For all his obscurantism, Heidegger had something very simple to say about technology. For him, technology was not so much a thing as it was a worldview: our science, our infrastructure, our networks and our systems were ways of indexing and mapping, re-jigging the role of humanity itself. Take the typewriter, which Heidegger charged with an unthinkable crime. For him, this writing machine was no benign piece of secretarial equipment: it was actually destroying the very essence of the human, click by mechanical click. “Man himself acts through the hand; for the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man,” wrote the philosopher. But the hand no longer writes, it types. This new machine, “conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same.”

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