ah! the relations between user and tool are manifold and very intricate (even for a tool like a hammer, simply hammering a nail, simultaneously building houses, giving rise to sedentary communities, road paving between those settlements and all kinds of social customs regarding living in a house that the hammer made possible...). i don't think that the "tool as product" and the "producing tool" can be separated. naming the tool in these two different ways merely points to different ways of seeing the various processes that surround a certain tool.

... it is my firm belief [...] that a tool is neutral "an sich." it is only when the tool is used to further a certain political agenda that we can start to speak about it being _used_ democratically or not. however, the political context in which a tool is being used can certainly start to define a tool and thus when one uses this tool it produces a certain politicized effect in us. mind you! this is because we have learned what this tool is, how it ought to be used etc, in a political context. "ought to" is a strong cultural politic, whether we link it to nation-state-politics or not. (1)

i haven't thought this through sufficiently yet, but i might have to take back my earlier statement that a tool is neutral an sich. the rationale would be that every tool has a certain purpose, a certain use and this purpose and the way the tool facilitates it reflect the cultural/political ontology of the tool. the tool is already political simply by being a tool and being crafted by humans. (2)

An alternative 'subjective' perspective would define a 'tool' according to need, not outcome. That a hammer drives nails is not as significant as that somebody needed to drive a nail and cooked up something to do the job, which tool is called a hammer. By the same token, somebody needed to fasten two sticks together, and invented the tool we call a nail, and people who needed community built their houses close to their neighbors'. And if high density populations then discover they need to deal with other problems, they will need to address them, but the point remains, the need comes first: there is no 'ontological' domain of Tooldom. Rather, along this spectrum of development from two-sticks-together to Ministries-of-Transportation, there are only needs and 'met needs'; 'tool' is merely a label (i.e. conceptual tool) for that-which-meets-the-need.

Yet there is a further issue here. The thing that meets our need is not usually just found by the wayside: a thorn might hold two small sticks together, and a rock might drive a nail, but one doesnt call them tools. Why not? Or, at the other end of the spectrum, one who discovers an abandoned nail 'needs' footwear, as those living in high density areas need to resist endemic disease. Why don't we call shoe leather and a strong constitution 'tools'? These questions pertain to a 'social custom' of labelling the what we needed to meet an 'effect' and all other consequences of meeting a need, 'accidents' or 'side-effects.' A rock 'happens' to be adequate; the nail happens to be in the wrong place; ones neighbors happen to be sickly. That is to say, custom imbues a tool with durability or persistence: a hammer drives nails, plural; a healthy person resists not just one disease vector, but many over time.

Now, one consequence (that is, side effect) of having durable 'goods' of this sort is that they are (again, usually) manufactured -- which is to say, they are themselves a product of another chain of needs being met. One needs to smelt the ore and forge the iron hammerhead; to raise the cow and to tan its hide to make shoes; to cultivate (at the very least) a balanced diet to stay healthy. What, by social custom, we call civilization is, at its roots, simply the coordination of these multiple lines of production, aimed not just at meeting the 'simple' needs of the hour, but the needs for tools by which the needs of the hour can be met. And, as yet, it has not been demonstrated that civilization is 'sustainable'; still there are 'side effects' for which tools have not been found, and which, as the totality of human life on this earth grows ever more dense, impinge more and more on the simple needs for fresh air, clean water, and stable accomodation.

Up a creek?

The remedy for this conceptual deficiency, of course, is not to be found by looking at the top end of the spectrum for 'political' strategies that ought to be used; rather, that is the problem now to be solved; the condition we need to overcome. Is there a tool to meet this need? I believe there is.

Revenuers

A tall order, you say? Not at all; as may be inferred from the given examples, there is one aspect of every social order, every pattern of culture, which meets these conditions: in a word, mind, tho we usually refer to its expression, language.

Note that this is not to say that mind is an 'infinite resource'; indeed, the greatest threat to 'sustainability' is the deleterious effect of 'apriorism.' Certainly, language can be used to call things (including tools) by name -- but that this minor application has come to stand for the whole exercise of mentation (which we usually call communication) itself speaks volumes about the need for remediation. Are social acculturation, communal solidarity, individuation, conceptualization, etc. merely side effects to be ignored (that is, 'dealt with' by a 'political' agency) -- or is there another way to see -- and enact -- them?

'Each one, teach one' was a good precept in the days when means of expression were physically limited; now that the distinctions between local and global, between thought and action, are moot, isnt 'each one, use one' more appropriately modern? As we come to see that it is the extravagance of social custom (going 'above and beyond' the path of sufficiency) to which most resources have gone, isnt the necessary and sufficient remedy simply to realign our (what are we now, six billion?) minds to feed, clothe, house and govern themselves? What more do we need? (Do I hear someone say dreams?)

The topology of power

The 'need of the hour' can not be merely (magically!) to dispense with the frills of civilization, like zippers and plumbing and digital telly-phony, but to understand how superfluity works, comprehend that it is intrinsic to the structure of consciousness; or to say it a different way, that what appears to us as a 'structure' is the reflection of higher-dimensionality in lower-dimensional 'space'; or again, that life is a scramble, always pulling down the walls to firm up the platform underfoot, never able to wake up and accept that its being pulled on that causes walls to grow, like tomato vines.

The closest we can come is to deliberately reduce two dimensions at once: skip the reification, and go directly to the map. The magic of mind/ language is that one can talk about language/ mind (such as this sentence) because it provides its own reification, if one thinks about it in the way that one thinks. And the way one does not think, for a start, is by apriori naming. Apriorism is, after all an a posteriori construction: looking back at the wrack of destruction, we see that a path can be drawn as if we had known to go from point A to point B. (See Samvak on [Narcissus]) Hey presto! We really did that, because we really did know, because -- see? -- all the evidence lets us 'deduce' that we would have known at that time, even if we werent 'able' to 'put it into words' until later, like now, when (using these disjoint words) we can make utter mush of what we think. Double talk, thats customarily called: non-sense.

But it's seductive, what one can get away with. In the land of the blind who trust in integrity, the disjunctive ones have one eye, and (naturally!) they keep it on the main chance. That is (not trusting for a minute that people are really blind), they deepen the darkness, and stage theatrical shows (showing that they know how to deal with sighted people, if they did have to) and proclaim: The game is the thing. (Where is the map? The glory of reification is that it disappears, leaving only clues to 'the answers,' often known as 'secrets of success'.) When no one pays attention, its enough that those who can pay in some other coin appear to be attentive and 'on top of things.' That this 'sends a message' to others whose interests lie in the appearance of truth and justice, or conversely, the appearance of mistruth and injustice -- either way, there is money to be made, and that's what counts, isnt it, in this living shell?

Notes

The concept of reflection in terms of hierarchical layers should be replaced with 'reflection' as an orthogonal dimension of the complex construct. The operationalization of reflection as a recursion of the selection allows us epistemologically to formalize 'reflexivity' without ontologically reifying it as a substantively higher-level. Thus, this approach enables us thoroughly to solve the so-called reflexivity problem in post-modern sociology, i.e. the problem that one cannot claim priority for a specific reflection concerning reflexive actions. If reflection is a contingent property of the communication, it is possible to ask for the quality of a reflection.

Despite our irresistible habit of making and referring to statements in the present tense in almost all cases, the mode of the present tense provides itself with a queer temporal character. In particular, any affirmative and definite statement in the present tense claims its positiveness at any present moment, thus rendering itself to be atemporal and ahistorical. This grammatical stipulation in turn comes to affect our serious endeavor for describing dynamics of whatever sort, since the description has to observe the grammatical tense in any case. [T]he dynamics thus described are already under the influence of the grammatical tense that the description is to succumb to...
    Dynamics is not a consequence of time. Rather, time is a linguistic consequence of the dynamics to be described in the present tense in the manner being consistent with its description in the present progressive tense. Kantian-Newtonian time is simply an extreme case enabling a dynamics in the present tense to be equivalent to a similar one in the present progressive. What still remains is the possibility of those dynamics that time as an associative factor between the present and the present progressive tense may vary its implication in progress. This possibility is already latent in dynamics in the present progressive tense alone in the sense that it can be multi-agential....

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