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."
   
   These affirmations can be presented as political opposites, but in reality both point towards a common realization: the inextricable link between a subject and the technology they wield. If we strip away the political theater of the first claim, we find its core necessity: That a technology's use is dependent on human intent. That's important to remember, but the claim also misses the opposite direction: 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 effects.
   
   All these factors, together, determine the use of technology. And note that the life of a given technology 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 the possibility of a 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 there, we leave the question to you. But if we want to find a cause for the 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. But 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 thus 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 (now, yes, 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. But 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, by the way, 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).

   
   This is where we start to understand our own responsibility. We are part of the same systems, conjoined at the points where specific technologies pivot our respective intentions and experiences. And via 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 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 come Humanity, somehow. This would be a more interesting position if its holders followed certain aspects all the way through: that consciousness must exist in everything, including inert matter, without exceptions. That's a claim worth taking seriously on its own terms. But it doesn't actually 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, or no more than an abacus "knows" arithmetic just because it produces the right answer (which, as a side note, exists only if there's a human to read it).
   
   We know the power of AI to be more interesting than to simulate human cognition. Simply put, its power is to assist human reasoning and performance, although the same goes for any machine. 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, not 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 in this case: 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 devices' affordances. To be fair, this makes some sense when a single call center genuinely can't handle the volume of calls; under-resourced teams get a pass. But that excuse has expired. 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 potential: 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.

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 binary view of the world, 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.
   
   Digital technology allows us to create and experience reality in this third 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 perception. 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 subjective perceptions. Rather than seeking a single, egoistic truth, it's more realistic to sit with reality in its full complexity.
   
   People 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 new compared to the past? Not quite: fake news and propaganda go back to early forms of mass communication. Emperor Augustus knew a thing or two about this. 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, starting with the shaping of individual 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.
   
   What if we treated 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, visible?

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 place and time.
   
   When we say a name like Arendt, Newton, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, are we actually talking about the person? Or are we using their name as shorthand for something else entirely — a framework of assumptions tied to their published work, or a perspective that exists mostly because generations of lesser-known teachers, students, and commentators kept elaborating on it long after the person died? When I mention Darwin, am I talking about his actual daily life, his marriage, his health anxieties, 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? Obviously not. 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're closer to being consumers. 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 kind of over-rationalizing 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.
   
   School teaches us 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 middle managers, backed by social and technical infrastructure, is the real relational story behind any single figurehead. And yet audience attention fades fast, until the figurehead resurfaces and takes all the credit, or blame, over and again.
   
   This is natural. We're tribal readers. We're subjects of many empires, symbolic and literal. We want things explained to us in a single voice; we want figureheads to admire, follow, and blame. We want to hand off responsibility to a father figure. This is the cycle of politics, always, even in representative democracy whose main structural feature is just a faster turnover rate than other systems.
   
   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 these people aren't perfect is the first move against fascism, by the way. Here's what that admission does: - It frees us from a child's mindset, where parents are gods, and when they fail us we go looking for replacement gods. Instead, we become responsible for our own lives, which doesn't mean going cold necessarily. We can still love our parents while recognizing their flaws clearly, and appreciating whatever they were able to give us, because that's what shaped who we actually became. - 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 gives us responsibility and, therefore, freedom to act. Knowing others' flaws, we're free to improve on their ideas, to finish work they couldn't finish, reach goals they couldn't reach alone, because no one reaches anything significant 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 — just a path to enjoy and keep discovering. - It turns us into authors ourselves. We apply critical thought. We nurture who we really are by staying conscious of our relationships with actual people, not with images of people. We stay real.
   
   Cancel culture does the opposite — it kills empathy. It freezes what is, in reality, the ever-shifting, flawed nature of a human being, strips them of that humanity, and projects onto them whatever the audience currently wants to despise. A musician's decades-old tweet resurfaces and instantly overwrites everything else they've ever said or made; a comedian's old set gets clipped out of context and becomes the only thing anyone remembers about them. 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 exactly why a platform literally branding itself "Truth Social" is such dark comedy. Truth is context-dependent. The real damage authors do comes from refusing to change — 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. We force authors to become caricatures of themselves, burying whoever they actually are under an ideological shell they may have built, but of which they're now just as much a victim.
   
   Instead, think of ideas 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. 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. What does ego have to do with any of this? 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 what they meant, or simply not mean anything at all? Why should a tweet or an Instagram caption be treated any differently? An idea that's worth anything is bigger than any single text that tries to capture it. So a text should be allowed to change, because the specific arrangement of words isn't usually the point unless the arrangement itself is the whole point, like in poetry or in code. Most of the time, it isn't. The same idea can be said well in many different ways, and said badly in infinite ones. Importantly: a sharp audience can still find something worth understanding in a flawed version of an idea. So 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 not something we're doing for the benefit of authors. Hate speech must be acted upon. People who weaponize speech must be counteracted. These are political intentions to be opposed through political action. But 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 finally 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 we will no longer be forced to defend terrible people, for the sake of their ideas, nor to virtue-signal our way out of being associated with them, and become hypocrites in the process. Instead, we become the adults in the room: we see the ideas for what they add to our view of the world; we see the authors as people, like us, who might be wonderful or terrible or a flawed mix of both — exactly like us. 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.
   
   But why bother with all this? Why give authors so much room to breathe, instead of just cancelling them fast and moving on to the next idol? Because we've already seen the consequences. If we never let people change, not only do they not grow (which is a harm to themselves), they double down: they get stuck repeating outdated, maladjusted ideas that are now welded to their identity. Their defenses kick in. Everything becomes political. Public and private life get forced together, triggering the kind of dissociation social media now puts everyone through, constantly.
   
   Second, if we don't do this, we condemn ourselves as a purely reactive audience, as readers. 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 misstep, we act like adults and forgive the mis-speaking, because we're equipped enough to filter out the toxic parts and keep what's useful; we are able to engage with them truly. We know how to discriminate between the person and the image without fearing someone else's judgment, because we're the ones in control. We're not victims of abstract authors, because these authors are real people, just like us. We're the adults, and therefore 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.

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.