As for translation … it’s the translation of nature *into* standing reserve that gives technology its essence (for Heidegger). So mere translation isn’t the “problem” … it’s, as you say, “translation of the ‘essence’ of every thing into a means-ends utility.” The key part is the end of the statement.

If it were all getting translated into icecream, for instance, it might be less worrisome. Or more. But the crux of the concern is that standing reserve thing.

Translation not good enough? Heidegger’s charge was that technology made everything into “standing reserves”—this is a kind of translation of the “essence” of every thing into a means-ends utility. No?

But I agree with the fun, I think, as the anti-efficient. But I’m not talking about “stuff that is available on the web” but rather, the kinds of tools that “we” are building.

If you think about technology as the translation of things into other things, then the danger Heidegger points to is that everything ends up as a translation of everything else, or else a means of translation. It’s not so hard to think of the Internet and digital technology this way: everything becomes bits; bits get spooled and streamed this way and that, and most of the interesting development is in more efficient ways of streaming and channeling bits around: standards, protocols, services.

So the danger, in concrete terms, is that we become RSS feeds, or Twitterstreams; that friendships and other meaningful relations are reduced to bitstreams, that ‘experience’ gets mashed into UXD, etc.

I think the antidote—and this is following Heidegger pretty closely, I think—is to make sure we keep our eye on the playful, and not just the efficient. The Net is really wonderful for this, for there’s at probably more playful, wacky, artful stuff out there than the corporate/institutional/economic drive-to-greater utility/efficiency/businessmodel stuff. In our dayjobs, and in our day-to-day work, it probably makes sense to try to keep an eye on that distinction, and not get too tangled up in the latter.

And yes, I would put movable type, printing, mass media etc in the same pile as other technologies such as RSS & RFID & the Palm Pre with a working version of pre-Amazon Stanza … I’m not criticizing any of it, just wondering aloud about the things we might lose, I suppose, in the trade.

Also: how do you know that humans are the only part of nature that can derive meaning?

Comments like that get my back up. Did moveable type improve things? Printing? Mass media? Yes.

The original question is self-serving, egocentric, and simply blind. Had someone looked in on my childhood, they would have asked what damned good would it have been for a set of the World Book to be at my disposal. Why, I could have simply trudged to the library.

And the Heidegger hypothesis needs to be put in its box: humans are the only part of nature that can derive *meaning* from it. And so, we order it to derive, find, and yes, even categorize, the meaning.

Hee hee! I made a pun.