The Disappearing Button

Abstract

HEIDEGGER, FOUCAULT, AND SUPERAUTOMATED SPACES An opposition between technophilia and technophobia has characterized much philosophy of technology, including some feminist philosophy of technology But since the object in question in the opposition-technology-is unspecified in such designations, a lover of technology per se could be saddled with incompatible affinities for, say, the copper technology of the Neolithic Age, on the one hand, and the Euro-American plastics technology of the 1930s and thereafter, on the other. Likewise, a strict technophobe, allegedly averse to all regimes of technology, would likely be so bereft of tools of any kind that a Neolithic copper axe might in fact turn out to be of some appeal. Accordingly, this essay attempts to avoid this opposition in its examination of a contemporary development in built human environments. Superautomated Space. In particular, what follows will consider one kind of technological artifact: a self-regulating, automated, built human environment, or a superautomated space. I have in mind buildings and vehicles equipped with networks of sensors that "read" the bodies that inhabit them, and store information about those bodies for future use. One much-publicized example of such an artifact is the Seattle residence built by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Visitors to the house wear pins with chips containing their "preferences" for temperature, music, television shows and movies. As a person moves through the building, it controls these environmental factors and electronic screens as specified in the selections stored on the chip. Further, the building is self-monitoring by means of cameras twenty-four hours a day. Floors contain sensors that can track and pinpoint a person's location throughout the building. Many of these features can also be programmed remotely.2 This essay proposes that if feminist thinkers are concerned with questions of mastery, power and subjectivity, we should attend to such seeming new developments in the automation, or the "superautomation," of spaces. It addresses the emergence of these spaces primarily through some of Heidegger's work on technicity and Foucault's analyses of spaces of surveillance. Included are speculations concerning possibilities for understanding these spaces partly in terms of sexual difference, though this approach will be incomplete without a treatment of these spaces in terms of many other significant differences. So, my essay is motivated by two concerns. First, can the work of Heidegger and Foucault help us understand the nature of superautomated spaces? Second, what could introduction of feminist categories of analysis bring to our attempt to understand the nature of superautomated spaces? Buttons. One might wonder how an artifact such as a superautomated space could prompt the title "The Disappearing Button." Buttons, switches, keyboards, all kinds of novel interfaces, one might think, have been proliferating in recent years. This is undeniable. But though buttons have been proliferating, they are perhaps on the way out-at least it is clear that some portion of them are disappearing. And prior to disappearing, they are migrating. Buttons have migrated in time and in space. Storage of commands, that is, programming, makes buttons migrate in time. Since commands can be stored, they do not have to be repeated if a device can recognize an individual, or anything else that can register on its sensors, and simply apply stored commands. But buttons have also migrated in space. They no longer need to appear exactly on the devices to which they signal commands, since remote signaling is today old technology. But how are buttons disappearing? Superautomated spaces, with their capacity to register things that enter them or their orbit, transform one into a signaler; one's body in depth and surface may now be the signaler to activate operations of the superautomated space. The operations may be pre-selected by oneself or by someone else. …