Abstract
Multistability—the plurality of meanings of technological artifacts—is an emancipatory phenomenon insofar as it allows the user to freely appropriate the object according to his or her interests, even against the will of the designer. The objective of this article is to show how the trend to connect physical and digital artifacts to the Internet poses a danger to the freedom that there is in multistability. By reducing the traditional separation between the artifact and the designer, the connection of the artifact to the Internet allows the designer to continually modify the software that governs or constitutes it, which involves a relative loss of power for the user to determine its meaning. This change, in favor of the designer in the correlation of power among the actors—designer, artifact, and user—from whose interplay the meaning of artifacts arises, favors concentric stabilities and hinders eccentric ones with respect to the will of the designer. Thus, we should rethink the truth value of the designer fallacy, that is, the claim that the meaning of artifacts is determined only by the designer. From a political point of view, the remote control of artifacts and their multistability is an effective pedagogical tool to educate human beings in a time in which texts, according to Sloterdijk, no longer serve this function.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
One last relevant question that arises from what has been discussed here is the one related to the governance of innovation. It is worth asking about the peculiar role that designers have in technological development. What has been said in this article sheds some light on their powerful position and on how the Internet is a tool they can use to democratize technology due to the way it reduces the separation between the context of design and the context of use. However, the governance of technological innovation is a complex issue; too much to be adequately addressed in this already very long article. The interested reader can find a good thread to draw from in Schomberg and Blok (2021).
References
Aristotle. (2004). Nicomachean ethics. Cambridge University Press.
Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The second machine age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. W. W. Norton & Company.
Bustamante, J. (2018). Ethical and political delusion in the model of cloud computing. In B. Laspra & J. A. López (Eds.), Spanish philosophy of technology: Contemporary work from the Spanish speaking community (pp. 165–177). Springer.
Carabantes, M. 2021. Smart socio-technical environments: A paternalistic and humanistic management proposal. Philosophy & Technology, 34, 1531–1544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00471-6
Carr, N. (2009). The big switch: Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google. W. W. Norton & Company.
Elhai, J., Levine, J., Dvorak, R., & Hall, B. (2016). Fear of missing out, need for touch, anxiety and depression are related to problematic smartphone use. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 509–516.
Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. Vintage Books.
Ellul, J. (1973). Propaganda. Random House.
Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming technology: A critical theory revisited. Oxford University Press.
Floridi, L. (2013). Things. Philosophy & Technology, 26, 349–352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0139-2
Frischmann, B., & Selinger, E. (2018). Re-engineering humanity. Cambridge University Press.
Fuggetta, A. (2003). Open source software—An evaluation. Journal of Systems and Software, 66(1), 77–90.
Gershenfeld, N. (1999). When things start to think. Henry Holt and Company.
Grunwald, A. (2018). Technology assessment in practice and theory. Routledge.
Han, B.-C. (2022). Non-things. Polity Press.
Hansson, S. O., Belin, M.-Å., & Lundgren, B. (2021). Self-driving vehicles—An ethical overview. Philosophy & Technology, 34, 1383–1408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00464-5
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld: From garden to earth. Indiana University Press.
Ihde, D. (1993). Postphenomenology: Essays in the postmodern context. Northwestern University Press.
Ihde, D. (2014). The designer fallacy and technological imagination. In J. Dakers (Ed.), Defining technological literacy: Towards an epistemological framework (2nd ed., pp. 119–129). Palgrave Macmillan.
Kaku, M. (2011). Physics of the future: The inventions that will transform our lives. Penguin Books.
Kent, S. (2001). The ultimate history of video games. Three Rivers Press.
Kravets, D. (2011). Sony threatens to terminate service of PS3 jailbreakers. Wired February, 16, 2011 Accessed February 11, 2023. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/sony-threatens-jailbreakers
Lambert, F. (2020). Tesla gives deadline to force software updates on owners who have been resisting them. Electrek February, 14, 2020 Accessed July 7, 2022. https://electrek.co/2020/02/14/tesla-force-software-updates-owners-resisting-them
Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
Lee, K.-F. (2018). AI super-powers: China, Silicon Valley, and the new world order. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Mitcham, C. (1994). Thinking through technology: The path between engineering and philosophy. University of Chicago Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.
Oroza, E. (2009). Rikimbili: Une Étude sur la Désobéissance Technologique et Quelques Formes de Réinvention. PU Saint-Étienne.
Orwell, G. (2012). 1984. Penguin Books.
Packard, V. (1966). The waste makers. Penguin Books.
Pinch, T., & Bijker, W. (1989). The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. In W. Bijker, T. Hughes, & T. Pinch (Eds.), The social construction of technological systems (pp. 17–50). The MIT Press.
Schomberg, L., & Blok, V. (2021). Technology in the age of innovation: Responsible innovation as a new subdomain within the philosophy of technology. Philosophy & Technology, 34, 309–323. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-019-00386-3
Sen, A. (2005). Human rights and capabilities. Journal of Human Development, 6(2), 151–166.
Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Rules for the human zoo: A response to the Letter on Humanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27, 12–28.
Tenner, E. (1997). Why things bite back: Technology and the revenge of unintended consequences. Vintage Books.
Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin Books.
Torchinsky, J. (2020). Tesla remotely removes autopilot features from customer’s used Tesla without any notice. Jalopnik February, 6, 2020 Accessed July 7, 2022. https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-features-from-customer-1841472617
Vallor, S. (2016). Technology and the virtues: A philosophical guide to a future worth wanting. Oxford University Press.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Design ethics and technological mediation. Science, Technology & Human Values, 31(3), 361–380.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2008a). Morality in design: Design ethics and the morality of technological artifacts. In P. Vermaas, P. Kroes, A. Light, & S. Moore (Eds.), Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture (pp. 91–103). Springer.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2008b). Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human-technology relations. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 387–395.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2009). Cultivating humanity: Towards a non-humanist ethics of technology. In J. K. B. Olsen, E. Selinger, & S. Riis (Eds.), New waves of philosophy of technology (pp. 241–263). Palgrave Macmillan.
White, L. (1964). Medieval technology and social change. Oxford University Press.
Winner, L. (1989). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. University of Chicago Press.
Yoo, C. (2011). Cloud computing: Architectural and policy implications. Review of Industrial Organization, 38(4), 405–421.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank his colleague and mentor Javier Bustamante for his mentioned article about of cloud computing, as it was one of the main sources that inspired this work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
This manuscript was solely written by Manuel Carabantes López (MCL). Note that, when I write in English, I choose not use my second last name (López).
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethics Approval
This is an observational study. No ethical approval is required.
Consent to Participate
Not applicable.
Consent for Publication
Not applicable.
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Carabantes, M. Towards the End of the Designer Fallacy: How the Internet Empowers Designers over Users. Philos. Technol. 36, 33 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00637-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00637-4