Technology is often described as applied knowledge, neutral instrumentation, or external amplification of human intention. In these accounts, technology appears as something we use, while meaning, value, and agency remain safely inside the human subject.
From a relational ontology perspective, this picture is radically incomplete.
Technology is not an add-on to human action. It is a reconfiguration of the field of possibility itself.
Technology as Relational Infrastructure
At its core, technology is not defined by machinery, electronics, or novelty. It is defined by constraint and affordance.
A technology:
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stabilises certain distinctions
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suppresses others
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links actions across time, space, and participants
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reduces the cost of some coordinations while increasing the cost of others
In this sense, technology operates in the same ontological register as language — not as representation, but as relational infrastructure.
Where language differentiates possibility semiotically, technology hardens those differentiations into durable pathways.
Acceleration Without Intention
Technological change is often narrated as intentional innovation: someone invents, society adopts, progress follows. This story quietly centres agency in the human will.
But acceleration does not require intention.
Once a relational configuration reliably produces outcomes with less effort, greater reach, or higher stability, it becomes self-reinforcing. Technologies spread not because they are chosen repeatedly, but because they reshape what counts as viable action.
From Semiotic Stabilisation to Technical Lock-In
In earlier posts, we saw how semiotic systems stabilise possibility through:
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register
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grammatical metaphor
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inscription
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institutional uptake
Technology extends this stabilisation by:
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embedding distinctions in artefacts
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automating selections
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reducing the need for interpretation
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collapsing deliberation into procedure
What was once a semiotic option becomes a technical default.
This is not the replacement of meaning by machinery. It is the migration of semiotic distinctions into non-negotiable form.
Scaling Without Understanding
One of technology’s most consequential features is that it enables coordination without shared understanding.
Technology allows action to be coordinated through compatibility rather than consensus.
This is why technological systems scale so rapidly — and why their effects often outpace ethical reflection. Meaning can be slow. Infrastructure is not.
The Weighting of Possibility
Technology does not merely expand what is possible. It reweights possibility.
By making some actions:
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faster
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cheaper
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easier
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more visible
it renders other actions:
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improbable
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invisible
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impractical
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unintelligible
This is not coercion. It is selective pressure.
Technological systems do not force outcomes. They make some futures frictionless and others exhausting.
Ethics After Acceleration
Once acceleration is understood relationally, ethical questions shift.
The central issue is no longer:
Did someone choose wrongly?
But:
Which possibilities were made inevitable, and which were quietly foreclosed?
Ethical responsibility in a technological world is not located in inner freedom. It lies in:
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design decisions
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defaults
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thresholds
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points of irreversibility
Responsibility attaches not to intention, but to participation in systems that accelerate some relations over others.
Technology and the Becoming of Possibility
Technology makes visible something that was already true of language: the future is not discovered or chosen; it is shaped.
But technology shapes it faster, harder, and with less interpretive slack.
Understanding technology relationally allows us to:
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analyse its effects without moral panic
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critique its consequences without romanticism
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intervene without appealing to lost interiors
It places technology firmly within the same ontological field as language, knowledge, value, and coordination.
Looking Ahead
If language differentiates possibility, and technology accelerates it, then the remaining question is unavoidable:
How do we act responsibly in a world where possibility is no longer slow?
And that is where the series now turns.
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