Techne/Telos

Tech abbreviates information technologies (see Big Tech). The full name technology is reserved for the field adjacent to science related to application and engineering. We're thinking too small.

All life is problem solving. All organisms are inventors and technicians, good or not so good, successful or not so successful, in solving technical problems. This is how it is among animals - spiders, for example. Human technology solves human problems such as sewage disposal, or the storage and supply of food and water, as, for example, bees already have to do. – Karl Popper

Technology extends a (cyb)organism's response to Chaos sive Natura in the form of a Technology has a telos, a purpose to which it aims. Thus, human eyes extend from the brain and solve the problem of identifying snakes and ripe fruit.¹ Eating fruit gave us knowledge, not of good and evil, but of tools (the birth of Homo faber, not Homo sapiens). Prometheus gives us fire, digestion external to to the body. Thor summons Mjolnir, the durable ready-to-hand extension.

The ready-to-hand pen is mightier than Mjolnir because the former created the latter. It extended the mind. Socrates doesn't like writing, because it circumvents the exercise of the reader's memory. Too bad, the technology is here to stay. Writing begat the the self. Foucault says it in Technologies of the Self, and Bloom stretches a little when he says Shakespeare invents the human being.

The character of modern technology is Bestand, standing-reserve for telos. The airplane sits on the tarmac, ready for takeoff.

"Yet an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. Certainly. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to insure the possibility of transportation." – Heidegger

The modern technology will challenge nature in our lieu, turning it into a resource. Nabokov is not pleased that this is all the artist sees:

The great tragedy of modern art … is that
an artist cannot look at an airplane and see anything but a plane. – Nabokov in Wellesley College News (1942)

Heidegger suggests art. He suggests technology that plays (the birth of Homo ludens, not Homo sapiens). He suggests telonomos. That was what McLuhan meant when he said the medium is the message.