Tecnocoltura is an antidote to the view that technology is either a tool to dominate nature (including us) or a mechanism that replaces all human things. Instead, here are our core beliefs:

1. (1) Technology is an extension of human intent → Its flaws and faults are our responsibility.

   "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," claims the NRA. Bruno Latour offers this: "You are different with a gun in your hand [...] You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you."
   
   Someone might present these affirmations as if they were political opposites, but both point towards a common realization: the close, intimate relationship between a subject and the technology they wield. If we strip away the political theater of the first claim, we find its actual core: That a technology's use is dependent on human intent. That's important to remember, but taken at face value the NRA claim also misses the rest of the story: That human intent is poured into the design of our technologies. Intent turns into actualized design, and actualized design leads to conditioned use.
   
   A technology may drift from its designer's original intent—this happens constantly. But the effect is additive. Once a device is realized, it carries affordances, the silent commands of its material, its weight, and its form. The tool dictates a certain way of being whether the designer intended it or not.
   
   Furthermore, technology is not surrounded by a vacuum. It's born from the friction of cultural context. Every tool is a response to the material conditions and social experiences of its creator. People are in a state of continuous adaptation, and technology is our primary vehicle for a kind of evolution that is partly simulated and partly very real. While natural (genetic) adaptation is a process of spontaneous survival, artificial adaptation is driven by intent. And even so, as the tool becomes part of the user, the line between the two becomes hard to maintain in terms of its consequences (the aye-aye's elongated middle finger as opposed to the chimpanzee's use of a stick).
   
   All of these factors together determine the real use (i.e. the life) of technology. Note that this life begins and ends with factors that are almost entirely human: the designer's choices, the user's desires, and the influence of society on both. Technology is the means to respond to environmental conditions with new, artificial conditions. It becomes the most up-to-date vehicle for the human desire to engage with the world in terms that are as intentional as possible. We design new ways to communicate, new tools to facilitate how we relate to the world, new devices that mediate and represent reality. We make these changes either for ourselves or to impose them on others. The responsibility for our choices is implied in our freedom to make them in the first place.
   
   Consider the intent behind the object: We design guns to terminate a victim's life while minimizing the possibility of that victim's reaction. We design cameras to freeze the ephemeral—to capture a sunset that has no concept of being witnessed. We design AI... and we leave that question to you. But if we want to find a culprit for the harmful consequences of technology, we must blame the entire chain of human factors: those who commissioned its creation, those who designed it, those who use it, those who misuse it, and the societial/environmental forces that affect the people who use and misuse it. Important note: This is not to say that the chain of responsibility is too broad to be acted upon. On the contrary. Precisely by understanding that the chain of responsibility is extended can we each understand our individual roles (and at times, culpability) in a given use of a given technology.
   
   A society that produces guns is a society that is both already built on violence (there must have been a motivation for guns to be developed in the first place) and also in the process of replicating itself as violent through the specific tool (the gun is a form that replicates a culture of guns). A society that engineers aqueducts may do so for more efficient provisioning of its armies or more efficient irrigation for its farmers. Technology per se has no intrinsic moral direction. Once the choice is made to produce it, it has been imbued with one, and new subjects are continuously formed both through desire and imagination of new conditions as well as through the affordances that the new tool possesses. In other words, each time we introduce a new technology, we are:

   • projecting our desire onto the world;
   • inducing new subjectivities in the people that will use our technology;
   • introducing new conditions over which we never have full control, given that we cannot predict the full range of the new subjectivities we are calling into existence; this translates to new uses of the technology.

   
   It's on the basis of these facts that we need to understand our own responsibility. We are part of the same systems, conjoined at the points where specific technologies pivot our intentions and experiences, and through these instruments our intentions and experiences rise and fall in concert.

2. (2) Digital tools are the interface between humanity and computational systems. As such, Artificial Intelligence is an interface that makes computational systems more human.

   The history of Artificial Intelligence is long and varied, running from ancient automata, to hydraulics and clockwork, to Turing's definition of AI, to perceptrons. It even hit a special low point with decision trees, those virtual phone menus designed to frustrate customers while keeping support costs down. A lot of AI's history has been driven by one goal: simulating or replacing the way humans interact with each other and with the world. But is imitation—or replacement—the essence of what AI does today?
   
   No. AI is a tool that takes bits with meaning for machines and turns them into words, images, sound, and anything else that makes sense to human senses and minds. It bridges the ever-present gap between people and machines.
   
   Some people—not most—think that gap is an illusion. Their cynicism is rooted in a purely functional view of humanity: the clinical view of the body as meat and bone wired with sensors and actuators; the mind as a chain of chemical reactions. Scale these systems up enough and out comes Humanity, somehow. This would be a more interesting position if the people that hold it followed certain conclusions all the way through: that consciousness must exist in everything, including inert matter, without exceptions. That's a claim worth taking seriously. But even so... it doesn't help us understand AI.
   
   The systems we call AI today have their own structure, their own physical substrate, and their own algorithmic processes. None of these coincide with human biology and neurophysiology. The technical terms in the field of AI are metaphors for the human mind ("memory", "neurons", "activation thresholds"). These are terms of art, not lab results. Whatever consciousness might emerge from these systems, it isn't human consciousness, no more than a tree's awareness is human, no more than an abacus "knows" arithmetic just because it produces the right answer (which, by the way, only exists when there's a human to read those results).
   
   We know the power of AI to be more interesting than to simulate human cognition or to replicate a fragment of its functional mechanisms. Simply put, its power is to assist human reasoning and performance, although the same could be said for many machines. More specifically, its power is to translate the operations of computational systems into a form that fits our senses and cognition. Back to the phone-menu example: that old system forces callers to squeeze a problem—half of which might be emotional rather than strictly technical—into a rigid decision tree, built by some overworked product manager trying to filter out unwanted calls at 3am. Two unforgivable sins have been committed here: First, "press 3 for billing" isn't the result of thoughtful design centered on the user. It's just an artifact of how phones happen to work. Second, it actually works against what phones are good for. A cellphone is built to let you talk to people over radio signals. Its keypad is built for dialing numbers, not navigating an invisible maze of menu options. For decades, users have been forced to adapt to systems that not only deviate from but work against the device's affordances. To be fair, this may be necessary when a single call center genuinely can't handle the volume of calls and has no alternative technology available; under-resourced teams get a pass. But that excuse has expired as of 2022. And phone trees are far from the only offender: look at almost any enterprise software whose interface still looks like it's from the late '80s.
   
   AI does not resolve organizational dysfunction. No tool does. AI is risky and often mis-managed when it comes to data privacy. It is controlled by a handful of corporations who use it as a lever to shape public opinion and manufacture desire. But these dangers sit flatly in the design choices of the companies and governments building AI products. Once you separate what AI actually does from who's selling it and why, the moral questions shift from its functional existence to the people building products with it. Strip away the apps, platforms, and infrastructure that are almost entirely in the hands of tech giants and we are left with AI's real use: rescuing humans from performing as machines. Need information from a database? You no longer need to write SQL or think in set theory. Need to pull something together from across the web? You no longer need to build a barely-legal scraper and still have to wade through pages of noise before working up an answer. Want to mock up a 3D render of a home renovation? You no longer need to fight a professional CAD interface that requires a certification just to draw a wall. We get to do what humans do: ask, read, contemplate, evaluate, sketch, talk. AI turns data into information for us to finally interpret as humanists. If those who design the platforms allow us to do so.

3. (3) Digital technology creates the conditions for a third space, in which the experiential boundaries between virtual and real dissolve.

   In the context of digital technology, third spaces are created when the virtual and the real fuse together. You can see it in virtual reality, augmented reality, and other immersive media that let people have digitally generated experiences that still feel real and tangible. Third spaces can also be created through social media, online communities, and other forms of digital communication that allow people to connect and interact with each other in ways that transcend physical boundaries into an affective, relational dimension.
   
   Acknowledging this third space helps us move beyond a world made of two essences (mind and matter) to land on a more phenomenally-based understanding. When an experience is virtually mediated, is it any less real? And how many aspects of the real world influence us, and our perception, without a conscious awareness on our part? The pain of a phantom limb is real pain, even though we might lazily call it a simulation of a real injury. If we imagine a virtual headset that recreates not only image and sound but also touch, smell, and taste with the same fidelity as the real world, we would lose all ability to tell virtual from real. This is not to say that all reality collapses into the virtual; that distinction still matters, which is why we use the term "third space".
   
   Digital technology allows us to create and experience reality in this space. It can be used to enhance our perception of the world, to create new forms of art and expression, and to connect with others remotely. By the same token, it can be used to manipulate and control our perceptions, experiences, and beliefs. Due to our embodied nature, people tend to confuse what is true with what is real. But the former sits within the boundaries of a linguistic framework; the latter just is. And multiple true facts can be said about the same reality while contradicting each other: this artwork is sad; this artwork is explosive; this artwork is contemplative; this artwork is joyous. It's easy to play this game when the true facts are projections of multiple people's private perceptions. Rather than seeking a single, egoistic truth, it's wiser to sit with reality in its full complexity, including its mental contradictions.
   
   People already spend a great deal of time in environments where the boundary between virtual and real has effectively dissolved, and carry the consequences of that dissolution elsewhere. Is this something that only happens in the digital age? Not quite: fake news and propaganda go back to early forms of mass communication. Emperor Augustus knew a thing or two about this ^{[ref] [ref]} . We are constantly conditioned in terms of what we see, hear, and feel. And much of what we see is fiction, mediated by technology, as much as it is real in its effects, and as much as it is inspired by real events. Starting with the shaping of personal identity: A campaign's virtual narrative become reality when it is felt as such. We are concerned so much with AR goggles that we don't realize, once we take them off, our environment is already derived from some form of social engineering.
   
   How about we treat this not (necessarily) as sinister manipulation but as a natural consequence of living in a world other people built? What kind of built environments do we actually want to live in? And how do we make our own inevitable conditioning, at the very least, more visible and more voluntary?

4. (4) Ideas are not immutable. Ideas are not property. They have a life separate from their authors. We respect or disrespect ideas, while holding the dignity of humans as separate from the depth or shallowness of those ideas.

   Books, chats, posts, the Internet Archive are all snapshots of a society's ideas at a given moment. Ideas move through historical currents, philosophical development, social pressure. They evolve across people, place and time.
   
   When we cite a name like Arendt, Newton, Aristotle, Laozi, are we really talking about those people? Are we actually using their name as shorthand for something way more abstract—a framework of assumptions tied to their published work, a perspective that exists mostly because generations of lesser-known teachers, students, and commentators kept elaborating long after the "original authors" died? When I mention Darwin, am I talking about his real daily life, his marriage, his patriarchal views, his health concerns, his arguments with colleagues? Am I speaking of him the way I'd speak of a friend, flaws included, with any real ability to do something about those flaws? Doubtful. I'm either talking about a theory that took on a life independent of the man or I'm talking about the idea of the man himself.
   
   People who fall in love with an author think they feel empathy for them. Fans of a podcaster or a streamer think the same thing, that years of listening to someone's voice adds up to knowing them. But really we are consumers and followers. The moment the supply stops matching our expectations, we turn on the person almost violently. Usually, the judgment ("this isn't any good") is really just "this doesn't reflect my experience, and I can't project myself onto it." If there's zero point of contact, the work means nothing to us. A second, more sophisticated kind of judgment comes from people who do know the field: "I understand what they were going for, but they didn't get there" or "didn't get there the way I would have appreciated." This over-rationalization is typical of people too close to the subject to notice that creative work doesn't follow pre-set rules. First someone clears a path: the grunt work of moving rocks and dirt so the direction becomes visible. Then comes the map, and the people good at clearing paths aren't necessarily good at drawing maps, or vice versa. Then comes the actual walking, which is when the path takes its real shape under the feet of... random people passing through.
   
   Standard education teaches a fairly rigid relationship between reader and author. Curricula are laid out chronologically, name by name, with certain people elevated to stand in for entire eras and movements. Mussolini becomes the scapegoat for the fascism he built and exported. So does Mao. So does Stalin. But while they were undeniably central, who propped them up as they rose? Who were the many people who followed, willingly and with open eyes? A vast network of ideologues, foot soldiers, and administrators, backed by social and technical infrastructure. That is the real relational story behind any single figurehead. And yet audience attention fades fast, until the figurehead resurfaces and takes all the credit and all the blame, over and again.
   
   This is natural. We are tribal readers. We are subjects of many empires, symbolic and literal. We want things explained to us in a single voice; preferably between 85 and 155 Hz. we want figureheads to admire, follow, and blame. We want to hand off responsibility to a father figure, whether the father is man, woman or intersex. This is the cycle of politics even in representative democracy whose main structural feature is its fast turnover rate, not the absence of a cult of personality.
   
   But people are not gods. Authors are not abstractions. Instead of feeling betrayed the moment we realize our idols didn't quite mean what we thought—or worse, didn't quite know what they meant at the time, fumbled a talk, wrote a bad chapter, said something clumsy in an old interview—we should pick up the thought ourselves and keep going, because the thought matters infinitely more than a person's inconsistencies. They are all just people.
   
   Admitting no one is perfect, and taking this statement to its logical consequence, is the first move against fascism. Here's what that admission does:

   • It builds empathy. If everyone turns out to be flawed, we can finally relax about our own flaws as well. And if everyone around us is flawed, why get defensive, why feel the need to shut others down? What real threat can they pose, if they're neither above nor beneath us no matter how intelligent, educated, or resourceful they are? Which they very well may be! The only remaining threat is physical, from someone who hasn't yet done the work of empathy we're now trying to do. They haven't killed their gods yet. They're still distant from their true selves.
   • It frees us from a child's mindset, subjected to people who are raised as gods (i.e. abstracted) and whom we replace whenever they inevitably fail us. Instead, we become responsible for our own lives.
   • It enables our responsibility and, therefore, freedom to act. Knowing others' flaws, we are free to improve on their ideas, to finish work they couldn't finish, to reach goals they couldn't reach alone. Nobody reaches a significant goal entirely solo. Not Newton. Not Einstein. Giants stand on the shoulders of giants, and it's easier to stand on those shoulders once you've got nothing left to prove. Genius must be protected by being allowed to enjoy its path towards discovery. It must move outward, not be pressed inward.
   • It turns us into authors ourselves. We apply critical thought. We nurture who we are by being conscious of our relationships with actual people, not with images of people. We stay real.

   
   
   Cancel culture has already been bashed in the 2020s, but let's be more specific as to why it should be: because it kills empathy and ignores human nature. It freezes what is, in reality, the ever-shifting, flawed nature of any person, strips them of that humanity, and projects onto them whatever the audience currently wants to despise. A musician's decades-old tweet resurfaces and overwrites everything else they've ever said or created; a comedian's old set gets clipped and becomes the only thing they've ever said. Identity politics runs on shrinking the circle of empathy. It pulls us away from our own real selves, even while we chase something stable to call our "true" identity. But truth is relational. Truth is social—which is why a platform literally branding itself "Truth Social" is such dark comedy. Truth is context-dependent. The real damage authors cause always comes from refusing to change, from doubling down on their worst ideas, going ideological instead of admitting their opinion was only ever a fragment of the truth. And if the audience piles on, we make those harmful ideas even stronger by giving them a stage, and pressing them into a hardened core. We force authors to become caricatures of themselves, where that caricature becomes internalized identity, burying what makes them human (i.e. changeable) under an ideological shell they may have built, but of which they're now merely a victim of.
   
   None of this reflects human nature. Here's the alternative: Let's think of ideas (good, bad, ugly) as a single rocket fired into a mostly dark sky—a star manually thrown out into the cosmos, hoping it finds its gravitational fit somewhere. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn't. Thankfully, or the sky would disappear with litter. Thankfully, thought is an act, and a performance when done consciously; a forced encounter with everything still unknown, as that idea gradually lights up more of the space surrounding our current, limited knowledge. If ideas rise or fall regardless of a person's ego, regardless of their drinking habits, their political fights, how badly they treated a partner, or how hard we try to fence them in with IP law, how could we possibly judge ideas clearly while looking at them through the tunnel of someone's personality? Or why judge an idea by the exact words an author happened to choose, words that might completely misrepresent that idea, or simply not mean anything at all? Why should a tweet or an Instagram caption be treated as the Word? An idea that's worth anything far exceeds any single text, any single form of expression that attempts to capture it in a single snapshot. Because ideas move through history, even the text surrounding them should be allowed to change. The specific arrangement of words isn't usually the point unless the arrangement itself is the whole point, like in poetry or in software code. The same idea can be stated well in many different ways, and stated badly in infinite ones. Importantly: a sharp audience can still find something worth understanding in a flawed statement of an idea. If that's the case... why treat the text as sacred? Change it, if changing it makes it better. Who cares if the words shift after the fact, as long as the goal is getting closer to the idea itself, which keeps developing as its form does. This is a paradox worth encouraging: the more freedom we give an author to change their mind and revise the shape they gave an idea, by removing the personal stakes tied to any one version of it, the more we let that author actually say something worth remembering. Imagine what that would do to copyright as we know it.
   
   And this is very important: We do not make these claims for the benefit of the authors themselves. Hate speech must be acted upon. People who weaponize speech must be counteracted. These are political intentions to be opposed through political action. The bigger point has to do with how we as an audience must change in the face of digital communication. As an audience, mentally separating authors from their ideas is the only way we can remove ourselves from their influence! To emancipate ourselves from the authors and their flaws, so that we ourselves can stop being victims of them. Only then will we no longer be forced to defend terrible people for the sake of their ideas, nor virtue-signal our way out of being associated with them, becoming hypocrites in the process. We must mature: to see the ideas for what they add to our view of the world; to see any author as people like us, who might be wonderful, terrible, or a flawed mix of both. Because so are we all. This allows ideas evolve as ideas, through the contributions of many authors, playing out across culture and society. And it frees the authors as well, because people don't evolve like ideas do; they need the freedom to change as human beings, shaped by lived experience, so they can eventually circle back and re-contribute to old ideas, updating them with what they've learned since. Their social status is no longer a perverse incentive to attach themselves to ideas that are clearly wrong. And the audience is no longer a twisted mob ready to rip apart one of our own for the sake of our own entertainment riddled with hypocrisy.
   
   Why bother with all this? Because if we don't, everything becomes political. Public and private life are forced together, triggering the kind of dissociation social media now puts everyone through, constantly. Plus, if we don't do this, we condemn ourselves as a purely reactive audience. We offload all responsibility. We kill any interest in developing our own critical thinking. We need to be more ambitious than that. We need enough ego to say: "I may not have spent a lifetime studying phenomenology the way Heidegger did, or evolutionary biology the way a science communicator like Neil deGrasse Tyson has, but I still have every right to respond, interpret, and reflect on their ideas, and to fold them into my own life however fits me naturally." Treating authors with pure reverence assumes we can't really understand them. That we're just victims of whatever words they happened to use, instead of thinking past those words for ourselves. If we put ourselves on the same plane as the people we read, we can actually engage with their thinking and carry it forward to the extent that we're truly able. Not because we're smarter or better informed (let's not make that mistake!), but because we give ourselves enough credit to learn from them. And with that elevation comes responsibility: instead of blaming authors for every bad idea, we become the adults and ask them to explain their thoughts while giving them a chance to back away; to change their stance. This is what it means to engage truly with the process of knowledge. When we know how to discriminate between the person and the image without fearing judgment, we are in control of this process. We're not victims of abstract authors. Authors are not victims of a mob driven by an inflexible and simplistic understanding of their stated views. We are all first-hand agents in building culture.

5. (5) Technology is culture. Art is culture. Technology and art naturally happen together → Seeing any of these terms as antithetical is antithetical to human nature.

   It is 1913, and you are a friend of Luigi Russolo, the Italian Futurist. He is busy building large, awkward wooden boxes—gears, levers, pulleys, cones—to produce as many kinds of noise as possible. You step into the room, he cranks a machine, and the air fills with trains, factories, the city. Why would he do this? Unconvinced, you show up to a performance. It takes the crowd seconds to start throwing tomatoes. You dodge them, and consider joining in. No performance, you think, could be received worse. And yet this will not be the last of its kind. Why try again?
   
   It is 1970, and you are a friend of Suzanne Ciani, the American composer. She is busy patching a modular synthesizer—knobs, cables, oscillators—to produce as many kinds of sound as possible. You step into the room, she patches a cable, and the air fills with water, wind, weather. Why would she do this? Why would Daphne Oram, Pierre Schaeffer, and Delia Derbyshire each begin with technical knowledge and arrive at what would eventually be recognized as music or electroacoustic art?
   
   Ibn al-Haytham laid the foundations of optics in the 11th century. Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the use of linear perspective in painting in the 15th century. Leonardo da Vinci made contributions to both art and science through drawing and anatomical studies. There are countless examples of art and science being very close to each other, from color theory to the development of photography, from the invention of the telescope to the creation of computer-generated imagery. Especially in the Renaissance, this point is hard to miss: art and technical development were all just different ways of understanding the world, its possibilities, and creating new ones (a new shade of color, a new way to raise a cupola). Artistic and technical development can both be read as the development of knowledge about the world. But that is not the only bond between the two domains.
   
   Art and technology require each other. Art requires technology because it is always the outgrowth of a new design or a new instrument. The piano, for example, answered need that was both technical and creative: a keyboard instrument that allowed the musician to control dynamics and sustain, unlike the harpsichord. Out of that quite sophisticated engineering, composers such as Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy were able to achieve eternal fame. The Moog and Buchla synthesizers came directly out of the field of electronics; as instruments, they reshaped the timbrescape of every existing genre and generated new ones. The story repeats for every art form that has existed and every one not yet invented. As long as people build new tools there will be new art, because every experience a tool makes possible arrives with forms an artist can manipulate and explore further.
   
   But in what sense does technology require art? Start with some definitions. The classical account is mimesis (Plato): imitation of physical things, appearance only. For Kant, fine art is a representation purposive in itself, one that cultivates the mental powers for sociable communication. For Hegel, beauty is the sensuous appearance of absolute truth, and art therefore carries a civilization's deepest values. More recent definitions are relativist: art is expression in any medium, its value and status conferred by the viewer. Running alongside all of this is the history of aesthetics, which is not art but the study of the sensory dimension of what humans make, with beauty as its object.
   
   Even without pressing into the fine grain of these theories, notice that every theme they raise has already appeared here under the name of technology. Technology is phenomenological practice, social and physical conditioning, cultural shaping—aesthetic experience constrained by matter and design. While there are functional and mechanistic incentives to design new technologies (profit as a bottom line or sheer operatioal optimization in factories), each practice that manipulates matter, from woodworking to housing construction to metalworking to urban planning to software engineering, also has an aesthetic dimension. This might go unnoticed because it is rarely quantified. But we all can tell when it's missing. When that dimension is ignored, we subject ourselves or others to the worst consequences (see the phone trees of Point 2). When the aesthetic dimension is taken seriously, we liberate the medium's potential to create new forms of experience. It is our choice to work in a cubicle with cold neon lights or to work in a garden surrounded by wooden surfaces. And we reap the consequences of that decision, although our ability to adapt can mitigate the effects of a poor choice, as much as a frog in water that gradually reaches its boiling point.
   
   Art is the isolated research of aesthetic experience into the deeper and broader forms given medium can achieve. Every technology is worth probing for its aesthetic affordances, every medium for the experience it can generate. More precisely, for a new stable structure of experience, a new kind of perceptual harmony. Usually, art is associated with the word expression, but expression names only the active side of the bond between intent and technology. A device (and the gesture captured by an art piece) exists as the expression of an intent, and that intent gives it its functional and moral direction. Art is the development of consciousness around every direction a medium can take toward harmony: the prior intent, the current function, the potential new functions, the "wrong" functions that open new ones. The oscillator was never meant to be listened to, but it became the source of the sine, square, and sawtooth waves that define the Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails, and every other band built on electronic music. So, while art can run on its own track, if its results are fed back into technical development it will be an improvement of that technology's use or potential use, because aesthetic research is what carries a technology—and the conditions it imposes on whoever uses it—closer to its essence under a given set of constraints.
   
   History shows art and technology occurring together, gathered around the same objects. It could not be otherwise. Both are rooted in the shaping of human conditions of living, and so of perception, experience, and culture. Art is the domain of expansion, pulling at the seams and pushing at the edge of the possible through subversion: keeping the form and switching the content, so that new meaning appears and finds its expression. Technology is the domain of scaffolding, fixing each discovery in place so that the next one can be made through use. Both produce conditions for living and practices of living; both are therefore acts of culture. The worlds we inhabit are shaped by the two at once. They are not identical, but they share the role of keeping civilization in motion. They channel life's meaning: the making of sense and direction. Their joint development is the full expression of human nature and the movement of life.

6. (6) Philosophy produces structured forms of abstract ideas. Technique is the result of experientially reinforced practice. Philosophy and technique are complementary. Both lead to habits that cause friction with things that change.