[This has not been proofread or edited really at all as I wrote it in two hour-long fervours a few days apart, so hopefully, it is not too jumbled, nonsensical, or just an annoying rant]
Martin Heidegger, in his essay The Question
Concerning Technology, argues that man is conditioned by ‘modern
technology.’ Modern technology is the peculiarly calculating, exacting,
automated, mechanistic, nature of modern life – the quest to reveal all. It
“pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces.” It is the
difference between craftsmen, artisans, or tools of old who take what they need
and live somewhat reciprocally with nature and the factories, machinery, and modern
science that grabs nature by the balls and demands that it give up the goods.
In Heideggerian language modern technology is a
way of revealing. What he means by this is that modern technology is, to
put it simply, an entirely different way of seeing things – a historical epoch
that reveals the world in its terms. Heidegger uses the example of the
Rhine. It appears first as a part of nature, something to live with, as
something to marvel and respect. But under modern technology it is revealed in
a different way. A hydroelectric plant is built on it as a way of challenging
it, it demands of the river that it be instrumental in our wants. It literally
becomes a water-power supplier instead of a river. Sure, it is still there, it
is still part of the landscape, but it is not as a river, or even really as an
object, it is there as ‘standing-reserve.’