Latent and active delegations

After analysing a number of items, we can perhaps zoom out again and find a
multiplicity of perspectives regarding delegation gesturing within those
representant tools of our topic. Our proposal here is to organize our gaze
to them departing from the notion of attention. Following that logic, if we
inscribe the analysis within the so called *attention economics* in which
these cultural artefacts that are such mediation platforms are inscribed,
we find two larger perspectives from which to look into the situation.

Before deepening into their description, we might perhaps make it clear
that when we talk about these platforms, we understand them as convivial
spaces in which very varied agencies such as humans, tools, discourses,
languages, etc co-habit conforming a certainly complex scenography (and
often showing identifieable power relations).

Diagnosis: two large perspectives, involving the situation and its possible
perception(s). 1) latent: unintended, disattended; 2) active: intended,
attended.

Latent structures

First one falls into the classical gesturing, and hence reproduces a
somehow dis-attended assemblage.
This dis-attention in the structuring of the implicated agents'
performativity means that distribution and divisions of labor follows the
traditional script, and shows a perhaps un-intended hierarchy based on
traditional production models.

In an often tragic unintended shape, labors and tasks tend to represent an
echo of fixed affordances, and hence an hegemonically-scripted play.

Such a performance constituted once a strict management of the
ex-spectations of all implied agents, and that strictness responded to a
top-down structuration. What we found is that perhaps that constitution now
became somehow naturalized to the extent of rendering itself invisible.
This is why we named this perspective of the situation "latent structures",
as it could be that they are still-in-scene structures that merged with the
background. This merging is what facilitates the path dependencies on tool
use and development. If the structure is there as a result of an unintended
process, it is very plausible that all agents pass through it without
interpreting it as a structure, even. In other words: its smoothness is a
tricky materialisation of a long period of hierarchical organizing trough
and with a hegemonic performativity.

Also, this smoothness has to do with a very known design paradigm of “the
disponible” (what is available?). What this means is that in tool design, agents perform within
a pre-disposed framework, not going as far as to the questioning of its
limits, shapes, shadows, etc. This development and/or use of tools within
the disponible framework is precisely the paradigm that helped that merging
go ahead along our recent (cultural, political) time, even taking the shape
of a false conscience.

How the user and developer's performance is pre-defined by a dependency to
the already-disposed (who know if sometime consensuated) political plot of
technological design is precisely what made us turn on the alarms and
wonder when is it exactly that an affordance-oriented behavior in relation
to tools can be at risk of discaring very basic political, ethical and
aesthetical sensibilities. This wondering about specific moments, of
course, places our question in that of the sneaky moments.

We can, then, reformulate it this way: when our cultural-political
ecosystems bypass situations of special intensity/agitation, our relation
to tools tends to fall into an affordance-oriented paradigm that rules out
politic, ethic and aesthetic atentions in an already-disposed setting (does
not matter how radical the political fight is, it can still contain and
respond to that latency regarding tool use/development).

But, as we said earlier, this scene we are looking at here is a scene of
mediations. Having this said, we find the need of problematising the
rendering of that false consense [can you point at exactly where this happens?] also from the mediator's perspective.
Mediating agents are not always facilitators through the existing path, but
also problematizers and visibilizers of alternative options, distributions,
orientations and behaviours. [:-)] :-****