Draft Overview
This article will develop two phases to help understand the meaning of Third-TechnoScape (3TS) and singular technologies (ST). In the first part, through the description of actual use-cases, we focus on shedding light on key aspects of 3TS that will help approach the modes of existence of ST, in the second part.
We shall conclude with means to embrace 3TS and develop ST.
Third TechnoScape
Shedding lights also means casting shadows. In the shades of capitalist hegemony and ideology, we cast the 3TS to respond to the reductionist market-driven fallacy of “Third Space”, between home and the workplace, where social capital can easily be captured and executed while the worker’s guard is lowered. Not only the pervasiveness of technologies make such notions as home and work porous to the point of dissolution, but the rapidly deteriorating conditions of existence of the living often do not respond anymore to such criteria : the homeless meet the jobless in the darkness left over by the predatory shadow of mainstream propaganda.
Our four use-cases will enlighten the reader on some facets of 3TS and ST, delineating not a tangible asset, but the traces by which the living have made their own path working around the arbitrary grid of the square-cornered flat display of market value.
Reclaiming Singular Technologies
At this point the reader has a good idea what kind of resistance 3TS is characterizing. From our use-cases, we can explore the granularity of ST that make them distinct from, and slippery to market-driven technoscience. We insist on the step aside that can make us see the flatness and compose with interstices and “sociologies of scale” to enable ST and resist the apparent ineluctability of capitalist hegemony.
Each of this case studies points out specific tensions between existing practices and necessities of singular technologies.
While Quantify Wholeheartedly addresses the corporate body-politics agenda it needs free software and rethought data based models to reuse relearn and share again.
BMDE considers the production of knowledge as citizen based necessarily part of the commons and is in need of shared infrastructure and share information with other initiatives to ensure resilience.
Zinneke is in itself an infrastructure as it is transversal to many Brussel based structures, and it faces the omnipotence of corporate networks that penetrate in its organisation in order to build knowledge within its participants it needs means to give them access to information and education.
Key features of ST:
- foster the living
- maintain an open-world assumption
- enable unity-in-diversity
- plurality and diversity of representations
- paying attention to otherwise invisible knowledges
-…
Key components of ST:
- human-driven
- free software (especially the recognition of collective freedoms)
- equal access to data allowing for creative appropriation and analysis
- non categorizing visuals
- …
