Nordification.com | Build | Self
Michel Foucault’s definitions of technologies include four distinct types. These four ways of doing technology inform Nordification.
This page is about the fourth one:
“4. Technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”
Self
Foucault’s Technologies of the self, the fourth in his list of four, to my mind should be everything traditional technology — let’s say Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley-influenced tech development worldwide — is all about.
Unfortunately, it’s not.
It’s not an unheard-of way of seeing and doing things in other sectors: client-focused delivery.
In schooling, we say child-centred learning. In universities, it may become a hybrid of guided learning and self-organised and conducted learning. In social- and healthcare it’s the patient and service-user we think most about.
In tech, it’s not unheard-of either. But the service-user and client is generally the tech corporation’s bottom line. Not the real-world problems out there. Nor the people who still have them.
It doesn’t have to be like this. In other parts of the world, we inspect the potential customer less and respect them much more.
So why NOT do it the Nordification way? Why not more respect for the “self”?
Why not a real diversity of actions and events? Of processes and procedures? Of thinking from scratch instead of cobbling “solutions” together, on the basis of shaky presumptions at best?
Relevant links
From some of our sites:
https://www.niokvinnor.com/more/activity | Dividing production into three processes of radically improved functionality: two are prior to the engineering and upscaling processes themselves, but their proposed structures are quite distinct from what’s currently on offer
https://newlean.org/why | Why we need privacy-sensitive, and even secrecy-positive, software discovery environments to improve the accuracy of software and hardware development
https://gb2earth.com/blog/three | The 3Rs of agnostic, and therefore much more relevant, software and hardware consulting