As we engage with the digital world, we grow comfortable with the how questions, the inhuman ones, and we find awkward the why questions, the human ones involving judgments about good and evil. We phrase how questions in terms of “efficiency,” “maximization,” and “optimization.” The idiom of productivity is senseless in itself; it can be meaningful only when we know what we value. No notion of means-ends rationality105 (if you value a, you should do b) coheres without a value judgment; no amount of how can get you to why.
