Karl Ove Knausgaard at Harper’s Magazine:
At the same time, I came across an interview with a philosopher unknown to me named Gilbert Simondon. In 1958, Simondon had written about an alienation that wasn’t due to technology but due to our lack of knowledge about technology: by treating technology as a mere tool, reducing it to its utility, and denying its inherent dignity and complexity; and by elevating it to mystical status, seeing it as an autonomous threat or an alien entity beyond human understanding.
That was a deeply foreign thought, that it wasn’t technology that was the problem but my relationship to it. What kind of relationship did I have?
About technology, I had never made an independent decision, always just passively going along with the flow of innovations, never immersing myself in anything, always surrendering to the feeling of standing ever further from the world. Not having control, but somehow being controlled—that was the feeling.
more here.
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