On Friday I heard Barry Allen talk about tools. His talk touched on points he makes in his forthcoming book, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience. He defined a tool as having two distinctive qualities:
- Â Artifactual economy. A tool is an artifact and it is part of an economy of tools. Tools are made by other tools, they are controlled by other tools, and often operate on tools. This is what characterizes modern technology – a technical culture of machines driving machines making machines and interacting with machines.
- Functionless functionality. By this Allen, I think, meant that tools do not have a single function or purpose – that they are often used for unanticipated functions, but are still functional. The general purpose computer might be the paradigm of a tool with no fixed function that is therefore adaptable to all sorts of functions.
After the talk Barry and I talked about software as tools. He would say that a book or a movie is an artifact, but not a tool. At what point does a digital artifact go from being data to being a tool? When it is executable? Is a web page information or a tool?
Barry also made an interesting point about first-order and second-order machines. First-order machines are “devices that extend human capacities by exploiting a mechanical advantage.” Second-order machines are like factories, “an assembly of first-order machines, coupled to produce a multiplying effect. Exploits the economic equivalent of a mechanical advantage.” These second-order machines are the factories of tools that make our culture more than tool using, but an economy of technology. Allen warned that it is these second-order tools that so easily turned to waste.