Steuern und Regeln

In the traditional philosophy of technology, the two main modus operandi found in conventional technology are categorised and described under the terms ‘control’ and ‘regulation’ as a way of differentiating between them. This occurs for two reasons: on the one hand, in order to specify the difference between the forms of technology that have been developed by since the Neolithic revolution and the ‘accidental’ technology (as discussed by Ortega y Gasset) of higher species or prehistoric man, and on the other to reveal the relationship between technology and (natural) science more precisely. In the meantime, however, modern technologies and new epistemic practices are challenging historical descriptions of the nature of technoscience and the dichotomy between ‘control’ and ‘regulation’ respectively. Bearing in mind the so-called new emerging sciences and technologies (NEST) and other developments in IT, cognitive technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology, this volume examines who or what can be conceptualised as the subject of processes of control and regulation. In terms of large-scale systems and the organisation of large social structures, methods of control are becoming increasingly problematic because digital information technologies especially are creating new, diverse ways of manipulating and regulating processes or conditions, for example monitoring, big data and profiling, while the counteractive consequences of the same development, for example the ever-increasing amount of data, acceleration, automatisation and the logic of sociotechnical infrastructures, are increasingly throwing the possibility of coordinated control into doubt.