His Tools Anyone who works in software development, as I do, knows that technological determinism is a crock. In other words, the world is the way it is because of technology. Rather than having created the railroad, television or the computer to serve our needs, we are the way we are because of what these things have done to us.
Technological determinism is the reification of technology.
Because we love our tools, we assign them magical properties, which simultaneously let us off the hook for our own actions. The tool has been well analyzed as an extension of the human mind or body, but poorly analyzed as an excuse . Blaming our technology for what we are is the moral equivalent of the Twinkie defense. In writing about the Holocaust , I described how technology permitted the spreading of responsibility across members of a hierarchy, and further allowed the actor to stand remote from his act . One of the essential experiences of software development is that of trying to introduce a methodology, and more generally, a software development process, to people who do not want one.