Devices and Instruments
The promise of unlimited power with no effort.
In The Life We’re Looking For, Andy Crouch outlines a couple of “promises” that “every technical advance in human history has been borne on the wings of…”:
1. "Now you'll be able to…" – The promise of expanding human experience and capacity in some way. You might not have studied piano as a child, the player-piano salesmen would say, but "now you'll be able to" have piano music in your home anyway.
2. "You'll no longer have to…" – The promise of relieving toil, drudgery, stress, and, for that matter, skill. "You'll no longer have to practice," says the player-piano brochure. "You'll no longer have to vacuum," says the Roomba review.1
So far so good, I would love nothing more than for my capacity to be expanded and to be relieved of toil. But as we’ve talked about before, all technology comes with tradeoffs. Crouch outlines those tradeoffs as two additional consequences we unknowingly agree to that come with the first two promises.
3. "You'll no longer be able to..." – The acquisition of this piece of technology will inevitably shrink your capacity and experience in one dimension, often a creative dimension, even as it expands it in the direction of consumption. Fill your home with devices that play music, and the chance that you will maintain the habits of practice that allow you to make music yourself, to create rather than consume, will shrink. Sign up for an unlimited video-streaming service, and somehow the time available for reading books–and concentrating on them–will seem to dwindle.
4. "Now you'll have to…" – The new technology will enforce new requirements, new behaviors, new patterns of life, whether you wanted it to or not. As I have learned to my chagrin, the music-making devices we purchase, like the click-wheel iPod I bought with such delight, come with a stiff "now you'll have to upgrade" if we want to keep enjoying their benefits.2
Long-time readers of Context & Content will recognize the themes at play here. What Crouch offers is a helpful distinction between the degree of these trade-offs among different types of technology: devices and instruments.
Devices require us to accept a great deal of you'll no longer be able to and, increasingly, to accept a great deal of coerced behavior in the form of now you'll have to to access their promises…
Instruments, on the other hand, are marvelously different. If devices promise relief of burdens and toil, the best instruments specialize in promise number one (now you'll be able to), even while they actually require a great deal of us…
In Crouch’s book, he spends a lot of time talking about the way magic & technology promise us power without effort, and how power without effort becomes a dehumanizing force in our world. In our quest for ultimate power with no effort, we are willing to make steep trade-offs that diminish ourselves and our experience of the world. But Crouch holds out hope.
…the best instruments also impose almost no cost in terms of promises (or threats) three and four. They expand the capacity of human beings without shrinking other parts of us at the same time. They do so because they extend our capacities by further developing our hearts, souls, minds, and strength–further involving us in the glorious and difficult work of being persons in the world.3
Crouch goes on to talk about computers and the multi-use devices that fill our world. These items are essentially blank boxes. Right now, I’m writing this very paragraph oh a Macbook Pro. This computer could either be a device that enables me to scroll through my social feeds for hours on end (as it does frequently) or an instrument to allow me to create and write and otherwise further involve me in “the glorious and difficult work of being persons in the world.” It comes down to how we use it.
Of course, there are limits. When the pieces of technology we use are only meant to be devices, then we have to work extra hard to use them as instruments as they almost demand to be devices. But we do have the choice: will I put in the extra effort to be intentional in how I’m using my technology, or will I let my technology dictate how it is used, and therefore, fall victim to what my technology wants?
And with that, thanks for reading. See you again soon.
I do highly recommend Andy Crouch’s The Life We’re Looking For, for those that believe in a higher power or not. You can find out more about it here.