User:Themsen/TT3-2
Synopsis, Bruno Latour: Where Are The Missing Masses?
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Man is ruled by artefacts according to a preset morality, is it artificial? Where is the morality in electronic artefacts such as a seat belt?
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Humans work as artefacts, where the middle has been cut out; only right and wrong remains. We can remove the artefact and introduce the excluded middle. “IF a car is moving THEN the driver has a seatbelt”. We’re making artefacts to impose the law of the exclusion of the middle.
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Like cosmologists, sociologists want to find the missing mass which equals the total mass. "“The Groom [electric door] is on strike, For God’s Sake, Keep The Door Closed "The Door serves as a fusion for labor relations, religion, advertisement, and technique in one significant fact”
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The hinge solves the wall hole dilemma (the door dilemma), a nonhuman; a character which’s solution is delegated by a carpenter, not by the one who needs the door hinged. A middle hand. If you want to know what a nonhuman does, imagine what you’d do without it.
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Closing doors might not be as obvious as it seems, there will only be a proper closing of the door if you have the law behind it? Mumford mentions that you either have to discipline those who don’t do it well until they do, or substitute those who don’t do it well with someone/something which does it well. The hinges + a groom opening the door correctly solves the wallholle dilemma. The hinge is effective because it performs a simple task, while having a human groom makes for all manner of complexities (spending & disciplining). Artifact is infallible as long as it is maintained, the complexity of humans make grooms targetable due to the common understanding that humans aren’t simple like nonhumans.
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Artifact excludes the middle(-man). Artefacts work in past-tense (once it has been installed), Humans work in present tense (when the groom is at his post). Artifacts control us by their simplicity, efficiency and single-usage. They are put there to work, and if a human doesn’t work according to it then it is not the system’s fault, it;s the humans’.
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The lesson with artefacts is that you have to learn how to live around them, and those people who haven’t lived around them must relearn in the place that they ended up in.
Media Object Ideas so far:
- Saving prompt in Photoshop
- http://www.popuptest.com/
- http://mischiefmakersmanual.com/tools/annoy/homepage.html
(to be continued)