It’s in vogue to speak of the advancement of technology as a process that is simultaneously inevitable, and yet, without apparent awareness of contradiction, something which everyone needs to be on board with in order for progress to occur. Technology “wants” things, but relies on us to do its bidding, in the words of some commentators. I ran across these thoughts from W.H. Auden earlier today:

…it is our task to discover what everything in the universe, from electrons upwards, could, to its betterment, become, but cannot without our help. This means reintroducing into science the notion of teleology, long a dirty word. For our proper relation to nonliving things, the right analogy might be that of a sculptor. Every sculptor thinks of himself, not as someone who forcibly imposes a form on stone, but as someone who reveals a form already latent in it…

We have to realize that every time we make an ugly lampstand, we are torturing helpless metal., every time we make a nuclear bomb we are corrupting the morals of a host of innocent neutrons below the age of consent.

-from A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, 1970, New York: Viking, 282.