The Cycle of Technological Mediation Need/value → design → material/code → use → institution/market → habit/standard → new need A tool is not passive — it makes some options easier and others harder; it directs attention; it distributes power; it opens some future paths and closes others. Problem Technology is ordinarily understood as a ‘tool for getting work done’. Hammer, road, printing press, electrical grid, telephone, medical device, computer, mobile phone, sensor, artificial intelligence — all appear to be means for fulfilling human purposes. But a question arises: if technology were only a means, why would its design, standards, access, speed, maintenance, economic structure and institutional rules so deeply alter human behaviour, relationships, attention, work, politics and ethical choice? Technology is not a single object. Any device is bound up with materials, energy, knowledge, standards, training, capital, labour, repair, supply chains, law, institutions and users. A ‘mobile phone’, therefore, is not merely one device; it forms part of an extensive sociotechnical system of communication networks, electricity, software, radio spectrum, platforms, identification systems, labour and social habits. Without seeing this wider structure, the word ‘tool’ makes technology’s actual effects appear much smaller than they are. A second difficulty concerns neutrality. The instrumentalist view says that technology is neither good nor bad in itself; morality depends upon the user’s purpose. There is some truth in this, since the same tool may be used for different ends. Yet design itself makes some actions easy and others difficult; it is built around some assumed users and leaves others out; it gathers some kinds of data and not others; it makes some decisions easy to reverse and others durable. The user’s intention alone is therefore not a sufficient explanation. A third difficulty concerns technological determinism. If technology is treated as an autonomous force that drags society in an inevitable direction, human choice, politics, design, resistance and alternative arrangements disappear from view. In the opposite direction, if technology is said merely to take whatever form society wants, material limits, structural inertia, standardisation and infrastructural pressure disappear. The Parallel perspective rejects both extremes. A fourth difficulty concerns mediation. A device does not merely perform a task; it changes how the world is seen. Telescope and microscope alter the limits of vision; maps change the meaning of distance and place; clocks make time into measurable segments; cameras change the form of memory; search engines alter the order in which information is encountered. Technology mediates among perception, action and meaning. The technological question is therefore not only one of efficiency but also of the structure of experience. A fifth difficulty concerns power. A bridge, road, gate, platform, identification system, factory, healthcare system or communication network may determine who enters, who is excluded, who is watched, whose labour is made invisible and whose costs are reduced. These are political questions. To ask whether ‘artefacts can be political’ does not mean that every device is a secret conspiracy; it means that design and infrastructure can create lasting effects in the distribution of power. A sixth difficulty concerns invisible infrastructure. Technology that works properly often disappears from attention. Electricity, water supply, roads, servers, standards, script encoding, time zones and authentication become conspicuous chiefly when they fail. From the viewpoint of this ‘broken world’, maintenance, repair and care are no less important than innovation. It is easy to write the history of those who create new things; the labour that keeps old systems running often remains invisible. A seventh difficulty concerns the relation between technical efficiency and human values. Words such as ‘faster’, ‘cheaper’, ‘automated’, ‘measurable’ and ‘accurate’ sound positive, but faster for whom? Whose costs have been shifted elsewhere? Whose labour has automation changed? What has measurement left out? Efficiency is not itself the final value. Dignity, equal access, safety, privacy, environmental durability and democratic accountability are separate criteria. An eighth difficulty is future path dependence. Once a large network, standard, data architecture, road system, energy system or industrial plant has been established, alternatives may remain technically possible yet become economically and institutionally difficult. This inertia can be called lock-in. Early design choices can therefore impose burdens upon future generations. A ninth difficulty concerns accountability. In modern technological systems, outcomes are produced by many hands — designers, engineers, managers, suppliers, regulators, users, platforms and institutions. When harm occurs, it becomes easy to say that ‘no single person is responsible’. But distributed agency does not mean the disappearance of responsibility; on the contrary, it increases the need to specify accountability role by role. Core Proposition The central proposition of this chapter is that technology is not merely an external tool; it is a material-social arrangement that mediates human action, experience, institutions and values. Yet this does not make technology an independent destiny. Human design, policy, use, resistance, repair and reconstruction can alter technological directions. The defensible position is therefore a critical view of mediation between the extremes of the ‘neutral tool’ and ‘autonomous technological fate’. Five distinctions are necessary for evaluating technology. First, intention and outcome are different: a designer’s intention does not determine every effect. Second, affordance and compulsion are different: a device makes some actions easier without completely determining the user. Third, object and system are different: the effect of a single device is tied to its networks, standards and institutions. Fourth, innovation and maintenance are different: novelty is not the same as progress. Fifth, efficiency and justice are different: what is technically excellent is not necessarily ethically or politically appropriate. Parallel Philosophy will test technology against seven criteria: purpose, design, access, distribution of power, unintended consequences, repairability/reversibility, and long-term environmental and social effects. Evidence is required at all seven levels. A technology should not be accepted or rejected merely on the basis of advertising, fear, tradition or the attraction of novelty. The specific questions of digital truth, algorithmic classification and artificial intelligence are reserved for Chapters 85–89. The basic concern here is the philosophical character of technology: when does a tool become an environment, when does design become policy, and when does convenience reshape the structure of human choice? Principal Arguments First argument — means and ends influence one another. We often suppose that we first decide on a goal and then choose a tool; but when a new tool becomes available, the goal itself may change. A camera does not merely preserve memory; it can alter the habit of deciding ‘what is worth preserving’. Means are therefore not only servants of ends but participants in the formation of ends. Second argument — design structures the field of choice. A door, road, mobile application, hospital device or payment system makes some actions easy and others difficult. Such affordances are not compulsions, but they alter the distribution of practical possibilities. Philosophical evaluation cannot dismiss the effect of design merely by saying that ‘the user is free’. Third argument — standards can become invisible politics. File formats, script encodings, voltage, railway gauge, identity-card formats and thresholds of medical measurement provide uniformity and compatibility, but what is not included within a standard can be pushed to the margins. The benefits of standardisation must therefore be examined together with its possibilities of exclusion. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Fourth argument — infrastructure becomes an ethical background over time. What is an option for one generation can become a necessary condition for the next. Once motor roads, electrical grids, digital authentication or communication systems become pervasive, ordinary expectations of citizenship, education, employment and access to services may change. Fifth argument — path dependence alters the cost of alternatives. An early decision need not persist because it was technically superior; it may persist because of investment, training, network effects, law and habit. The inference ‘this is the present system, therefore it must be the best one’ is invalid. Historical contingency also shapes present structures. Sixth argument — the ethical meaning of lock-in is intergenerational. Today’s cheap technology may generate tomorrow’s costly maintenance, environmental damage or data dependence. Cost is not only purchase price; it also includes the whole life cycle, disposal, energy, training and dependency. Seventh argument — technological determinism oversimplifies history. Claims such as ‘the printing press brought democracy’, ‘the railway made the nation’ or ‘the mobile phone changed society’ compress a complex causal network into a single instrument. Technology may be an important cause, but institutions, law, markets, language, class, gender, the state and cultural responses also remain in the causal chain. Eighth argument — an extreme form of social constructivism is also inadequate. If technology is treated as entirely a matter of social meaning, material resistance disappears. A bridge’s load-bearing capacity, a drug’s chemical effects, a battery’s limits, a river’s flow and the range of a signal do not change merely through social interpretation. Objects and society set limits for one another. Ninth argument — technological mediation changes perception. Spectacles, thermometers, cameras, maps, satellite images, medical scans and navigation systems do not merely enable us to ‘see more’; they alter modes of seeing, forms of trust and the order of attention. A world received through instruments is itself an object of analysis. Tenth argument — technological mediation also changes agency. Vehicles increase speed, but also increase dependence on traffic rules, fuel, parking, insurance and infrastructure. Automation may reduce labour while changing surveillance, skill profiles and centres of decision. Alongside the question ‘what capacity increased?’ we must therefore ask ‘how did dependence change?’ Eleventh argument — Heidegger’s critique should not be read as an anti-technology slogan. His question concerns a modern technological mode of disclosure in which the world tends to be ordered as standing reserve or resource. The value of this analysis lies in showing how efficiency-centred language can encourage us to treat nature, labour and human beings merely as available resources; it should not be understood as a command to abandon every technology. Twelfth argument — Ellul’s concern about technological autonomy reveals the self-expanding tendency of modern systems, but if complete autonomy is assumed, the possibilities of politics and design are diminished. The critique is useful for identifying the dominance of technological logic; its solution is not to declare human decision impossible. Thirteenth argument — Feenberg’s critical theory of technology treats design as an arena of social struggle. Decisions presented as ‘technically necessary’ often contain values, distributions of cost, labour arrangements and assumptions about users. Where alternative designs are possible, technology can become a subject of democratic reconstruction. Fourteenth argument — Winner’s question ‘Do artefacts have politics?’ reveals a deep relation between technology and power. The caution is that not every object should be treated as an intentionally political conspiracy. Politics may reside in intention, in structural effects, or in institutional conditions required by a system. Analysis should distinguish among these three. Fifteenth argument — maintenance and repair are central to technological life. The launch of a new object is visible; repair, cleaning, updating, calibration, replacement of parts, correction of data and training remain largely invisible. A system that cannot be repaired, is disconnected from local knowledge, or lacks available spare parts can become weak in the long term despite its initial efficiency. Sixteenth argument — repair is a form of ethical care. Throwing away a broken object and buying a new one, rather than repairing and reusing the old, has different consequences for energy, labour, waste, skills and economic access. A technological culture that gives repair a second-class status under a paradigm of ‘innovation’ is itself biased. Seventeenth argument — technology does not merely replace labour; it reorganises it. Automation removes some jobs, creates some new ones, embeds some skills in machines and makes some labour invisible. The number of jobs alone is therefore not enough: the distribution of control, skill, safety, wages, pace and dignity must also be examined. Eighteenth argument — accessibility should be a fundamental criterion of technological excellence. A design that ignores diversity in vision, hearing, mobility, language, age, literacy or device capability constructs an imaginary average user and excludes many actual forms of human life. Inclusive design is not charity; it is an improvement in knowledge. Nineteenth argument — environmental effects are not external to technology. Mining, energy, water, manufacturing, transport, cooling, electronic waste and land use belong to technology’s material life cycle. The word ‘digital’ does not prove immateriality. Technological ethics should examine local benefits together with distant environmental costs. Twentieth argument — the Parallel view of technology favours reversible design where possible. Decisions capable of producing very large harms should be easy to modify, halt or confine to a testing phase. Not every technology can be fully reversed, but staged deployment, testing, protection of alternatives and public review can reduce risk. Pūrvapakṣa First pūrvapakṣa: Technology is a neutral tool; only the bad user is at fault. Reply — the user’s intention matters, but design, default options, access, surveillance, standards and institutional conditions also shape outcomes. Different designs of the same device can create different ethical risks. Second pūrvapakṣa: Technology moves at its own pace; social control is ultimately impossible. Reply — path dependence and inertia are real, but history also contains changed standards, restrictions on harmful technologies, new safety rules and alternative systems. The assumption of complete autonomy encourages political passivity. Third pūrvapakṣa: If the designer’s intention is good, the technology is good. Reply — unintended consequences, misuse, social repurposing and structural exclusion can lie outside intention. Ethical evaluation should examine intention, actual use and long- term effect together. Fourth pūrvapakṣa: Users can change everything, so the effect of design is exaggerated. Reply — repurposing is possible, but cost, permission, technical knowledge, materials and institutions constrain the user’s freedom. Affordances alter the field of options even though they do not completely determine outcomes. Fifth pūrvapakṣa: Efficiency is an objective criterion, so technical decisions should remain separate from politics. Reply — efficiency is always relative to a goal. Whose time was saved, whose cost increased, whose risk was shifted and what value fell outside measurement are political and ethical questions. Sixth pūrvapakṣa: If values are embedded in technology, then truth or engineering becomes relative. Reply — acknowledging value-ladenness does not abolish material facts. A bridge’s load-bearing capacity may be a fact; where the bridge is built, whether it includes a pedestrian path and who bears the cost are different value-laden decisions. Facts and values should be distinguished without being artificially treated as unrelated. Seventh pūrvapakṣa: Poor or developing societies need more technology, not philosophy. Reply — precisely where resources are scarce, the cost of bad design can be more damaging. Equipment that cannot be repaired, services without local-language support, incompatible parts and expensive maintenance waste resources. Philosophy of technology is not a luxury; it is a discipline of appropriate choice. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ Eighth pūrvapakṣa: Bringing Indian or Mithila traditions into modern debates on technology is irrelevant. Reply — the objection is valid if one searches for ready-made ‘precursors’ of modern theories. But questions of evidence, means and ends, non-harm, justice, labour, community, self-critique and local knowledge can cast a distinct critical light on modern technological decisions. Uttarapakṣa First response — read technology not as an object but as a network of relations. Device + user + institution + standard + energy + maintenance + environment + law together form the actual technological system. Analysis should not stop at one component. Second response — make the question ‘for whom?’ mandatory for every technological claim. Efficiency for whom, convenience for whom, security for whom, risk upon whom, whose data and whose benefit? The imagined average user can conceal real inequalities. Third response — bring counter-voices into the design stage. Excluding potential users, repair workers, disabled persons, local communities, environmental experts and affected workers from early review can make later correction expensive. Democratic participation is not a substitute for engineering knowledge; it is a complementary source of information. Fourth response — examine the life cycle. Production, use, maintenance, updating, failure, reuse and disposal should all form part of ethical evaluation. Purchase price or initial performance alone is insufficient. Fifth response — increase reversibility and protection of alternatives. Users should be able to extract their data, change standards, leave a service, repair locally and read older formats. Such arrangements reduce dependence. They are not fully possible in every domain, but they remain an important principle. Sixth response — technological literacy is not merely learning which buttons to press. Citizens need opportunities to understand basic questions of data, risk, source, maintenance, ownership, standards and alternatives. Critical technological literacy increases prudent use rather than fear. Seventh response — institutionalise a culture of repair alongside innovation. Budgets, prestige and education should not focus only on ‘making something new’; longevity, spare parts, documentation, local skill and reuse should also count as indicators of technological excellence. Eighth response — the final criteria are human dignity and corrigibility. If technology treats people merely as data points, resources or costs, its efficiency is incomplete. And if new evidence reveals harm, institutions must retain the capacity to change the design. Indian Dialogue Indian intellectual history does not contain a single ready-made discipline corresponding to the modern ‘philosophy of technology’. It would therefore be misleading to turn terms such as yantra, śilpa, karaṇa, upāya or sādhana directly into equivalents of the modern field. A fruitful dialogue must occur at the level of problems: relations between means and ends, causation, harm, justice, community, labour and responsibility for knowledge. The Nyāya tradition’s analysis of causation offers a limited but useful methodological inspiration here. Instead of declaring a single cause for an outcome, the habit of examining material, instrument, auxiliary conditions, absences and inhibitors can assist a multicausal account of technological effects. But one must never claim that ‘Nyāya already contained modern systems engineering’. Reflection on pramāṇa is also relevant. Technology companies, states, experts, users and affected communities provide different kinds of evidence. Demonstrations, statistical outcomes, longitudinal studies, local experience, failure reports and independent replication carry different evidential weights. Neither ‘the expert said so’ nor ‘users like it’ is by itself final evidence. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj asks severe questions about modern industrial civilisation, machine-centred progress and the expansion of desire. It should not be simplified into the slogan ‘all machines are bad’. The useful question is whether technological progress strengthens self-rule, restraint, community and the dignity of labour, or instead expands consumption, dependency and centralisation. An Ambedkarite perspective of social justice opens another set of questions. Technology may have an emancipatory aspect when it breaks hereditary divisions of labour, social exclusion or barriers to services; if digital or physical systems reproduce older inequalities in new forms, calling them ‘modern’ does not establish justice. In this dialogue, technology must be assessed through its actual effects on caste, class, gender, disability and regional access. Modern technological policy cannot simply be derived from Buddhist or Jain traditions of non-violence, but their extension of concern about harm remains useful. Does a local convenience increase distant mining, unsafe labour, harm to animals, water use or waste? Such traditions can encourage us to trace the ethical boundary of technology beyond the site of use. The conclusion of the Indian dialogue is therefore not syncretic. Classical philosophy is not identical with modern technological theory; Gandhi is not equivalent to hostility to technology; social justice is not equivalent to automatic acceptance of technology. The Parallel method preserves the historical specificity of each source while making modern technological claims more open to questioning. Mithila’s Parallel Perspective Mithila is not merely a ‘backward’ or ‘traditional’ counterpart to technology; it is a testing ground for modern sociotechnical transition. In fields such as floods, rivers, roads, agriculture, migration, communication, language, education and digital archiving, the same technology can produce different outcomes because of different geographies and social structures. Flood-control provides a clear example of the technology–society relation. Dams, embankments, drainage, warning systems and satellite measurements each have their own technical logic; yet without settlement patterns, land use, maintenance, administration, local memory and emergency access, structure alone is insufficient. Here technology is not an object but a long- term arrangement. The effect of digital design is especially clear in linguistic-cultural domains such as Maithili and Tirhuta. If fonts, encoding, search, text recognition, keyboards or archival systems do not properly support a script or language, material may continue to exist and yet become digitally invisible. Language technology is therefore also a question of cultural access. Digital archives, e-journals, audio collections, video, dictionaries and research portals can greatly expand access to knowledge, but file formats, long-term preservation, backup, searchability, accessibility and link persistence become fundamental ethical questions of design. ‘It is online’ does not mean ‘it is safe and accessible’. Communication technology reduces distance for Mithila’s migrant communities, but it can also reorganise local institutions, family expectations, language use and economic dependence in new ways. Its effect should therefore be understood not through the binary ‘tradition survived’ versus ‘tradition disappeared’, but through close study of changing relationships. Local repair skills have special importance for Parallel Philosophy. A technology that cannot function without a metropolitan service centre has a different usefulness in rural regions. Spare parts, documentation, training, language support and local adaptation are elements of technological justice. Seven Levels of Technology Assessment Clarify the purpose → examine design choices → identify access/exclusion → map the distribution of power → measure life-cycle harm → test repairability/reversibility → re-examine long-term social and environmental outcomes Novelty is not automatically progress — a technology whose design closes the path to correcting its own errors has incomplete efficiency. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Contemporary Applications In health technology, the question is not only whether a decision-support system will replace a clinician. The central questions are: which signals does it measure, on which patient groups was it developed, how far may clinicians override its recommendation, can reasons be explained to the patient, and how is responsibility divided when an error occurs? Technological mediation can alter the ethical structure of the clinical relationship. In education technology, automated practice, video, distance learning and digital books can expand access, but technology should not determine the purpose of education. A system that measures only the speed of answers may undervalue discussion, imagination, local language, collaboration or deep reading. Educational design must therefore ask: ‘What is being measured?’ In disaster-warning systems, sensors, weather measurements, communication networks and mobile alerts are important, but final safety depends on local language, trust, evacuation routes, electricity, disability access and administrative response. Sending a warning is not the same as making a warning effective. A technological system should be tested against the social conditions at its last mile. In agricultural technology, soil sensors, weather information, mechanisation and remote-sensing imagery may increase productivity. But cost, repair, data ownership, crop diversity, access for small farmers and the place of local agricultural knowledge must be separately examined. A single measure of efficiency cannot capture the realities of every farm. In energy transition, solar, wind, storage and smart grids offer opportunities for cleaner energy, but questions of land, minerals, grids, battery waste, local acceptance and cost distribution remain. ‘Green’ technology does not mean impact-free technology; comparative harms over the life cycle must be examined. In public digital services, simple authentication can increase convenience, but if the failure of one identity mechanism cuts citizens off from services, technical convenience becomes a gatekeeper of rights. Alternatives, human assistance, error correction and appeal pathways are necessary parts of technological justice. In language technology, text recognition, speech recognition, translation and search can increase access to knowledge in smaller languages. But sparse training material may increase errors; dominant standard varieties may receive greater representation while dialects, older scripts or regional forms are marginalised. Building language resources therefore requires source diversity, human review and systematic error logging. In urban technology, traffic sensors, cameras, automated signals and smart meters can improve administrative efficiency. But civic life should not be reduced to data flows. Public space, privacy, pedestrian access, poor settlements, older and disabled people, and informal labour must be represented in design. AI-assisted systems provide a new example of this chapter’s basic principle. If a system answers quickly, speed is a benefit; but sources, errors, privacy, dependence, human skill and accountability are separate questions. Intelligence, consciousness and algorithmic power will be treated in detail in Chapters 86–89; here it is enough to establish that artificial intelligence too cannot be treated as a neutral tool and thereby automatically exempted from ethical scrutiny. Chapter Conclusion Technology is not merely a tool because its effects begin long before and continue long after the moment of use. Design determines which options are available; standards create compatibility and exclusion; infrastructure changes habits and institutions; maintenance determines longevity; environmental life cycles generate distant costs. Yet technology is not itself fate: design, policy, resistance, repair, alternatives and democratic review can change its direction. For this reason, Parallel Philosophy is neither anti-technology nor technology-worshipping. Its questions are: what does this technology enable, what does it make difficult, whose power does it increase, whose risk does it increase, whose language/body/place does it treat as the norm, and does a path of correction remain open when error becomes visible? Technological prudence does not necessarily mean slowing innovation; it means placing innovation under the discipline of evidence, dignity, justice and self-critique. Parallel maxim of Chapter 84: ‘A tool remains in the hand, but the form of the tool also changes what the hand can do; therefore examine technology not only through its use, but through its design, system and long-term relationships.’