Saffron Huang and Maran Nelson
<aside> 💡 “I think that engineering is what human beings, deep down, want to do. Not the only thing, but one of the most basic and satisfying things. Engineering is an activity that is fulfilling—existentially… To be human is to be technological. When we are being technological we are being human.” - Samuel Florman, The Civilized Engineer, 1987 (pp19-20)
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If you go to the Wikipedia entry for “Technologist” today, you’ll find it unwritten. Nobody, thus far, has attempted to explain what a “technologist” is on the Internet’s canonical encyclopedia. As a result, the page can only point the reader to a list of highly specific and mechanical job titles, peddling entries on “cardiovascular technologist” and “architectural technologist” rather than providing a unified overview of what these jobs have in common.
What it means to be a “technologist” is similarly ill-defined in the general popular conception. “Technologist” implies little other than a narrow sense of “technical”: knowing how to construct and/or program a machine. Not only this, the frequent implication is that machines are all a technologist cares about, that technologists are nerdy men who think only in code and prefer not to be bothered with the human constraints and messiness of the world. In turn, the perceived coldness of the machine is projected onto its maker; many of us distance ourselves from our identities as technologists, for fear of identifying with a dehumanizing persona.
The irony here is that to be technological is to be profoundly human. Humanity controls its fate by using tools and materials to survive and to self-realize. The human species developed by gradually accumulating complex, adaptive technologies passed on through cultural transmission, giving us essential tools. Not only does human life and survival depend on our technologies; so do many elements of human culture. A society’s available technologies shape the way people live. A nomadic foraging society’s tools permit very different cultures, customs and habits compared to a society reliant on electricity, automobiles and postal infrastructure. To quote Marx, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”
Indeed, philosophers of technology have argued that technology is the essential human activity. Ernst Kapp said that human existence is always and everywhere bound up in a relationship to tools. Dessauer posited that man’s act of technical creation is “the greatest earthly experience of mortals.” To him, creating technology almost constituted a religious experience.
We must address two points of dissonance. Who, indeed, is a technologist, if not the narrow conceptions present in the public imagination? And if technology comes from a deeply human place, why is that not the popular conception, and should that be changed?
The modern world is repeatedly subject to layers of technological change unfurling, enveloping and transforming various areas of life, like ever-quickening waves of metamorphosis. More people participate in and witness technological advancement—this essentially human practice— than ever before.
In fact, more people are technologists than ever before, insofar as a “technologist” can be defined as someone inventing, implementing or repurposing technology. In particular, the personal computer has allowed anyone to live in the unbounded wilderness of the internet as they please. Anyone can build highly specific corners of cyberspace and quickly invent digital tools, changing their own and others’ technological realities. “Technologist” is a common identity that many different people occupy, and anyone can occupy. Yet the public perceptions of a “technologist” still constitute a very narrow image.
The identity of “technologist” needs a reboot. Our own and others’ conceptions of who we are as technologists influence what we expect of ourselves. Here is a stab at the definition Wikipedia is missing.
A technologist makes reason out of the messiness of the world, leverages their understanding to envision a different reality, and acts to build a pathway to make their vision happen. All three of these endeavors—to try to understand the world, to imagine something different, and to build something that fulfills that vision—are deeply human.
We are a species possessing a fundamental drive to understand and organize the world, and our ability to grasp abstract concepts is part of what sets us apart from other animals. Humans are continually distilling and organizing reality into representations and models—to varying degrees of accuracy and implicitness—that we can understand and navigate. Our intelligence involves making models of all aspects of our realities: models of the climate, models of each other’s minds, models of fluid dynamics.
But the technologist does not stop there; after simplifying the messy soup of the world, they also envision a different version of reality and act to make that change, aided by their knowledge. This process of imagining things differently and acting on it to modify the world in a methodical, informed way is a particular trait of the human animal. We act to change our world on a scale and with a systematicity and permanence that has allowed us an unprecedented level of mastery over our environment.
From radical visionaries to hobbyist tinkerers, all technologists do this, just at different magnitudes of scope and ambition.
It seems impossible to delineate who is a technologist and who is not based on a job title. “Technologist” is more of a continuum, involving varying degrees and forms of technological participation and literacy. A kid building a tree-house is a technologist. The countless people who have contributed knowledge, ideas and labor towards the Internet are all technologists. Any random person walking down the street is likely more of a technologist than they realize, as are you.
Technical creation is an activity that is essential to humanity, available to all, and done by many.