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We have trouble seeing technology's dominant paradigm for what it is, Borgmann argues, not just for the banal reason that all paradigms are difficult to see when you are governed by them. Rather, technology has invisibility as one of its central characteristics. For technology is built on the concept of the device: a vanishingly small apparatus that procures for its users some desired commodity—a single good made available in whatever abundance is required. Technology at its most successful is designed to disappear.
To illustrate this point, Borgmann invites us to contrast the hearth, the source of heat in pre-technological homes, with the furnace, a technological device designed to procure the commodity of heat. A hearth was typically at the center of a home—the Latin for hearth is focus—and, true to its Latin name, was the center of various household activities. But furnaces are typically located as far out of the way as possible, and as they have become more advanced they have become, quite on purpose, ever more marginal to household life. An invisible hearth is a contradiction in terms, but an invisible furnace, quasi-magically delivering heat not just on demand, but even before we knew to demand it, while demanding nothing from us in return, would be a technological achievement. For all I know, Bill Gates may already have one.
The more advanced the device, the more invisibly and effortlessly the commodity is supplied. The furnace's commodity is heat. The airplane's commodity is mobility. The stereo system's commodity is music. And the commodity procured by the web of devices encompassing the supermarket, the freezer, the frozen burrito, and the microwave is, in a lot of American homes, supper.
The promise of technology, Borgmann has shown with considerable philosophical precision, is liberation or, as he also calls it, "disburdenment." The hearth was a dangerous and fickle presence in the household that had to be tended by persons skilled in building the fire, stoking the fire, covering the fire at night, and so forth. Not for nothing did the Romans venerate Hestia as a goddess. But with the advent of the furnace, we were disburdened from the need to procure heat with our own hands and skill. We are so disburdened, in fact, that few of us could "tend" our furnace if we had to. Furnaces, like airplanes, stereo systems, and microwaves, are complicated and opaque devices that are serviced by specialists. Even technological food itself can be complicated and opaque, as Borgmann illustrates in his latest book, Power Failure, with this list of ingredients:
Water, hydrogenated coconut and palm kernel oils, corn syrup, sugar, sodium caseinate, dextrose, polysorbate 60, natural and artificial flavors, sorbitan monostearate, xanthan gum and guar gum. Artificial color.
These are the ingredients for Cool Whip, the device that provides the commodity of "nondairy whipped topping" for consumers, thus disburdening them of having to whip cream and count its fat grams for their diets. "All of these attractive features," Borgmann writes, "can be gathered under the notion of availability. … Nearly everything that surrounds a citizen of [advanced industrial society] exhibits the opaque and commodious availability of Cool Whip and rests on a sophisticated and unintelligible machinery."
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