"…there is a way of thinking about any technology that has the same baleful effects as these universal categories of human and machine, and that is thinking in terms of costs and benefits. And if you can make up an economic accounting sheet, an audit, you can audit a technology for cost over here, benefits over there, who gets which costs, who gets which benefits, and so forth. You handle it like an accounting problem. And I think that’s a terrible mistake, or rather that’s a tiny little bit of work that ought to come after we ask questions like “What kind of world is this?” Literally, ontological questions: What sorts of entities exist here, and with what kind of relationality? What are the practices here? We might find much more interesting things, including things that bear on who lives and who dies, that aren’t well gotten at by thinking as an accountant or cost-benefit analyst. A cost-benefit analysis basically takes a given technology and then tries to assess the costs and benefits; it doesn’t question the conditions of existence of the life world itself. And the life world is not the technology in some narrow sense - it’s a whole set of material-semiotic practices that make lives this way rather than some other."