unintended consequences

By sarahendren

Aug 22, 2014

 a man wears a flight suit made of white wings of about a 6 foot span, part of Jeremijenko's collaborative project with Usman Haque, to create personal flight paths as future transportation.

Poking around online for a good interview with Natalie Jeremijenko, I came across her unusual deployment of the term “unintended consequences,” which is so often associated with negative byproducts. As ever, Jeremijenko alerts us to opportunities:

Jeremijenko: As a rule of thumb, we should think of technology as a profoundly conservative social source. By definition, it is resource intensive. It costs a lot of money and time to build a technology; therefore, technology is built in the interest of those with money and time. Hence so much military influence on our technology.

The things that work on our side are these unintended consequences, the complex systems that technology is a part of, these techno-social systems that are not controllable or completely comprehensible. So the unintended consequences can be exploited by those of us with fewer resources and a commitment to a participatory democracy.

Image: A suit worn as part of Jeremijenko’s collaboration with Usman Haque, Flight Path Toronto, via.