“Without tools he is nothing; with tools he is all."
- Thomas Carlyle
Buying new silverware is a big deal.
It has to look right of course but more importantly, it has to feel right. Weight, heft, shape, texture. We looked and touched our way through dozens of samples until we found the right set, the one that felt just so in the hand.
I love the ones we bought, love the new butter knife.
You know what I mean…it feels good.
Is it odd to have feelings at all about a simple technode? Probably. Feelings and machines do not seem to fit together well; machines are cold whereas we are hot-blooded. To feel one way or another is to invoke what Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy,” the imposition of our emotional states on external phenomena. Machine chat is supposed to be logical and orderly, while feelings are amorphous, messy, and contradictory. We make fun of ourselves for loving our cars, buying presents for our computers, being angry at our Blackberrys.
Yet we do it all the time.
And why not?
Feeling is simply a link between ourselves and the world and so, in this vast Gizmos that we are making, it can be a reasonable guide to action. In a way, to feel about stuff at all is to embrace and even exercise our own techumanity.
We have probably always had feelings about our tools. Sharpened stones, for example, have been dated back 300,000 years and it makes sense to assume that one of the earliest tools was some form of cutting device. Our forebears would have needed such a tool to slice off bits of meat, dig for tubers, skin animals, or cut down plants. It is pleasant to think that our first tool was not a weapon but a piece of paleolithic dinnerware. A kitchen utensil. Something to dine with, that felt good in the hairy hand, civilized, a step up from the muck. And it must have been satisfying to get the job done with the tool in hand.
Must have felt good.
Other creatures, of course, use tools. Apes and various birds have been observed using sticks to pluck insects from their hiding places; some sea otters use rocks to break clams. Do they have feelings about these devices? Doubt it. Wasps and termites even have technology…complex architectures that include air circulation, function separation, egg hatcheries, and more. But they presumably do not feel one way or another about these designs because they are the result of genetic patterning, a closed system that does not evolve.
But who knows.
After all, we are not a wasp.
What makes our own feelings about our stuff so complex is that these objects morph as the system evolves. That sharp stone became a knife somewhere along the line which itself evolved into a thousand different variations, fixes, and redos in flint, copper, bronze, iron, steel, plastic, ceramic – even laserlight – in all imaginable shapes, sizes, and styles.
Form follows futzing and the knife becomes not just a type of object but an entire category of extended action. In this way, a knife can be a hammer, a doorstop, or a pen for carving monograms into trees. Even a chair for a balancing yogi. A shard can be a knife and so can a feather if it cuts through soft butter.
Categories morph, uses evolve…and feelings flutter like debutantes around them.
Then too, the knife did not just cut better than teeth, rip better than fingernails. It expanded our cuisine and begat the meal, which begat the fork as a way of skewering food, which in turn begat the table knife with no sharp poin. Yea and these begat the table setting, which led to the reclining dinner, and then course servings, and waiters and checks, and posh restaurants, and takeout menus. Formal meals that helped structure the day paved the way for clocks, schedules, work hours, iPads. That sharpened shard has helped us become what we are. No wonder we have feelings about it.
The lowly knife makes it possible to alter the universe in a fundamental way, severing the given connection to the world as it presents itself. The knife is a techuman moment, our shot at evolving the Gizmos. It is right to feel something about it because it is human to.
Pass the butter please?
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