Technology as Practice, Not Artifact

Franklin's most important analytical move was to insist that technology is not what the public conversation treats it as—a collection of artifacts, devices, gadgets, programs. Technology is a practice: a way of doing things, a system of relationships between the worker, the work, and the institution within which the work occurs. The distinction sounds simple but carries radical implications. Understanding the artifact tells you what the tool can do—its capabilities, features, performance metrics. Understanding the practice tells you what the tool does to the person using it—how it reorganizes the work, who controls the process, who gains skill and who loses it, what forms of knowledge are rewarded and what forms become invisible. Applied to AI, the distinction reveals that the public conversation has been conducted almost entirely in the language of artifacts. Claude Code is an artifact. GPT-4 is an artifact. The natural language interface is an artifact. Their capabilities are remarkable