Instruments encode the minds of their makers, so violence is not neutral technology

Evidence

An instrument in the very basic and primitive sense of a tool is therefore not a merely fortuitous physical object but, because of its architectural and epistemological composition, it becomes itself a structure of thought and action. To coin an adage, tell me what you invented and I will tell you what you are. The creation of a tool, instrument, or method therefore is never neutral, and never just a matter of need (as in the old adage “need is the mother of invention”) but “a revealing” of a structure of thought that establishes an epistemological continuum between subject and predicate, between the instrument and its maker. A gas chamber, a machine gun, an excavation machine, a drilling rig, a fighter plane, or a nuclear head embody within them structures of thought that establish an epistemological continuum with the minds of their makers. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 397 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Violence has been turned into a technique. Like all techniques, it is free from emotions and purely rational. ‘It is, in fact, entirely reasonable, if “reason” means instrumental reason, to apply American military force, B-52’s, napalm, and all the rest to “communist-dominated” Viet-Nam (clearly an “undesirable object”), as the “operator” to transform it into a “desirable object”.’ — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 287 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Technique includes mental and philosophical instruments, not just industrial science — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1261; Tools encode the structures of thought of their makers — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 397; Attention activists can weaponize inherited everyday tools nonviolently (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Tools encode the structures of thought of their makers #corroborates (0.95) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 397
• Violence becomes purely technical and instrumental when bureaucratized #complicates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 287