Abstract
Multistability—the plurality of meanings of technological artifacts—is an emancipatory phenomenon insofar as it allows the user to freely appropriate the object according to his or her interests, even against the will of the designer. The objective of this article is to show how the trend to connect physical and digital artifacts to the Internet poses a danger to the freedom that there is in multistability. By reducing the traditional separation between the artifact and the designer, the connection of the artifact to the Internet allows the designer to continually modify the software that governs or constitutes it, which involves a relative loss of power for the user to determine its meaning. This change, in favor of the designer in the correlation of power among the actors—designer, artifact, and user—from whose interplay the meaning of artifacts arises, favors concentric stabilities and hinders eccentric ones with respect to the will of the designer. Thus, we should rethink the truth value of the designer fallacy, that is, the claim that the meaning of artifacts is determined only by the designer. From a political point of view, the remote control of artifacts and their multistability is an effective pedagogical tool to educate human beings in a time in which texts, according to Sloterdijk, no longer serve this function.
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Notes
One last relevant question that arises from what has been discussed here is the one related to the governance of innovation. It is worth asking about the peculiar role that designers have in technological development. What has been said in this article sheds some light on their powerful position and on how the Internet is a tool they can use to democratize technology due to the way it reduces the separation between the context of design and the context of use. However, the governance of technological innovation is a complex issue; too much to be adequately addressed in this already very long article. The interested reader can find a good thread to draw from in Schomberg and Blok (2021).
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank his colleague and mentor Javier Bustamante for his mentioned article about of cloud computing, as it was one of the main sources that inspired this work.
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This manuscript was solely written by Manuel Carabantes López (MCL). Note that, when I write in English, I choose not use my second last name (López).
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Carabantes, M. Towards the End of the Designer Fallacy: How the Internet Empowers Designers over Users. Philos. Technol. 36, 33 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00637-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00637-4