Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

have to help them get there faster and more comfortably. Each one of us,by taking Aramis to reach our regular destinations, will contribute a bit ofreality to this transportation system.Obviously, Aramis won't find itself "up and running," ready to translatemy crosstown itineraries, unless the local officials, after many others,become excited about its prototype and decide that Aramis translates theirdeepest desires. The task of making Aramis interesting never ends. Fortechnology, there's no such thing as inertia. Here's proof: even an ordinaryuser can make Aramis less real by refusing to get into one of its cars; or,if she's a local official, by refusing to get excited about it; or, if he's amechanic or a driver, by refusing to work for it. No matter how old andpowerful, no matter how irreversible and indispensable, thus no matter howreal a transportation system may be, it can always be made a little lessreal. Today, for example, the Paris metro is on strike for the third week ina row. Millions of Parisians are learning to get along without it, by takingtheir cars or walking. A few hundred shop technicians have stopped doingtheir regular maintenance work on the system, and a few dozen engineerswho've benefited from the Aramis experiment are plotting to make the nextmetro completely automatic, entirely free of drivers and strikers, thanks tothe Meteor project. You see? These enormous hundred-year-old technologicalmonsters are no more real than the four-year-old Aramis is unreal: theyall need allies, friends, long chains of translators. There's no inertia, noirreversibility; there's no autonomy to keep them alive. Behind these threewords from the philosophy of technologies, words inspired by sheer cowardice,there is the ongoing work of coupling and uncoupling engines andcars, the work of local officials and engineers, strikers and customers.So is there never any respite? Can't the work of creating interest everbe suspended? Can't things be allowed just to go along on their own? Isn'tthere a day of rest, after all, for innovators? No: for technologies, everyday is a working day. You can forget the work of the others, but you can'tmanage if there's no one left working to maintain the technologies that areup and running. People who talk about autonomy, irreversibility, and inertiain technology are criminals-never mind the purity of their motives. Maythe ashes of Chernobyl, the dust of the Challenger, the rust of the Lorrainesteel mills fall on their heads and those of their children !SHlllY SHALlYING IN THE SEVENTIES