Meaning as a Dangerous Technology: 2 Technology, Not Capacity

Once meaning is no longer treated as the foundation of intelligence, a shift becomes unavoidable.

Meaning stops looking like a natural capacity — something organisms simply have — and starts looking like a technological intervention: something that is added, learned, maintained, and capable of malfunction.

This reclassification matters. Profoundly.

What capacities do — and what technologies do

Biological capacities are typically:

• continuous rather than discrete

• tightly coupled to bodily and ecological constraints

• self-regulating through feedback

• costly to override

Technologies are different. They:

• extend reach beyond immediate context

• compress complex activity into portable forms

• enable coordination across distance and time

• introduce new failure modes alongside new powers

Meaning fits the second profile, not the first.

It allows us to coordinate with strangers, plan across generations, stabilise institutions, and transmit practices far beyond direct experience. But it does so by abstracting away from the very conditions that normally keep behaviour calibrated.

Meaning is not grown. It is installed.

Plug-in machinery

Meaning depends on infrastructures that must already exist: symbols, conventions, shared constraints, social reinforcement. These are not biological givens; they are constructed, sustained, and fragile.

Remove the infrastructure and meaning collapses. The organism remains.

This asymmetry is telling. When meaning fails, coordination does not disappear — it reverts to other forms. But when coordination fails, meaning cannot compensate. It floats, untethered, unable to act.

Meaning is therefore not primary. It is parasitic in the neutral, technical sense: it operates on top of systems that do the real-time work.

Compression and detachment

All powerful technologies compress.

Writing compresses speech. Maps compress terrain. Algorithms compress decision processes. Meaning compresses lived coordination into symbolic handles.

This compression is extraordinarily useful. It allows planning, justification, explanation, and control. But compression always discards information.

What meaning discards is context: timing, affect, bodily readiness, local constraint. The very things that make behaviour viable.

Detached from these, symbolic commitments acquire a dangerous autonomy. They persist even when the conditions that made them sensible have disappeared.

Failure modes we mistake for virtues

Because meaning is treated as a capacity, its failure modes are misread as moral or cognitive shortcomings:

• hesitation becomes lack of conviction

• overload becomes lack of care

• withdrawal becomes irresponsibility

But these are not personal failures. They are signs of technological strain.

When meaning scales faster than the systems that must enact it, organisms do not become better — they become brittle.

Why the distinction matters

If meaning were a capacity, the solution to its problems would be more meaning: clearer concepts, better definitions, stronger commitments.

But if meaning is a technology, the solution looks very different:

• better placement

• tighter constraints

• limited scope

• explicit awareness of costs

We do not ask whether a technology is true or false. We ask what it enables, what it disables, and under what conditions it should be used.

Meaning deserves the same treatment.

Once we stop mistaking it for a natural faculty, we can finally ask the questions that matter:

Where does meaning work?

Where does it interfere?

And what happens when it is allowed to run without bounds?

That is the problem of scale.