30 June

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social relations. Look at this 1955 ad, the top cartoon frames as well. A 'washing machine' would not even exist without those social relations, particularly relating to women. It is those relations, shifted to another medium. The much bigger story here too is that 99% of what makes society stable is technologies. They don't just do jobs for us, they create our most stable social bonds. The relative peace of the past century is nearly all due to this, people rarely agree on anything. But if you take the different beliefs and passions and weave them into a machine, agreement can be reached. Once that's done, the social relations embodied in the machines operate without us even realising it. So we stop fighting one another.