8 September 2021. Tech | Faeries
41 questions about technology; living with the faerie folk
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#1: 41 questions about technology
The technology blogger L.M. Sacasus specialises in critical readings of tech use by drawing on classic readings of technology—people like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich pop up in his work, for example. He writes at The Convivial Society.
(Bomber Lair; Egg and Fin, by Paul Nash. Birminghan Museum via RawPixel)
During the summer he re-posted a piece called ‘The questions concerning technology—41 of them, in fact. In turn this was picked up by the journalist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who worked through all 41 in an edition of his show. The podcast is here; there’s a transcript here (may be paywalled).
The re-posted version of the 41 questions was prompted by this tweet:
In turn, this had been prompted by a selection of tweets from others about the unintended effects of technologies:
In each case, there was either an expressed bewilderment or admission of obliviousness about the possibility that a given technology would be put to destructive or nefarious purposes.
The original set of questions, published in 2016, were a response to a more positive framing of the responsibilities of technologists by Om Malik:
“we in tech don’t understand the emotional aspect of our work, just as we don’t understand the moral imperative of what we do. It is not that all players are bad; it is just not part of the thinking process the way, say, ‘minimum viable product’ or ‘growth hacking’ are.”
L.M. Sacasus doesn’t make strong claims for his list. He doesn’t claim that it’s exhaustive, and he doesn’t claim that they are especially profound. He just hopes that they are useful when we are trying to think about how technology works, and how we work with technology. I’m not going to include all 41, but the first ten give a flavour of the whole thing:
1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?
3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?
9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
Some of these, as it happens, remind me of the types of thinking about media and technologies that are encouraged by the McLuhan’s Tetrads model, which I’ve discussed before here.
The conversation with Ezra Klein (58 minutes) also puts the questions into a broader context.
#2: Living with the faerie folk
One of the features of the west coasts of both Ireland and Scotland is a continuing belief in the value of the “faerie folk”—sith in Scots Gaelic, sidhe in Irish Gaelic, both pronounced ‘she’. It is an otherworld that lives alongside the human world, and interacts with it.
In Philip Marsden’s fine travel book, The Summer Isles, he writes about the Scottish Hebridean island of Skye as the place where “the gauze between this world and the otherworld appears to be thinnest.”
It has its Fairy Bridge and Fairy Knoll and and Fairy Glen and the Cave of the Fairies and sightings of cro sith (fairy cows)that live beneath the sea and live on seaweed. It has more than its fair share of brownies and glaistigs and urisg, the solitary figures that are found around the Cuillins and are said by those who encounter them to evoke pity more than fear.
In Dunvegan Castle, the home of the McLeods, is displayed the “fairy flag”, given to an ancestor of the McLeod chief, perhaps because he spent some time in the sith kingdom, married to a sith woman.
(Image: ‘The Faerie Folk’, by Willy Pogany)
Alistair McIntosh also finds a lot of faerie folk in his walk from the bottom of Harris to the top of Lewis, recorded in his book Poacher’s Pilgrimage. I don’t have that to hand, but my recollection is that their presence was particularly strong close to the shore, and that there’s been some work done on the island to restore some of the old sites associated with the sith.
Marsden, whose book is full of insights into Celtic culture, records that Ronald Black has observed that over several hundred years, ‘academics in both England and Scotland...have recognized the Highlands and islands as an area in which the occult was extraordinarily close to the surface of people’s lives.’
These beliefs lived alongside conventional Christian beliefs. Of course, they haven’t fared well in the rationalist culture of the 20th century, which is full of explanations as to why they existed. Marsden lists these:
the expression of collective anxiety, the product of dreams, psychic constructs to contain pathology, social constructs to normalize behaviour, ways of explaining the inexplicable, of visualizing the invisible.
Marsden is more interested in why these stories survive than explaining them away.
They’ve survived because they remind us of the human urge to elaborate what we see. Why? ... The imagination enables us to see beyond what is in front of us. It is what keeps us alive.
And maybe a bit more than that. Such stories represent the survival of other ways of knowing—ways that sit alongside the science of it. They help us to explain the things that our science still isn’t good enough to explain.
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