Towards a Sociotechnical Horizon of Expectations: Hermeneutics against Presentism

In the following paper I argue that much work in the philosophy of technology is fixated on technologies that are new and emerging. This leads to a methodological and conceptual inability to account for any sense of historical continuity that can explain how contemporary technologies are part of a historical continuum. This is, I argue, a problem of historical time. Following the historian François Hartog, I argue that this attitude to historical time amongst philosophers of technology can be termed "presentism," which is characterized by imagining the future and the past as extensions of the present. Arguing that presentism disables any form of effective critique by reproducing an idea of historical time favoured by the contemporary tech industry and its boosters amongst government and academia, I draw upon the tradition of hermeneutics to introduce the concept of a sociotechnical horizon of expectations to account for technology through longer periods of historical time. The result is a way to think about technology through an idea of historical time that draws out those aspects of sociotechnical society that endure across time instead of methods and concepts that demand researchers constantly try to keep up with unceasing disruptive change.