"I was sick for a long time, and that made me think about factories." —Jean-Luc Godard, in Numéro Deux (1975)

Hermes, the god of interpretation, gave his name to this magazine via those thinkers who've used "philosophical hermeneutics" to challenge our collective habit of taking received notions of self, truth, morality, and other phenomena—our social arrangements, our basic expectations—for granted. The "heady philosophy" of our subtitle is the kind that challenges prejudices masquerading as common sense. Lately, we've found the received wisdom surrounding the subjects of anorexia (as in "Calista Flockhart, Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Teri Hatcher, Tori Spelling, Helen Hunt, Celine Dion, ad—as it were—nauseam, must really want to be thin") and technology (as in "Only a reactionary Neo-Luddite could possibly believe that the 'Information Revolution' is anything less than inevitable") particularly infuriating. Which is why you're holding an issue of Hermenaut with not one, but two themes.

Here at Hermenaut HQ the editorial decision-making process operates strictly on the basis of personal obsession; we never stop to wonder what anyone else thinks. So when we sent out the call for submissions to the "Anorexia/Technology" issue, we suspected we'd be deluged with essays on food fetishism, the erotics of self-discipline, and the politics and poetics of willful starvation—and in this we were not disappointed. But we also never doubted for a moment that the editors@Hermenaut.com in-box would soon be jammed with close readings of the ongoing communications technology "revolution." After all, we writers and artists are supposed to be particularly threatened by new technologies: Tolstoy, for example, refused to use the Dictaphone because he was afraid he'd find it "too dreadfully exciting"—we know exactly what he means. This latter type of article, however, failed, for the most part, to materialize. Readers, it is at these moments of crisis, which happen at least once a quarter around here, that the entire Hermenaut project is put to the test. Do we bow to the will of the public, or not? As always, the answer came back "not." I was informed by the Hermenaut staff that I'd just have to write about technology myself. So here goes.

Not long ago, I quit a lucrative and high-profile job at one of those ultra-capitalized Web-based start-up companies you're always hearing about. I decided that I needed a change when I almost killed myself on the highway one morning trying to hotsync my Palm Pilot with the dash-mounted laptop while simultaneously "fertilizing" my virtual Chia Pet, Harry. (Don't worry: Although he was a bit shaken, Harry survived.) As I hung there, upside-down, waiting for the Jaws of Life to set me free, I found that I suddenly craved freedom from wearable disposable computers, digital mini-walkie-talkie phones, two-way pagers, personalized "start pages"—from any and every device, in other words, that served only to exacerbate the worst qualities of my own monkey-mind. At that moment I was transformed, or so I believed at the time, into that most ludicrous of contemporary creatures: a Neo-Luddite.

Like others of my ilk, I became paranoid: Technology fills the world with itself, I suddenly realized. It's like a virus that way. I also began to feel physically nauseated by the thought of what Jean Baudrillard calls our current "society of excrescence." In "The Anorexic Ruins," an essay from several years ago, Baudrillard insisted that even if we manage to ignore 99 percent of all the information and products out there, we are still "electrocuted" by what remains. And in "Waiting for the Year 2000," published this past spring, he suggests that, thanks to late-20th-century technology, all human and social functions have become "extreme," literally grown beyond their own ends. "Because of the intervention of numerical, cybernetic, and virtual technologies... [things] can no longer end, and they fall into the abyss of the endless (endless history, endless politics, endless economic crisis). ... Everything can be extended ad infinitum. We can no longer stop the process." Unlike some people out there, I know that M. Baudrillard is a theorist, not a prophet, but I find I can relate to his apocalyptic vision of an apocalypse that will never happen, or that has already happened. The visceral feeling of too-muchness which he describes is with me every day now.

Perhaps we do not literally live in a world grown obese through technological outgrowth—but it sure feels like it sometimes. Thanks to the octopoidal spread of fiber optic cables (capable of transmitting about a million times more information than copper wires can), the almost complete interconnection of the world's computers—i.e. the "information society"—is upon us. Besides changing the way we communicate, the way we do business, and the way we spend our days, the sudden ubiquity of directly accessible data sources has upped our daily information flow from a trickle to a rushing torrent. Now, we "knowledge workers" want to be filled with this substance... but we quickly become over-full, and are disgusted with ourselves. We soon long to stop receiving faxes, e-mails, and phone calls, yet we don't dare unplug for fear of becoming non-entities. Eventually even the most hotwired among us become aware of a hidden longing to "do something" about "technology." But the imperative "do something" must always be examined for received notions and prejudices, right? What, in fact, is the best way to think and talk about technology?

"The hallucinatory utopia of communication technologies... has crept up over the years, disguised in the glad rags of ideologies of progress." —Paul Virilio, "The Shrinking Effect" (1993).

To be strictly accurate, I first encountered what I think of as the "technology question" back in 1994, the year I began working at an "alternative press" magazine which had long published marginalized would-be Thoreauvians and '60s hold-outs like Jerry (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) Mander, Bill (The End of Nature) McKibben, Neil (Technopoly) Postman, Wendell (The Unsettling of America) Berry, Theodore (The Cult of Information) Roszak, and Kirkpatrick (Rebels Against the Future) Sale. These and other social critics had adopted, by the time I arrived on the scene, the pejorative term "Neo-Luddite"—which used to mean, to conservative and progressive social critics alike, a "hopelessly romantic machinoclast"—as a badge of honor, indicating their principled stance against technological "progress."

Before I could even begin to appreciate what these thinkers were saying, however, everything suddenly changed. The World Wide Web, previously the exclusive haunt of scientists and Deadheads, became a mainstream medium. Wired started making publishing history, thanks to its devotion to the personal computing "revolution." Early in '95, then, the magazine I worked for ran a cover story on "100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life," in which stalwart Neo-Luddites like Berry, Postman, Sale, and Roszak were forced to jostle for elbow room with Wired's "digerati": John Perry Barlow, Danny Hillis, Mitchell Kapor, even Rand and Robyn Miller, the creators of the addictive CD-ROM game Myst. Then, at a public event the magazine sponsored in Manhattan, Sale pulverized a personal computer with a sledgehammer, and Postman barked that "we have transformed information into a form of garbage, and ourselves into garbage collectors." The peculiarly '90s version of the century-old technophile vs. Neo-Luddite debate was off and running.

In a Harper's forum shortly after that event, Neo-Luddites Sven (The Gutenberg Elegies) Birkerts and Mark (Cyberspace and the Hi-Tech Assault on Reality) Slouka expressed their fear that the advent of the Internet was a signal of the disappearance of the "autonomous, bounded 'I'." Barlow, and Wired's editor Kevin Kelly, replied that the idea of an 'I' which isn't always already fragmented is naïve. The Neo-Luddites worried that the Internet warps its users' sense of time and space; the technophiles replied that old-fashioned ideas of time and space (not to mention race and class) just hold us back from that ecstatic self-fulfillment which is the birthright of every American. The Neo-Luddites said they hated the thought of knowledge-as-decontextualized-information-allowed-to-recombine-in-previously-unknown-configurations; the technophiles just said, "Well, yeah, of course that's a good thing!" The Neo-Luddites argued that online "community" is just a pathetic, mediated ersatz of human exchange; the technophiles came back with, "Why can't we have both kinds of community?" I'd been rooting for the Neo-Luddites, so I was troubled at how easily the digerati had shut them down. Something, it seemed to me, must be wrong with the very terms of the debate itself.

That's when I discovered "The Question Concerning Technology," a late essay by Martin Heidegger (whose brief attraction to Nazism, it's important to remember, was motivated not out of anti-Semitism, but by his distaste for highly "technologized" mass societies like the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.). Writing in 1954, Heidegger seemed to be speaking directly to my own set of questions by insisting, rather mysteriously, that "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological." That is to say, the artifactual component of technology—from steam engines to software—is the most insignificant and innocent part of a complex social and institutional matrix which includes corporations, banks, and public utilities. Technology is, for Heidegger, fundamentally a relationship between people—and to think of it as anything else is only to engender mystification, passivity, and fatalism. The only thing worse than "a stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology," he concludes, is "to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil." This, it seemed to me, summed up most of what was passing for the debate over communication technologies.

An article on Wired in The Baffler right around then ("The Killer App," by Keith White, The Baffler #6) directly addressed this larger, Heideggerian definition of technology. White skewered Wired for being "an aggressive apologist for the new Information Capitalism," the "Great Rationalizer of the new technology." The media-hyped drive to get us all online, White pointed out, is powered not by inevitable historical forces but by entirely evitable business interests. It became clear to me then that, like those 18th-century "Mechanical Societies" which provided those who stood to profit by increased production and the creation of new markets with a pseudo-religious doctrine of technical progress, the digerati cannot be trusted to speak with anything but a forked tongue. The idea that new technology will bring universal wealth, enhanced freedom, revitalized politics, satisfying community, and personal fulfillment is a promise we've heard many times before in history. Will "being digital" offer us ecstatic self-fulfillment through the ability to disburden ourselves of outmoded illusions like place, time, and appearance? Of course not. All it will really offer us is new gadgets, what Thoreau called "pretty toys"—nothing but improved means to unimproved ends [see "Disintermediated!" by Chris Fujiwara, this issue; and "The Thin Machine" by David Rothenberg, this issue].

Exposing the machinations of the digerati may be excellent social and cultural criticism, but it ain't philosophy: It doesn't tell us what "technology" is or what we should "do about it." That's why I turned next to social philosopher Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization (1934). Written in the grand style of the old-school public intellectual, Mumford's book offers an accessible world history of technology, and uses that over-arching perspective to shed light on the Neo-Luddite vs. technophile debate of his own time (which was focused on workplace automation and the increasing use of the telephone and radio). Most of us, in debates over whether or not technology is "good" or "bad," are referring to artifacts, things, from toaster ovens to corporate intranets; an endlessly evolving mass of tools, instruments, machines; the means and methods used to help people travel, communicate, produce, calculate; the practical implementations of human intelligence; McLuhan's "extensions of man." Mumford was, I believe, one of the first to argue that "technology" is not a thing, but a combination of artifacts ("technologies," even) with activities, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus, physical instruments of technology must be viewed as only one aspect of a larger sociotechnical complex—Mumford calls this previously unnamed phenomenon "technics"—which "promises well or ill as the social groups that exploit it promise well or ill."

Against the Neo-Luddites of his own time, Mumford notes that automatic machines don't make men "mechanized" or "regimented"; men had been mechanized by the builders of the pyramids, for example, long before mechanical automation happened, and monastic regularity is even stricter than the factory time-clock. What is new, Mumford argued, is not mechanization and regimentation but the fact that these functions have come to dominate every aspect of our existence, the fact that we Westerners have adapted our whole mode of life to the relentless pace and seemingly infinite capacities of the automatic machine. To Mumford, automatic machines are the result, not the cause, of our inner capitulation to... it would be left to sociologist Jacques Ellul, writing a generation later (La Technique, 1954), to finish this thought: technique. By this term, Ellul means any complex of standardized means, any deliberate application of rationalized behavior whose goal is attaining a predetermined result. The automatic machine is certainly the first and most obvious example of technique, but it's not the origin of what Ellul calls the "technical problem."

Technique in its proper place is fine, writes Ellul; the problem is that "technique has taken over all of man's activities, not just his productive activity." "Technicians" (what we now call "technocrats") control every sphere of human activity; political economists, for example, whose mission it is to question the morality of various economic activities, have been everywhere supplanted by economists who just figure out how to make things work. The "end of ideology" in politics has come to mean the end of ideals, and the successful politician today is one who simply gets services delivered efficiently [see "Whatever Works, Sucks" by Joshua Glenn, this issue]. In a civilization dominated by technique, means are continually "improved" while ends go unexamined: "Technical Man," laments Ellul, is fascinated by results and results alone. Neo-Marxists would come to call the reign of technique "instrumental rationality," the blind pursuit of means to further means, with ends forgotten. Technology theorist Rosalind Williams, writing in the journal Social Research (Fall, 1997), summarizes this criticism: "There is a zeal that lets nothing stand in the way of ever-greater efficiency in the production of more and more goods, and all this for the sake of ever-greater profits, and in total disregard of the costs to workers or to nature, while all higher purposes recede, dwarfed by the technological process." Ultimately, ends are transformed into means and means into ends, and everything and everyone is transformed into an efficient machine [see "Time for Teletubbies!" by Greg Rowland, this issue].

Having gotten "technics" and "technologies" and "technique" straightened out, it finally became clear to me that any debate about technology has to begin not with discussion about the various technologies in our lives, but with a discussion about our ideals. Although people would much rather debate the "effects" of new technologies than disagree publicly about the nature of the Good Life, this is precisely what needs to happen. How do we want to live? Once we've answered this, we can address what Mumford calls the "real question": How far does this or that "technology" further the ideal ends of life? If our life-values include material conquest, wealth, and power, then Ellulian "technique" is all good; wealth and power are the by-products—which accrue to someone, though probably not you, dear reader—of the process by which end-free means "improve" themselves. But if our life-values revolve around, say, culture and self-expression, then technique must be balanced with spontaneous and intuitive action, following which (says Mumford) "the machine... will fall back into its proper place: our servant, not our tyrant." This, by the way, was the conclusion independently arrived at, around the same time Mumford was writing, by this issue's Hermenaut: Simone Weil [see "Hermenaut of the Month"]. Which brings us to the anorexia part of this issue.

"Disgust in all its forms is one of the most precious trials sent to man as a ladder by which to rise. I have a very large share of this favor."—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Because of her lifelong obsession with purity, Weil has been described, by contemporaries like T.S. Eliot, as a kind of saint. Although she starved herself to death at the age of 34, Weil had none of the primary symptoms of clinical anorexia—she didn't weigh herself excessively, hoard food, avoid eating in public, or appear to suffer from any significant disturbance in her body-shape perception [see "Interview with an Anorexic" by Lisa Carver, this issue]. It seems to me, then, that Weil was what historian Rudolph Bell calls a "holy anorexic," someone whose refusal to eat has nothing to do with body shape and everything to do with purity. Like Catherine of Siena, whom Bell analyzes, Weil practiced various austerities: She rejected sexuality, wore rough clothes, slept on hard surfaces, and restricted her diet whenever she could to bread, water, and raw vegetables [see "Convent Erotica" by Chris Fujiwara, this issue]. In this, Weil may have been a victim of what feminist literary critic Leslie Heywood calls the "anorexic logic" of the Western philosophical, religious, and literary tradition: To Weil, her body may have seemed the source of worldly corruption, and the antithesis of philosophical detachment [see "Confessions of an Anorexic Wannabe" by Michelle Chihara, this issue].

The only thing more fascinating to Weil than the symbolism of eating was the problem of automatic machinery in the workplace, and technological "progress" in general. I hope it doesn't seem callous to those who actually suffer from this disorder to suggest that anorexia is a useful concept for thinking, not about technology itself, but about how we think about and react to the technologies in our daily lives. Anorexics suffer from feelings of ineffectiveness (think of how you feel when your browser crashes again); from a strong need to control their environment coupled with limited social spontaneity (unless you count Multi-User Dungeons or whatever as a form of social spontaneity); and above all from a feeling that their life is not theirs to control—hello, Neo-Luddites!

But, of course, most of our lives are out of control. We enjoy the freedom to be, do, and have almost anything we want, but we lack "freedom from": freedom from being advertised to incessantly [see "Letter from London" by Matthew De Abaitua, this issue], freedom from direct mail solicitations and telephone sales calls, freedom from too many TV channels and breakfast cereals, freedom from intimate knowledge of the President's sex life, freedom from distraction and overchoice. According to Hilde (The Golden Cage) Bruch, the pioneer authority on anorexia, "Anorexics struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that their parents, or the world around them, has to offer... The main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness." In other words anorexics, typically privileged young white women who enjoy all the "freedom to" in the world, may long for freedom from freedom itself [see "Fatty Fiction" by Lynn Peril, this issue; and "Anorexic Outfitters" by Pauline Wolstencroft, this issue].

This sort of attitude towards what passes for freedom finds its most direct expression in "Industrial Society and Its Future," the manifesto of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. A true ascetic, who lived in an unheated shack in the woods, Kaczynski wasn't just talking about freedom from distraction—for him, the free market, free press, and every other so-called freedom we enjoy are simply "freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual." He writes that "industrial-technological society" constricts every one of our true freedoms ("the power to control the circumstances of one's own life"), leaving us nothing but "the freedom to consume." Identity, competence, effectiveness—these are the Thoreauvian values the Unabomber sought to publicize by killing people. When, for whatever reason, these human impulses are (or just seem to be) thwarted, we seem to arrive at some form of anorexia [see "Fun With Richard & Karen" by John Marr, this issue].

The most recent widespread manifestation of Neo-Luddism is our collective emotion of rage, frustration, or just exhaustion at the thought of all that information we're expected to... well, ingest, nowadays. Theodore Roszak's The Cult of Information, for example, argues that we're being endlessly "force-fed" data, to the point where we begin to compare our minds unfavorably to computers [see "Suffragist City" by Dara Moskowitz, this issue]. David Shenk's book Data Smog makes the dieting/info glut connection manifest: Just as rich people paradoxically tend to be thinner than poor people (because they eat better, are more health-conscious, and have the leisure time to worry about their weight), he notes, the more media- and tech-savvy you are, the more likely you are to have the willingness and the tools to be an info-ascetic [see "Thin Code" by Scot Hacker, this issue].

Anorexia is not, then, as the Greek word suggests, a lack of appetite, but rather a distorted and implacable attitude toward eating [see "The Juice on Dick Gregory" by Dan Reines, this issue; and "Extreme Dieting" by Mark Frauenfelder, this issue]: I suggest that most of us have a distorted and implacable attitude toward what we mistakenly call "technology." Neo-Luddites like to argue that technologies are never neutral, that TV inherently controls social and political thought, breaks down family communication, shortens our attention span, and mediates our reality; that computers inherently invade our privacy (by making mega-databases possible, for example) and facilitate social centralization. For Heidegger, modern technologies are not the problem: The will to mastery is. One could say the same thing about anorexics; that their pathetic attempts at self-mastery only end up obliterat-ing the self [see "Half Karen" by A.S. Hamrah, this issue]. We Neo-Luddites want to get technology under control, we're super-privileged and super-disgusted—we're techno-anorexics: Remember, you heard it here first.

In search of a non-distorted attitude toward the new information and communication technologies in my life, technologies which were indeed making me as unhappy as they were helping me to be more efficient, in the spring of '95 I attended something called The Second Neo-Luddite Congress. At this event, which took place at a Quaker meeting house in Barnesville, Ohio, I was overjoyed to discover an ally in my own attempt to address the Technology Question in a manner that was more Heidegger and Mumford, less Birkerts and Barlow. Scott Savage, the "plain" Quaker who'd organized the Congress, had convened representatives of the most laughably technophobic subcultures—survivalists, self-helpers, back-to-the-landers, rawfoodists, tree-spikers, deep ecologists, pagan bioregionalists—in order to teach them to stop asking "Technology: Changing The Way We Live For The Worse, Or For The Better?" Instead, he (and other plain folk present) suggested, let's ask "Technology how?" "Technology why?" "Technology when?" "Technology with what history, and to what end?" I have no idea if the ideas expressed at this event helped anybody present other than myself begin to see a solution to the problem of new technologies, but the whole scene, silly as it was in many ways, affected me deeply.

Like anorexics, who fixate on the means of bodily denial ("How many peas per serving is too many?") without ever allowing themselves to consider their desired end ("Just how thin is thin enough?"), we don't ask ourselves what we want our lives to be like before we slap the "Kill Your TV" sticker on the Bronco. Until we can agree upon standards by which to judge new technologies, Neo-Luddites and technophiles can go around and around arguing the relative merits and demerits of cyberspace and "real life" without ever getting anywhere. The Amish belief that technology is only bad when it intrudes upon one's home life (which leads to the spectacle of rollerblading patriarchs, and a pay phone on every corner, in their communities), may not work for all of us, of course. All I'm trying to suggest is that the "technology question" is not just about machines and "their effect"—whether positive or negative—on mankind: That's a dead end.

What to do? Heidegger's essay on technology offers one way out. Writing after the war, the previously activist philosopher had come to believe that human willpower cannot oppose the technological "enframing" of the world, in which everything and everyone is mobilized for the purpose of greater efficiency—precisely the state of affairs the Una-bomber's manifesto describes. Instead of suggesting that "it would be better to dump the whole stinking system," as Kaczynski does, Heidegger proposes that we practice a non-technological way of encountering things; that instead of perceiving the world in terms of means and ends, we keep sight of the "thereness" of reality, the mere given fact of the world. Heidegger replaces resoluteness of will with Gelassenheit—"releasement": the gentle coaxing from things of their own best potentiality.

For anorexics, Gelassenheit may mean learning to live with the reality of one's body, allowing oneself to desire without being ruled by desire—perhaps even to "desire without an object," as Weil puts it. For us techno-anorexics, I think Gelassenheit means resisting the instinct to reject or embrace new technologies reflexively. It means questioning the motives of those who'd convince us that we can't get along without the latest gadget; but it also means questioning our own use of those technologies we take for granted.