“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

Often attributed to media ecology thinker Marshall McLuhan, these words were most likely first said by one of McLuhan’s friends and fellow media scholars John Culkin. Regardless of who first gave this idea utterance, this notion seems particularly important today. It is an inescapable fact: the technologies we develop over time do more than merely sit idly awaiting our use. They bear upon our expectations of our work, our leisure, and of each other.

Justin Hodgson’s work treats “the new aesthetic” -- an artistic and communicative sensitivity that renegotiates boundaries between the real and the digital, the machine and the human – as an environment in which rhetoric now operates. This ecology appears inescapable. Technology is not picked up, used, and placed back into a receptacle – it redefines what we do and who we are. The finer points of the New Aesthetic as an artistic movement aren’t universally agreed upon, but weaving throughout it is an acknowledgement that our technology is now our environment, and that environment affects our understanding of art, production, and even other people.

Even in a craft where it is assumed that human agency exerts power on that which we’ve created, such as automobile repair, you cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it means something different today in 2020 to even be an automechanic than it did only a few decades ago. Mechanical aptitude and work by hand still exist, but exist to the extent they can work in concert with powerful computerized technologies that perform a range of diagnostic and corrective functions that may have taken a human being hours to do. Our expectations of a grizzled mechanic -- of his knowhow, or his turnaround time on a job – have evolved in no small part due to a requisite augmented acuity with the digital tools.

If this year has taught us anything, it is that more than ever, what it means to be a teacher, a medical professional, and even a person, has changed under the unwavering glare of the technology we use. It is becoming increasingly difficult to sort and separate the virtual from the real, the digital from the physical, and the tool from she that wields it.

How this blurred network of human and non-human actors will benefit or harm our society in the long term is a question I cannot answer. It’s difficult for me to venture a guess as to whether this is the beginning of a great unraveling or a logical next step in our evolution. What matters, as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote, “what counts is we are at the beginning of something.”