Resisting technology : self-transformation and its catalysts

Abstract

As with utopian promises, where technology contributes to the convenience and welfare of human society, technology also has the contradictory consequences of enforcing humans to conform to a biased politics often without negotiation. How do I, as an individual, challenge such unwanted enforcement? Can I meet this challenge without producing yet another coercive technology? In this thesis, I argue that technologies for transforming the self can function as emancipatory strategies against such coercive technologies, without reproducing them. My hypothesis is that these technologies for transforming the self can be achieved through strategizing and experimenting with the self. This strategizing and experimentation involve identifying and exploring the following conditions: standing on the border of both sides of ambivalence in the self-technology relationship, taking the risk of failure in this position, and expanding these conditions to multiple selves. The repetition of strategizing and experimenting with the self can generate constant self-transformations. To test/experiment this hypothesis, I design and activate performative situations for self-transformative experiences of an individual, and a group. In these situations, objects act as catalysts and structures for action and dialogue, while revealing the ambivalence in them-as technologies of coercion and freedom.