Building better handles
What does empowerment really mean?
Growing up, I felt that I had little power over my life. I was told that things were the way they were because someone older and more powerful had decided so; that I could not question or push back; that I had to accept the world as it was, without any means of voicing my dissent or desires.
Over time, I felt the world open to me, as I found people who would listen and take me seriously and learned to assert myself. But the dominant feeling of my childhood was one of powerlessness: that I was unheard and unseen, that my life was not fully my own, and that the world was orchestrated by forces I didn’t understand and couldn’t touch.
That’s why I became interested in the questions of power, and so sensitive when power is wielded to restrict our freedom and flourishing. And I recognized this in the realm of technology: the same sense of powerlessness in our relationship to the digital world and our devices. We are told that technological “progress” is something that will be imposed upon us — that AI will take over our jobs, whether we like it or not; that we must accept the devices and algorithms imposed upon us, despite very clear evidence of the harms they cause to our psyches, attention, and self-esteem — and that we have no real say in the matter.
To participate in the digital world today means consenting to opaque systems whose rules are established by someone else. We are given tools that we are told are “empowering,” yet they come with defaults we didn’t choose and often can’t change. Many people engage with their digital devices through a mode of resistance — hence the rise of digital detox programs, app blockers, and phone lock boxes. We’ve recognized that there’s something harmful about the way digital systems currently engage with us — it feels manipulative of our desires, corrosive to our attention, eroding to our thinking, confining of our bodies. And yet, they’re so entangled in our lives and systems that we feel trapped between two extremes: to either embrace them as they are, or reject them entirely.
But I don’t think the answer is to retreat off-grid. There’s a seductive purity to this — a life of pristine individuality, untouched by digital harms — but it can be a form of abdication, a refusal to engage with the responsibilities and benefits of society. Even Thoreau, during his time at Walden, went to his mother’s home for laundry and dinner. We are woven into one another’s lives in both digital and physical ways, and a future in which we must choose between the two seems regressive. Our digital world is full of possibility; its connectivity can broaden our worlds immensely and bring people and opportunities in our lives that we otherwise wouldn’t encounter. It is something we ought to try to remake, not to reject in its entirety.
I wanted to figure out what it actually means for technology to empower people — not in the shallow ways companies have co-opted it to sell incremental aspirations and demand higher productivity within pre-defined limits. Rather, I wanted a definition that was much deeper and truer to its original meaning — not to “do more” in the sense of increased productivity and efficiency, but in an expansive sense where we have a greater understanding of the complex systems in our lives and a greater capacity to respond to them.
One of the clearest depictions of it, I found, was in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essay in Harper’s, “The Reenchanted World.” In it, he writes about his relationship with computers, how it became a more pervasive, omnipresent force in his life without an accompanying deepening of his understanding of it.
“About technology,” he wrote, “I had never made an independent decision, always just passively going along with the flow of innovations, never immersing myself in anything, always surrendering to the feeling of standing ever further from the world. Not having control, but somehow being controlled — that was the feeling. Not controlled in any personal way; it was more like being steered by some kind of invisible power, always there yet out of reach. How to regain control from something invisible?”
What Knausgaard felt was a sense of alienation, as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon defined it: not caused by technology itself, but by our lack of knowledge of it. When we treat technology as either a mere tool or a mystical threat, denying its inherent complexity or elevating it to something beyond our capacity to understand, we forfeit the possibility of a meaningful relationship: not one built upon domination and subjugation, but an ecology of care.
Technology is not our enemy or our saving grace; it is an entity that we must understand in order to form a proper relationship with it. But how?
To answer that question, Knausgaard traveled to an island off the coast of Athens to meet the writer James Bridle, author of the books New Dark Age and Ways of Being. Bridle is a thinker who investigates how our digital world reaches into our physical one, forming networks of ecological intelligence that defy simplistic binaries between human and machine, organic and artificial, natural and technological.
Bridle’s answer was, in essence, to learn by doing:
“There’s really nothing you can learn abstractly. The only thing you can do is experience it and do it yourself. You have to do it, you have to experience it, it has to happen to you. Bodily, physically, because you’re part of the world.”
Bridle described how he got himself out of a state of “climate depression” by learning to build simple renewable energy devices he called solar toys: an oven, a heater, wind turbines. It moved him from a position of paralysis to one of empowerment by building a greater capacity to respond:
“Before, my thing was that technology is big and scary and worrying, and one of the major problems with the Western world at the moment is that we live within this society of very large, complex systems that nobody really understands and everyone basically tries not to think about. That in itself is going to fuck you up. For years I have been teaching people — I can do like a half-day seminar on programming, or giving little tours of the physical structure of the internet. The seminar manifests it, concretizes it, and kind of puts handles on this big system so that it is no longer existentially terrifying. The weight you see lift off people when you do that is extraordinary. It transforms it from being this completely unknowable force that just acts on their lives into being a thing in their lives that they can see the edges of and conceptualize a little bit better. I call it technological literacy… a feeling of competence in the face of very complex systems.”
We learn by doing, whether it’s speaking a new language, building a table, or writing software. And as the world becomes increasingly digital and complex, it is incumbent upon technologists to create more levers for people to not just access, but to reshape this world — and upon all of us to learn how to use these levers through tinkering and playing with them. Creating software is one such lever — it gives us a handle on the vast digital system by allowing us to modify our environments and determine how the digital world touches our lives.
When we understand how the systems in our lives function, and know where the levers for change are, we gain the power to make better, more informed choices for our own lives. This literacy is something that nobody can take from us. Companies can create products that feel extractive or misaligned with our needs, but if we have the power to create our own, and if we create the conditions that allow for that kind of freedom, we will always be capable of imagining and building better alternatives.
And this extends beyond technology. We feel powerless in any system — food, healthcare, governance, education — when we don’t know where the levers for change are, or how to pull them. This powerlessness often curdles into anger. It’s why so many celebrated the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, because he represented a system in which people feel they have no avenue for recourse. The promise of education and of technology is to give us better handles in the world — to make the impenetrable more legible, the rigid more malleable; and to expand the horizons of what our lives can become.
But this self-education won’t happen by default — it is something we must seek, demand, and undertake ourselves.
“The purpose of the system is to reproduce the existing power dynamics of that system again and again,” Bridle stated. “That is what it does. Society has no interest in educating you in how technology works. Because then you make your own technology and you make different technology, and you upset the economic power balance and so forth. But it is doable, and people are doing it all the time. You can do it yourself.”
The people I admire most have always sought to create handles, even if they didn’t think of their work in those terms. Alice Waters, pioneer of the farm-to-table movement and founder of Chez Panisse, championed a deeper understanding of the food we eat: how and where it is grown, and by whom. Maria Montessori believed even very young children should engage directly in the world: chopping vegetables, sweeping floors, making decisions for themselves. The motley crew behind the Whole Earth Catalog curated and shared tools and information to help people become self-reliant, so any reader could "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."
What they shared was a desire to deepen our literacy of — and participation in — the world, not to outsource our understanding and decision-making to distant authorities. And through that participation, we don’t just become more capable humans: we come to relish the world more fully.
One of the most moving illustrations of this kind of empowerment in Knausgaard’s piece wasn’t about a piece of technology, but about a garden.
For years, Knausgaard hired a gardener to care for his garden a few times in the summer, but he himself did little more than mow the lawn and occasionally sit outside. Though he saw the garden every day, he felt strangely detached from it — letting the trees wilt during a drought, neglecting the flowers until they withered. He felt alienated from his garden, and it from him. But at his gardener’s urging, Knausgaard planted some flowers himself. And a strange thing occurred: he found himself thinking about them, even as he drifted off to sleep. The more he tended to his garden, the more his own care and curiosity grew, and the more the garden opened itself to him:
“In a few weeks the garden had gone from being nothing — “the garden,” essentially empty and interchangeable, with no meaning except as a place I happened to be in — to something I was deeply familiar with and cared about, thought about, nurtured. It had become full of meaning.”
That, I feel, is the heart of what it means to be empowered: to understand and care for the world more deeply, to take part in its shaping, and in doing so, to imbue it with meaning. When we take responsibility to understand and engage with the systems in our lives, we become more alive to them, and they to us.
Isn’t that a beautiful thing?
Thank you to my colleagues at Imbue for the many conversations that inspired and informed this piece.