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...when Confucius, the most famous and revered East Asian teacher, was asked by his students to tell them the meaning of athoritative personhood or jen - the conceptual pivot of his entire philosophy - he refrained from ever giving them a a definition. In diametric opposition to the Platonic insistence on defining essences, Confucius related paradigmatic stories. Knowing what a word means is not knowing what it signifies, but how to conduct oneself in situations where it is used.
Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. By Peter D. Hershock .p. 6

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...we have dedicated ourselves and much of hour life-energies to extending, generation-by-generation, the range of our choices in shaping our circumstances. To this end, we have managed to take control over that with which Satan once tried bribing us - good crops, better health, the easing of pain and suffering, the longevity of our offspring. p.17

With the advent of sufficiently sophisticated virtual reality technologies, the distinction between inner and outer environments or circumstances may well blur to that very little point will be seen in maintaining the wild spirit of the nonelectronic cosmos. p. 17

But what if Ch'an master Pai-chang was right in insisting that we see the principle of liberation as "not selecting anything," not making any choices? What if increasing our choices actually means sacrificing our freedom? p. 18
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this is very important - an increasing number of choices tends to overburden the control system, so that it takes us back to the complexity of the starting point.
"ideality" = don't have to control anything.

A tacit, but quite crucial precedent for believing in the neutrality of our technologies is that we perceive them in terms of the toools they generate. When asked to consider the effects of tehcnology on our everyday lives, we think of computer terminals and televisions, the automobile we have parked at the curbe, and the answering machine in the kitchen. This conflation of tools an technologies is far from innocuous. Indeed, it has had the effect of masking a great deal of the impact of technology on our lives.
The premises of the argument for open possession of firearms is a classic instance of such a reduction blindness: "Guns don't kill, people do. p. 20

Pistols and televisions are tools. Tools are extensions of our body-mind. They are designed and manufactured in order to extend our natural capacity.

Conceiving of technology as a patterning of conduct has two important benefits. First, it becomes clear that deciding whether a technology lives up to its promises must be undertaken by communities, not isolated individuals or interest groups. At the same time, precisely because technologies exist between us as the patterning of our conduct, like all other institutions they are practically invisible or ambient - part of the very atmosphere of our lives. As such, they easily escape evaluative scrutiny. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why it is so easy to ignore the presence of technology and why we tend to concentrate our critical attention on tools instead. p. 22

===
looks like he's proposing another control mechanism. one could argue that market is a community driven decision body, though an imperfect one.

In Buddhism, this kind of relationship is referred to as pratitya-samutpada or codependent origination. It is not that the spread of mass media determines the disintegration of the family or vice versa, but rather that they have arisen in mutual dependence or support of one another. p. 30

We may admit that while each new technology rsolves some previously existing problems, it often raises entirely new ones in their place. But this does not mean that we aare willing to admit the failure of the technical enterprise as such. We persist in believing that the promise of technology is for the most part being honored, and that it is just a matter of time before any problems ensuing from new technical advances will be solved - by further and continuous technical advance. p. 41

When we play with a new tool, it is just a novelty. But real familiarity means quite literally an adoption of the tool as par of oursevles. The tool becomes family. And we, in turn, become members of the clan of its originating technologies. p.41

...tools allow us to carry out individual tasks faster, with more precision, greater force, and so on. That is a large part of the incentive of inventing them. p.47

Based on patterns of reciprocity, such societies ( vernacular) build for use, not for profit. Moreover, because the tools used are both few and "primitive," there is little hierarchical division of labor. What is most important throughout is coordination - the ability to work together, to mesh efforts, accomplishing as a community what no individual could.
This changes as sophisticated tools and their associated technologies come into play. Building technologies lead to a specialization of labor, to a separation of tool making and tool using, a disjunction of designing and constructing. Technologies of control individuate effort.

=== this is where and when the money technology emerges

It is not the automobile as a tool that increases the time we spend in travel, but the ffect of automotive technology on our conduct - the dynamic, narrative aspect of our community. Our towns and cities change shape and size. Workspace and homespace become increasingly separated. We begin thinking differently about travel, about time and distance. What is proximate may no longer e what is intimate. What was once too far away to bother wanting may well become a current rage - something we will not live without, simply because we need not. p. 53

==
cf "The world is flat". for a aprice.

The result is that a very sizable portion of Kona's expenditures for household goods and groceries is deposited in a corporate bank account somewhere on the U.S. mainland. Money that once directly supported local families now circulates a great deal further and only a fraction of it ever return. p. 61

...we can see the corporation as an organizational pattern useful in taking controlled advantage of the flow of goods, services, and capital through an economy.
..
Corporate structure - as a technology - allows tremendous amounts of energy to be gathered and channeled at will.

... the evolution of corporate structure can be seen as entailing othe one hand a centralization of highly informed decision-making and on the other an intense diversification of both products and markets. Information transfer and analysis technologies are the primary means of insuring the former. Multinational corporations are clearly unthinkable in a world limited to postal transmissions of information, hard currency, and card-file dtabases.

What is glaringly absent from any mass=mediated contact with other cultures and the alternatives they provide for the construal of reality is the immediately dramatic interweaving of our life stories with those of others. We may become quite familiar, say, with a particular pygmy family that a documentary film maker live with for six months and whose lives are the subject of a twelve-hour series on pygmy culture. ... But we are not friends..
..In short, we are not part of that family's story and they in turn are not truly part of ours.

...directs us to see things as impermanent, self-less, and troubling. That is, it instructs us to flexibly alter the scale, perspective, and horizons of our perceptions in such a way as to free tings from our conventional and largely uncritical identification of them as definitively either "this' or 'that;.

At the same time, resisting our own habitual modes of perception is to stop taking a stand on whether things are good or bad or indifferent and to recognize our irrevocable intimacy with all things. Freeing things from our habitual views of them is free ourselves from these very same views - a liberation from the win barbs of 'me' and 'not-me', 'self' and 'other'.
...it also enables us to realize that no situation is intractable, that no barrier is absolute. p. 106

It means consciously making an effort to sense things from different perspectives and on different scales. p. 107

As evidenced in our public and private lives, when confronted by trouble, our first reaction is to do more of what we've already been doing - effecting greater control, developing and acquiring more tools, more institutions, more laws. In short, when things don't quite go our way, we either add more technical "levers' or apply force to those we already possess.
In sharp contrast, the ideal Buddhist person - the bodhisattva or 'enlightening being' = is said to have an unlimited capacity for skill-in-means. Such a person is able to improvise with any situation to orient it (with a minimum expenditure of forece or energy) away from the samsaric toward the nirvanic - away from blockage, stalemate, rigidity, and strstion toward freedom, harmony, flexibility and joy.

=== see Zajonc experiments on the arousal-complexity diagram.
=== also relates "how do we find people who think outside of the box in NE 175 lecture 6".

Instead of freedom being identified with an absence of restrictions on our ability to choose this or that, Buddhist freedom is understood in terms of virtuosity as such - virtuosity in the art of contributing. p.116

Karmically, the dilemma is this"the better we get a getting what we want, the better we get at wanting; and the better we get at wanting, the better we get at getting what we want, though we won't want what we get. Gambling, drug addiction, and sexual obsessions are classic cases of short-term - and thus relatively visible - karmic complexes of this type.

==== cf tunnel vision.

...skilfully wanting control means not only that there will never be a dearth of things to control, but that control itself as guiding value of conduct will become increasingly ambient. The "syclic' nature of karma thus virtually guarantees that phased of being in control will be matched by phases of being controlled.

.. the idea that a parallel can be established between the underlying principle of addiction and that of technological progress is intellectually and mythically repugnant. p 120

== the insatiable desire for control

Practicing emptiness - relinquishing our horizons for what is admitted as relevant - is liberating not because we get anything, but because we are removing blockages to the spontaneous and creative circulation of energy by freeing our attention from its customs, habits, and obsessions. Freeing all beings means releasing them from the boundary conditions imposed on them by our values. p. 130

Whereas an orientation toward control seems invariably to lead to a propensity for deliberate or calculated activity and quantitative evaluation, a bias toward appreciation subordinates untity to quality and deliberation to improvisation.
That is, Buddhist technology is concerned less with measurable results than with shared meaning and purpose.
p. 132

...control not only promotes a deep segregation of actor and acted upon, it polarizes those for whom the reality of control means the fulfilling of want and those whom it it simply leaves wanting. Control is in this sense decisive. It implies an intentional and advantage-taking subversion of our interdependence, a severing of our patterns of experienced reciprocity. Mass media have not become pervasive in our lives, for example, because the technologies of which they are a part dispose us to offer our attention in appreciative contribution. To the contrary, it is because they are conducive to the capture of our attention, its colonial redirection, and a radical compromise of our potential fro true intimacy. p. 139

Since using a tool takes place along an individually determined vector of intentionality, it can never provide evidence for a necessary, and not merely contingent, contradiction of wills. Focusing on tools virtually begs us to appeal to the moral transparency argument, making it impossible to generated a viable critique of any given technology and invisibly obscuring the interdependence of control and conflict. Sadly, if our mediation by tools is ubiquitous enough, we may never even be aware of others with sufficient intimacy for the experience of a contradiction of interests to be possible. p. 141

===
perception tools define the level of understanding. "hearing" vs "vision", "expression language".

Far from reflecting our increasingly meaningful contribution to each other's lives in distinct appreciation of our differences, equality summarizes what is practically and politically meant by technically achieving the right both to be left alone and leave others alone. That is, equality becomes a political ideal only when our mutual irrelevance has be successfully institutionalized and regulated.

Control establishes a current - a kind and direction of movement in our narration - that speeds some of us to our desired ends and against which others of us will either vainly struggle or capitulate.

== cf. early adopters, early majority, etc.

For example, software like the "cookie" files attached to all Internet servers are ostensibly designed to speed user access to sites they have previously visited or to related sites. This not only provides a record of where a user has "surfed" on the Internet, it disposes search engines to follow what amount to habitual search paths. Just as knowing the feeding routes of game animals makes it possible for hunters to lie readily in wait for them, software like this in combination with geodemographic databases quite practically enables politicians to "place" politically useful information in the way of users who believe they are freely researching candidate platforms.

==
a good metaphor for Google's business model.
also, knowing our social graphs allows advertisers create the mere presence effect.

There is absolutely no doubt that each new tool and technique in our growing arsenal of control-mediating inventions will enable us to more "efficiently" achieve our individual aims and so further inculcate our established patterns of reliance and desire. p. 145.

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