The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.
In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.
The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.
Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”
But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.
Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”
Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”
Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.
The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.
Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.
Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.
This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.
Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.
Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become charged with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.
But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.
But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.
Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.
To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.
Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.
Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.
This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.
If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.
We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.
Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.
Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.
The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.
That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.
This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.
But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.
(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)
But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?
Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.
Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.
Dang. Out of time.
To be continued.