The author of this text considers this text as a naïve exploration of an expert text. The expert text is one of Professor Mark Coeckelbergh’s papers. The professor has been so kind to welcome comments to his work entitled “Defamiliarizing Technology, Habituation, and the Need for a Structuralist Approach,” as it was posted within his Linkedin space some time during the early days of June 2021.

Thank you for this openness, Professor.

The Professor might not have implied that a playful dance around and through his work would be acceptably defined, and properly contained, within his realm of “comments”. Therein, this author here intuits, might lie a relationship. This imagined relationship could be one which this author imagines having with technologies and with the constructors of deliverables there with(in), and thus, for example, with the Professor’s text.

While there is an artistic compulsion at play, here in this text, this constructed relation with the professor’s text, is also engaged into with both some degree of volition and intent. These latter two are geared toward the exploration of that same expert text.

The Professor’s far higher order of discipline and rigor is to the author here an essential part of the unveiled intuitions (catalyzed by the Professor’s text) and the aimed at exploration. So too, with the above stated, there does not lie an admittance of hierarchical inferiority versus superiority and yet, through the perceptions of the writer here, non-paradoxically, there is a respect towards the far better honed and rigorous insights Professor Coeckelbergh can bring to the table. This text is not even an answer to some of the attributes as perceived within the expert text. This text is a set of questions without many question marks, while still some obvious question marks are sprinkled throughout:

“Exploration” (of the professor’s text) here is intended as more of a child-like and far less of a disciplined and rigorous form of analysis. There is a motivation with these seeming self-debasing disclaimers, which I hope might become more clear as this text advances.

This text is not philosophy nor is it scientific.

Its structure does imply its main question: are most of us human individuals presently at the child-like stage when playing with the artificial category of “technology” and all the processes, relations and consequences yet unforeseen?

Does in this diverse stage also lie our creative and imaginative ability to defamiliarize technology (and its mapped lingo and jargon)?

Does this process of defamiliarization herald habituation and perhaps, following, possibilities for (technological) embedding or immersion in becoming (and the grasping or perversion of its associated gatekeepers, lingo and jargon)?

Is a set of humans as the cyborg-species in becoming; while another set might reject degrees thereof (and of the associated realities as constructed by the “natural” languages through which they were conceptualized)? Does, in this diversity, lie a part of an answer as to how we (are) relate(d) to / with / within / by technologies (with and of which languages and their meaning-making architectural outputs are subsets)?

This text is an architectural design.

In being so, it does not (have to) destabilize any other architectured structure (only unless one wishes to perceive it as such). Neither does it need to be destabilized itself by its (non-)reader.

With it, the play intertwining (technological) intent, perception, process and deliverable do not go unnoticed. This text could but be structuralized because layers of technology were accessible to its author. Text became eligible since the structural architectures of “text” are to some degrees accessible to the author/designer of said architecture. This might be irrespective of the author having any intertwined degrees [of (self-)imposed] expertise or a layperson-hood.

I wish, for a moment, to extrapolate this:

is the human being and the interconnected set of humans, one of life’s architectural complexes?

As any word can be made to become arbitrarily (un-/re-)defined (in a somewhat Saussurian sense), I can imagine taking a degree of liberty, and following take poetic control of the word “architecture”. Then I can imagine deciding to take poetic control of the mapping of it with the word “life”.  This imagined act is an act with attributes that can be associated with similar attributes as found in one’s (collective) manner with which one can be and become with, in and through technologies. I can imagine doing this in the bubble of my existence: in solitude; until the other becomes involved.

Here I have done it. Now you have read it.

Now you judge: ignore, dismiss, embrace, ridicule, destroy, debase, celebrate, forget, deny, take-forward… (ab)use.

In the dynamic re-mapping of these possible, and at times probable, attributes one can sense hints of inter-subjective co-authorship, and perhaps some degree of co-ownership and in extension some minuscule nascence of potential ruling of/with/by/in-between the citizen-user-producer(s) (e.g. we collectively define the longevity or rebirth of the structural imaginations of my linguistic and thus/perhaps technological escapades).

Was it not Van Gogh’s ear that brought him silence and then –when he was echoed away– reverence, through the technologies of a meaning-taking knife an his meaning-making brush alike?

Is architecture a set of all deliverable extensions of life’s meaning-making processes, expanding as if mycelium, in orchestration with the trees?  Or, do the ingredients of degrees of intent, perception, process and structurally accepted “deliverableness”, play catalyzing and categorizing roles?

Are hence the technologies which a human delivers, the technologies of becoming inter-subjective humans, as one of the possible expressions of life(forms)?

Where does the phenomenon of one’s relation with technology end and where does one’s poetics with (one’s body’s) technology begin in mapping with the other (as a diversification; a higher granularity of the same)? … Van Gogh keeps popping up…

There might be a relationship (between text and comment-turned-text) which might not entirely be what a proto-, ur- or uber-architect intended. There might be, in the variety of architectured functions, multistability. Though, one might take offense as well as comfort in the idea of stability over the innovativeness or progressiveness of instability.

Let me extrapolate again into what might seem absurd:

is life stable or is life unstable?

One might wish the former while a higher granularity of measurement and observation might have one conclude the latter. Is the deliverable from forms and functions within life’s processes inevitably stable / stabilizing or unstable/destabilizing?

These questions are not necessarily exciting to this author, since the same author also uses a countering bias as a steppingstone to be and to (perhaps) become: there is no necessity for dichotomy; there is no necessity for duality; there is no necessity to polarize and these necessities are non-existent all the while (meaning-making in absurdity) dichotomies, dualities and polarizations themselves do exist.

While the implied linearity might be too dismissive of the complex forms –at least as it is inter-subjectively experienced by this author– which might follow these functions, these forms/structures.functions might not enjoy the recognition of established architects. This might be as much as the structure of the singular architect might but be accepted if a (less than critically) conscious, en-culturing (human) following has been accepting the architect’s structures . This (human) following is then “enlightened”, but merely “enlightened” within the constraints of the given (sets of interconnected meshes and layers of) architectured forms and functions. One set of followers might follow a diversity of architectures. Some architectures might be contradictory or paradoxical if and when juxtaposed or if (de)familiarized.

These active followers might or might not do so with a certain granularity as much so as the architecture allows to observe it (with its compatible constructed technologies; be that a word or a telescope; the entirety of the reality of its narratives).

Any incompatible measuring tool shall be welcomed with degrees of opposition: ignorance, denial, dismissal, attack; degrees of fear to destabilize a previously-acquired status of following of a preceding architecture. Lies therein the power of the following and another intertwined power of the followed architect (and the architect’s output)?

Is there any familiarized and submissive “follow”?

Are, in analogy, co-ownership, co-authorship and power defined by and intertwined with various processes of recognition, following and use?

As if various sides of one Trickster… the layperson (a Dionysian architect?) and expert (an Apollonian architect?) might perhaps also be intertwined sets of one metaphorical character: life as a Trickster?

In the layperson, (which is not a thing nor a fixed state) lies the play with technology? In the patriarchal expert lies the structuralization of power (be that through hardware, software, wetware or lingo-ware)?

The metaphorical Trickster, or at least this character’s layperson’s side, might seem anarchistic to its own expert’s side. Yet, the Trickster does not implode nor self-disintegrate. At the abstraction and large-scale view of the metaphorical Trickster, the Trickster seems in harmony (while metaphorical hiccups do occur). This anarchism does not necessarily (at all times / at all) need to take physically violent forms and functions. This is not body-(c)harmingly… unless of course one were to venture into medical technologies or embedded technologies within the human body.

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Simultaneously, one could also venture into the digital technologies that at least offer a veneer of an experience to a (set of) human individual(s) of narrative autonomy (with possible limitations in terms of meaning-giving within that perception; and within the linguistic/semiotic limitations one might be constrained by).

The Trickster’s layperson’s set of operational attributes might allow for a poetic that –due to the layperson’s blindness, ignorance or superficiality–trivializes, at first, yet enables depth and breadth, if the expert side of the metaphorical Trickster allows such entertainment from play toward rigor.  Is it as observing the “chaos” unfold in the wild?

A question might be whether this is chaos or rather whether this could be the beginnings of a possible unfolding of life, with various seemingly paradoxical vectors (i.e. forces and counter-forces; directionalities and counter-directionalities… the play of life; life as a layperson or child perhaps?).

Are such metaphorical vectors taking one beyond one’s ability / willingness to observe the nascence of empowerment and/ or degrees of co-ownership?

In the exploration of such question, the social role of the layperson in relation to the defamiliarization process might perhaps be considered as one that is of relevance in considering technology as a language as well as, reflectively, language as a technology. Perhaps one might wish to reconsider the (vague/ambiguous) vantage points and presumptions taken as must-have conditions to achieve degrees of empowerment and / or co-ownership?

These considerations, to this author at least, feel as if they might also touch on the aesthetic and ethical experience, behavior and imaginativeness of the human individual (in co-creation with the others), resulting in the increase or decrease of weights and vectors, constructing one’s (with the others’) active creation in, with and of technology.

Simultaneously, one might wish to consider that a consideration of technology, being enabling or not, might be made from the analysis of the models, from with which one looks upon the said perceived “problem”. The tool (i.e. word-narrative, tech-usage, body-relation, etc.) does influence the actively, inter-subjectively observed/re-produced; or so this author wishes to assume for now.

If considering power it feels as if one is either considering this as a status quo or as a dynamic. One might sense that even a status quo implies process and not as simple static beings, fixed in place without communication in-between them.

One might be delusional or dismissive and one might believe to be enabled to neglect the cultural, communal, market, policy, technological constraints of every human individual. Though these individually experienced contexts and constraints are there.

Through some thinking models one might perhaps wonder whether the awareness of these constraints exist to enable others who are in perceived and allocated positions of power (gatekeepers of various sorts) to control and punish the (other) human individual who is constraint by these. 

However: application, intent, deviation, transformation, evolution, revolution, perversion, or modding, (culture) jamming, hacking, (cultural or technological) appropriating, piracy, identifying of the (digital) objet trouvé and applying of micro-innovation, or the citizen’s applying of S.C.A.M.P.E.R. by, for instance, putting a technology to “other use” … do these, at all times, damage “…the moral character of the person engaging in that behavior…”? (Coeckelbergh, 30 Sep. 2020)

Do these thereby perhaps set forth a self-censorship within the (at-the-cusp-of-becoming “abusive”) person, constraining, slowing or even stopping the person to approach empowerment, co-authorship and co-ownership?

With one’s poetics (and aesthetic which might imply an innovation into ethics) one might perhaps take ownership; with one’s social contexts and constraints one might lose a metaphorical ear in doing so, to then just perhaps, later (unknowingly as the metaphorical unnamed fallen soldier) to be metaphorically revered. All metaphorically; a tool within the technology of language and (collective) narrative (repurposed) ownership.

Perhaps the underlying ideas and weights dynamically given to “self”, “individual”, “collective” , “attribution”, “anonymity”, and so on, could also be considered as biases in questioning the likelihood toward one’s (collective) empowerment, enablement, co-authorship and co-ownership.

These and others feel as mechanisms to maintain, assault, massage, fine-tune or to augment with. One does not exclude the other in a linear polarization of “being” versus “not being”; or in “good” versus “not good”. In similarity to an earlier phrasing, and in a zen-like manner: being, not being, good and bad as such do not exist, while each might be very distinctively identifiable. Is here then the Trickster at play?

If we deny the existence of the above words that imply human interactions with / in / in-between / across technologies then their experiences will not exist to the denying observer (who manipulates the observed by means of the coarseness of the applied measuring tool’s granularity). Such denial might also occur via a number of constraints as suggested previously and as offered by, for instance, Professor Lessig, and how we humans relate to intellectual property, the commons and more specifically, the creative commons.

Following a viewing and judging through such constraints, one can then consider the idea of use, reuse, misuse and abuse (or of empowerment, ownership, authorship, etc.)

The continuing text shall explore the concept, intent and perception of the process of “abuse”. For instance, one might find it abusive to warp a (LinkedIn) comment into a text. Such “abuse” is achieved by mapping two technological deliverables and delivery systems, LinkedIn and WordPress, together beyond the imposed constraints of a Comment section and beyond how it is culturally used versus abused. Is this abuse or is this usage toward empowerment, co-ownership and democratization of the comment section?

Is this abusive by going from a focused mode of writing of a mother-text or a mother-technology; beyond such focus? Or, is this liberating the technological constraints of form and function of proper academic reply?

In similar terms and in such realms, if abuse were the stepping-stone then a text (such as this) could be evaluated and dismissed as a rambling. This is all the while rambling does exist, irrespective of perception alone. This might be perceived as a codex structuralized by having been encoded, technologically, into the limitations of a (LinkedIn) comment section. Moreover, going to the maximum technological constraint of number of characters allowed within one comment section is at times considered “bad form”. Those who call out the bad form are architects of a different nature than the software architects of the comment section. Yet, wittingly or unwittingly, they might be occupying the same disenfranchising space toward a continued process of (re-)definition of ownership, authorship and empowerment. The one set of architects are in a sense the following of the other set (leaving open the possibility who is in fact following who and whether the followed can become the follower, ad infinitum).

Many non-human “actors” (this is a poetic for “technology” or for “language” or for “pragmatics of language into socially accepted protocol”, etc) are systematically in place to disallow empowerment, co-authorship, co-ownership or the participatory mechanisms of the populous; the layperson. Or are they? I believe they are not necessarily (the text in hand is a child-like attempt there against) while indeed I also believe that the layperson might be abusive at times and thereby self-censor one’s empowerment and co-ownership (see the above intuitions on “bad form”).

Following one might attribute creativity or imaginativeness (which might be seen as processing attributes of empowerment, co-ownership and co-authorship) to be respectively mapped or opposed, depending on these functionalized forms of uses; in this case “abuses”. Abusive behavior might perhaps be toward the technology of the word, or toward the popularized view on technology as a set of deliverables of physical hardware or software; the latter being physical in the electrons and their electromagnetic waves. It is conceivable that creativity and imagination might be used in tension with protocols and culturally used behaviors that are more welcomed; thus perhaps be abused.

Abusive behavior might be felt as justified to not see a (re-)use as part of the process of empowerment or not as part of the process toward co-ownership. Abusive behavior, for instance, of the one (human individual / group) might be experienced as the liberation of certain attributes with some temporary weight of the other (human individual / group). This might be depending on the relational space of the moment, as a fleeing spec on a multi-directional set of continua.

If one sees a hierarchy one might tend to see an abuse to that hierarchy. The latter might be a more inclined vantage point from within the earlier used metaphorical Trickster’s expert set, rather than from within its layperson’s set.

One might look at the relationship with technologies through the lens of a singular hierarchical (patriarchal) relationship. This might be ignoring rhizomic relationships, (seeming or temporarily seeming) chaotic relationships and enveloped processes with slopes of attacks, sustains, releases, decays and entropy. Processes of co-creativity (and information transfer) might occur that are recombinable and decentralized while also stable and with centers of control.  As is with the layering of (sonic or other frequencies of) waves, these would be intertwined and influencing or carrying one another. Such hybrids might exist (maybe in post-modernism; or maybe within Deleuze and Guattari?). The former might territorialize while the latter might deterritorialize. The former and the latter might both also engage in reterritorialization.

Ownership and power might then be imagined not to be fixed, nor have a solid state. From such imagination structures might arise. From such structures meaning-making might occur. From such meaning-making fungible or non-fungible ownership and empowerment might temporarily occur. Though this scenario, even to its author, feels too linear; too simple; too reductionist.

Complex systems with multiple human and non-human actors might (have) come into existence [e.g. as agents or other; as datacyborgs, data-cattle or in idealized (and too linear a contrast) as human individuals entirely immune of influencing or being influenced by technologies (which might be as reasonable as a human mind being perfectly able at all times to control which thought to have, when, and with which affects; to free oneself of having a thought before having it).]

One might wonder if the mental models that coordinate one’s judgement of the virtue of a behavior of oneself and of the other, is influencing the sense of (recognizing) accessibility. Such mental models might be hurdles in the act with technologies; be such technology (natural or artificial) languages or the language constructed or reconstructed with and of technology.

The construct that allows for the layperson to enter the perceived and intended ivory towers of the expert person might be enabled by attitudes, mental models and constructs engaged in, fine-tuned and (temporarily) manipulated by each: the layperson and the expert and those who constructed the architectures within which these encounters have been enabled.

Hence one might imagine that the two could be poetically combined into that metaphorical Trickster. The weights given to the attributes that form within the sets associated / associable with the manner with which these architectures might be  (ab-/re-)used might perhaps be adapted by the layperson architect and the expert architect alike.

Towards technological and semiotic empowerment and co-ownership: is technology, “technology” or is it rather proto-technology as a proto-language, still in its infant stages of being massaged by the meaning-making minds of its creators, co-creators and re-creators? Can then a probability of empowerment, co-ownership already fairly be observed let alone decided?

It somehow feels as if one gives up on the child for not having been born with the ability to speak four languages and fluently merge from one into the other and back again. To be fair, even the concept (let alone the sustained and scaled practice) of democracy is not yet ironed out (I think there might be some arguments as to why it should / could not be) nor is it already achieved in those locations where some seem complacent of making themselves believe to have comfortably arrived at it. Literacy then of technologies and languages might not be a given yet either. As an extension to that, empowerment and ownership might just perhaps be hard to claim if sufficiently sustainable and scaled functional literacy has not been achieved yet?

While for millennia we could penetrate the human integrity with crudeness of a spear we might just perhaps, to some extent, not yet be at the non-invasive and non-destructive stages of our technological output nor of our meaning-making around, with, in-between and within our human becoming. The meaning-making “victim” (i.e. lacking the utopian foresight and idealized freedom to decide not to be imposed with negative effects of an wanted or unwanted interaction; to decide to own) of the metaphorical spear is not only a victim of the spear, but also the holder of the metaphorical spear. The “victim” might also be lacking understanding of the spear, of depth, responsibility, learnability, negligence, inability to (re-/co-)design at the finest grain. Some might not even recognize the existence of the proverbial spear yet…

Might it then be too naïve to imagine an integration of poetics, aesthetics and ethics of ownership and empowerment from and to the collective and inter-subjective individual, combined with the imagination of a closer integration of generalizing layperson-hood and focused expert-hood; combining rigorousness, playfulness, diversity, inclusiveness and co-creative architectured conscious discernment?

Might such utopian vision lead to a creative commons of empowerment and co-ownership?