I’d like to see someone come at this from a slightly different direction.
What I take as “social technology” is what is often called social institutions—law, customs, language, markets, rights regimes.… The way I tend to think about these, particularly since we tend to see a certain degree of frictions along the boarders where different institutions rub against each other, is as social tools.
Just as with any other tool, matching the wrong tool to a job produces anything from bad results to absolute disaster. Hammers don’t work well with screws, and screw drivers are pretty useless with a nut and bolt.
But it seems like social problems that our social institutions arose to address are not as nicely separable or often even as recognizable.
So what I would think would be a really interesting additional to answers here would be just what is the social problem being solved and is this one of the one’s we’ve been dealing with for human existence, since we transitions between eras or something we think will be a future social problem that existing institutions cannot even begin to address.
I’d like to see someone come at this from a slightly different direction.
What I take as “social technology” is what is often called social institutions—law, customs, language, markets, rights regimes.… The way I tend to think about these, particularly since we tend to see a certain degree of frictions along the boarders where different institutions rub against each other, is as social tools.
Just as with any other tool, matching the wrong tool to a job produces anything from bad results to absolute disaster. Hammers don’t work well with screws, and screw drivers are pretty useless with a nut and bolt.
But it seems like social problems that our social institutions arose to address are not as nicely separable or often even as recognizable.
So what I would think would be a really interesting additional to answers here would be just what is the social problem being solved and is this one of the one’s we’ve been dealing with for human existence, since we transitions between eras or something we think will be a future social problem that existing institutions cannot even begin to address.