[C]hallenging-forth turns everything into resources, creating a world of objects and equipment on standby ready to be used in larger aggregates. For Heidegger there is a totalizing character of challenging-forth which forces it to attempt to apply the principle of efficiency to other marginal practices, and hence with it the danger of becoming the last possible mode of revealing.
In contract, I want to suggest that computationality is distinct from challenging-forth as technicity, inasmuch as it is a streaming-forth. One aspect of this is that streaming-forth generates second-order information and data from the world which is itself seen increasingly as flow. This collected information is then subject to further processing and algorithmic transformation, feedback thus becomes part of the ecology of computationality. Additionally, computational devices not only withdraw – indeed mechanical devices such as car engines clearly also withdraw – rather that computational devices both withdraw and are constantly pressing to be present-at-hand in alternation. They are in a curious middle state, this I call ‘unready-to-hand’ drawing on Heidegger’s notion of conspicuousness. Breakdowns, such as these, serve an extremely important cognitive function revealing to us the nature of our practices and equipment by bringing them ‘present-at-hand’ to our attention. However, the present-at-hand in computationality is of extremely limited duration, but also repeated in random ways, we could think of this as a stream of unreadiness-to-hand, specific to this mode of revealing. It is only when a breakdown occurs that we become aware of the fact that ‘things’ in our world exist not as the result of individual acts of cognition but through out active participation in a domain of discourse and mutual concern.
