Smart worlds and broken habits: A contextual analysis of the technological relations of post-phenomenology

Human habitual agency is utterly compatible with and easily adapted to many forms of technology. Don Ihde (1990) laid out four distinct ways we use and relate to technology, and given the advent of “smart” technologies, Peter-Paul Verbeek has more recently added several new relations. While each of these post-phenomenological relations brings important insights, a shortcoming is arguably their focus on individual artifacts rather than how these technologies shape and change the broader context of action and the orientation in a shared world that our agency depends on. This becomes particularly problematic in cases of networked devices with extensive information flows and recursive effects both within and beyond a given context. This chapter attempts to contextualize each of Ihde’s and Verbeek’s technology relations to better understand how our spaces of action are transformed by various technologies. In relation to “smart” or artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced environments, we see that interactive qualities previously only found in other agents are now embedded in the environment. The question that this raises is if the resulting disguised controls, asymmetric knowledges, hidden audiences, and context collapses are features that might pose serious risk to our agency, and particularly our ability to isolate affordances and judge what kind of behavior setting we are in. The suggestion is that habitual intentional agency relies on movement between separate affordance spaces each offering stabilities and transparencies, but that these conditions precisely are eroding in “smart worlds”.