can shock gloves be a neutral technology?

14 Aug, 2026

Or, thoughts on the human tendency with tools

In the past I've espoused the view that technology is neutral, it's about how it's used. An argument that tries to stop the conflation of real world uses with the essential nature of a thing. Moral concern about how things are being used in violent or harmful ways seem to be usually involved in those conflations.

But today I read, in the 13th August edition of Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American newsletter:

On August 10, ICE published a notice that it would spend up to $20 million on shock gloves that deliver a painful charge of electricity to subdue individuals. Jeremy White of Wired reported today that the glove is supposed to subdue someone in three seconds or less and the manufacturer warns that the device should not be used for longer than 15 seconds; no more than one pair should be used at the same time on one person; that operators must touch only arms or legs, strictly avoiding head, face, throat, chest, and groin; that gloves must not be used on the elderly, children, pregnant women, or people with severe disabilities; and that the technology must not be used to stop people from talking back, as punishment, or to torture.

It's hard not to read those manufacturer disclaimers and think, gee, it would be really easy to use these shock gloves in an incredibly harmful way. And, hang on a minute, wtf are we even talking about, shock gloves??? Designed to "subdue someone in three seconds or less"? This is technology that seems to have a narrow use case, one that is chiefly oriented towards or enabling coercion and domination (of other humans and other animals).

So it seems quite disingenuous to trot out the "technology is neutral" line in the case of shock gloves.

It's fine to resolve this by thinking that there can be exceptions or specific modifications to rules. Technologies in general are neutral, but you can narrow the scope of applications to such an extent that you aren't left much room except to use the tool in a violent way. The more specific the tool the less wiggle room (though I think people are also very creative when it comes to repurposing things)¹.

If there's a tendency for certain - most? - humans to exploit any tool if it seems like an effective available strategy, is it naively purist to insist on this abstract "technology is neutral" statement?² Maybe both things are paradoxically true and as ever context is everything. So in what contexts does it serve to emphasise one way or the other?

How does this relate to Audre Lorde's seductive formation --

the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

-- and my hunch that, actually, you can use tools (which?) with liberatory manner and intent such that, in practice, they are no longer the master's tools? TBC!

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Other thoughts that came up for me when I read about the shock gloves:

• If you give someone a gun, isn't someone just going to get threatened and shot eventually?
• If you create phones, isn't someone just going to make them addictive revenue streams eventually?
• If you centralise everything, isn't someone going to abuse power eventually?
• How does the marginal use case get used to downplay the harms of a dominant use case
• Feels like this somehow relates to morphogenesis, the dance of structure and agency... I've lost the intuition about why, though
• It relates to the issue of a "race to the bottom" and the problem of having principles that restrict the moves available to you in any game. Maybe it's possible to win that way but it's harder. How does that link to the idea of playing to win?
• Isn't this just what game theory is about, maybe it's time you finally engaged with that...

And, I need to see how this modifies my relationship to past thoughts about: hierarchy being a technology; the idea that we always have choice; the NVC idea that nothing "makes" you feel or do anything.