The question
This paper claims that the Cosmic Press records filed under Technology split agency between a machine and its people along the parts of a record. In a record that weighs a technology as gain or loss, the device is the subject of the sentences: a driverless shuttle takes over a driver's care, a glued shell ends repair, a tracking map robs waiting of something, a coupon dissolves the ritual of a gift. The record's own critique leaves those verbs where they are and turns the verdict over: the lament is called nostalgic or sentimental, and the device's safety, durability, precision or ease is put beside it. Regulators, designers, companies and users, the people who might make the thing otherwise, turn up elsewhere, in the notes that walk the question from the self to society and on into the far future. They are strongest at the scale of society, and the farthest note often gives the question back to a device that simply arrives. The plainer records, whose questions already concern using something, behave differently: their critique widens a single account of use, adding a right to delete, the helpful uses, the burden of a breakage, the fun of fixing a drawing.
Cosmic Press is one of the studios of the RISCON family. Its catalog holds questions a person might ask, each with a general form of itself and the record's own account of what that compression assumes, keeps and loses, a counterquestion, a defect and six notes on scale. Every entry is AI-generated, every situation hypothetical, and no record answers or recommends. That makes the catalog an unusual object for a study of framing. It does not say what a technology does; it shows a way of asking about technology, and then a way of finding fault with the asking.
Put as a research question, under the series' broader one about how record sets frame decisions: in a Technology record, who acts, the technology or the people around it, and what does the record's critique of its own framing do to that actor? The paper reads ten records chosen by one rule, set out in Section 1.1. It treats them as hypothetical texts. Their shuttles, laptops, apps, coupons and sensors are the settings of AI-generated questions, not reports about any device or service, and nothing here is advice about buying, using, repairing or regulating anything.
The debate: does technology act, or is it made?
The records touch one long debate in the study of technology and two strands that grew from it. The paper uses them as lenses on how the records frame their questions, not as tests the records pass or fail.
One side holds that technology has a momentum of its own. Allan Dafoe, On Technological Determinism: A Typology, Scope Conditions, and a Mechanism (2015), notes that technological determinism is mostly a critic's term used to dismiss certain claims, and he holds that, understood as claims that stress the autonomous and social-shaping tendencies of technology, it is a valuable perspective. His most useful point for this paper is that the determinist and the constructivist may each be right under particular scope conditions, and that the chief condition is the scale of analysis. Leo Marx, Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept (2010), adds a history of the word itself: it first named the study of the mechanic arts, and only later came to stand for a novel form of human power of far greater efficacy and scope.
The other side holds that technology is made. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology (1999), challenge the assumption that technological change follows its own logic, and their contributors show the social context at work in the technology of production, domestic and reproductive technology, and military technology. Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts (1984), treat facts and artefacts as social constructs, developing the concepts of interpretative flexibility and closure mechanism and the notion of social group, illustrated by studies of solar physics and of the bicycle. Wanda J. Orlikowski, The Duality of Technology (1992), finds both sides incomplete; her structurational model takes both into account.
The first strand concerns users. Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, Users as Agents of Technological Change (1996), show farmers taking part in constructing the automobile by proposing modifications for rural use. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, How Users Matter (2003), widen this to users who domesticate, reconfigure and resist technology, and who are themselves defined by it.
The second strand concerns power. Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics? (2017, a reprint of the essay first published in 1980), puts forward the notion that machines and systems can be judged not only for efficiency and productivity but for the forms of power and authority they can embody. Shoshana Zuboff, Big Other (2015), names a logic of accumulation she calls surveillance capitalism and a new, hard-to-see power that rests on computer mediation. One further work stands beside the debate because the records reach for its subject: Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001), on a global epidemic of longing in an age of globalization.
From all this the paper takes one question to put to each sentence: who is the actor here, a machine or a person, and if a person, at what scale? It takes from Dafoe the thought that the answer may change with scale, a thought the records' own notes on scale allow it to follow.
Contribution
The paper makes three contributions. First, it shows by close reading that in the records which put a technology to a verdict, the self-critique reverses the verdict but keeps the machine as the actor, so that the record moves between welcoming and protesting without reaching the possibility of altering. Second, it shows that the people who could shape a technology enter these records through their notes on scale, mostly at the scale of society, and that the farthest note often returns to a machine that arrives on its own, an arrangement that this paper, in its own reading, sets beside Dafoe's scope condition of scale. Third, it shows that the records whose questions concern use, not progress, correct a single account of use rather than a verdict, and so sit closer to the users' strand of the debate. The paper says what the records do; it does not say what any technology does, and it takes no side in any of the questions the records ask.