[P2P-F] determine (make decisions politically) / determinism (a philosophical concept)

[j.martin.pedersen]

On 08/01/11 16:07, Roberto Verzola wrote:

> I find myself agreeing somewhat with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the 
> mouse, who said we shape our tools and our tools then shape us. He talks 
> of co-evolution of the human and their tools. We might call this "mutual 
> determinism". When he says "shapes us", I presume "us" includes social 
> relations.

Engelbart likely ripped that from Winston Churchill, who said that "We
make our buildings and our buildings make us".

Anyway/However, the use of the word "determine" in the context of making
political decisions socially, in council with one another within
communities, has nothing much to do with "determinism", which is a
philosophical concept (dating back to Aristotle) often used in
sociological debates and which is a doctrine, very simply put, that
"every event has a cause".

In other words, to socially determine (and perhaps I should have used
another term, such as "decide upon") has nothing to do with (social vs.
technological) determinism debates, but all to do with political
realities: the processes through which people make decisions.

That is to say: in a community, that community should decide how they
want to share their things, not the essence of the things in question.
If a community decide to share their cars, but keep poems to themselves,
then that is their decision. It should not be imposed upon them that
cars are difficult to share, so they *shouldn't* be shared, and that
poems are easy to share, so they *should* be shared. And this is, for
the record, not so far fetched, as there are cultures in which certain
forms of knowledge and their representations in the forms of various
practices and artefacts are not shared freely, even though they easily
could be, and that is because they fulfil certain cultural functions
that glue the given society together.

That said, please do continue the determinism debate, which is always
(mildly) interesting on an intellectual level, but which doesn't get
much further, to my mind, than Winston Churchill got to, and as such
brings us back to the political question concerning decision making:

In retrospective observations - and in the predictions that
prophetic/opportunistic analysts can derive from them - no matter
whether the social or the technological was the determining factor of
some outcome (and we seem to agree that it is rather a recursive chaos
than either of the two), the crucial point is that communities are in
(or ought to be in) charge of making their own decisions (which they can
do as they see fit with reference to whatever debates they like).

Alternatively, of course, if one wants to insist on the essence of
things as of primary importance, then the most important essence of all
things, I would say, is that they are first and foremost *social
things*, produced socially, with social (and environmental) costs, needs
and so on, and as such should be decided upon socially.

At any rate, as far as I am concerned, social vs. technological
determinism is a displacement debate that keeps us from the "real
questions", --- as Andrew Feenberg puts it:

"What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our
tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements.
The design of technology is thus an ontological decision fraught with
political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from
participation in this decision is profoundly undemocratic":

Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford University
Press, 2002: 3)

-m