Chuck Cosson

“Tool Without a Handle”: Tools and the Search for Meaning

In a New York Times review of Edward Tenner’s book The Efficiency Paradox, Gal Beckerman observes that a key point is not simply to watch how much time we spend using technology, but to remember that “the tools we’ve invented to improve our lives are just that, tools, to be picked up and put down. We wield them.”

Which pretty succinctly states the main point of this entire series of blog posts: that human agency matters. Or, perhaps more directly, that while we all know human agency matters, we all too frequently overlook that point. This post (on Labor Day, 2018) thus asks what is the real value of human agency? By identifying value in it, I hope to set the stage for future posts on the urgency of fostering greater awareness of it.

Discussions of privacy tend to focus on the value of privacy. This post agrees that privacy has value in practical terms, as an important moral principle, and for its contribution to human flourishing. At the same time, these observations are incomplete. Privacy, like security and transparency, involves trade-offs. Indeed, it involves trade-offs with precisely those other qualities – security and transparency in particular. Privacy, for example, protects data that would reveal fraud, lies, and other wrongdoing.