Albert Borgmann

In the smart kitchen, as in so many of tech’s pursuits, this kind of inherently personal experience is and must be made uniform and repeatable.

In other words, taste needs to become data, made into what the philosopher Albert Borgmann called a device that abstracts the means and delivers the ends with little or no human input, so that human effort and the home chef’s agency along with it is abstracted away.

But an oven can’t taste.

It has no idea what smacking something with a propane torch means.

No matter how many data points are collected, data alone cannot reproduce or even accurately represent embodied experiences.

Yet the oven relied on an assumption that the qualities of food and human taste are quantifiable.

The smart kitchen was my introduction to an ideology I call computism, which holds that the universe is made of discrete, measurable bits of data, what philosophers call a digital ontology, and extends that view into an economic and political system.

According to computism, the world, including humans, can be computed.

Uh, uh, but that's not unique to the phone.

Uh, uh, you make, uh, um, you draw on Albert Borgmann's, uh, book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, uh, uh, which I strongly recommend to listeners.

And he distinguishes between thing tech- technologies-

Mm-hmm