Psychotechnologies and the Missing Test Bench

Techniques that modify a person's dispositions form the only class of technology without an external test bench: the outcome is assessed by the very system the intervention has altered. I argue that this is constitutive rather than accidental, and that it licenses a narrow but consequential conclusion: historical survival of such a technique attests to its transmissibility and to nothing else. I then propose two external criteria that discriminate techniques which return second-order capacity from those that bypass it: a transparency test, concerning whether a technique can install itself in a recipient who knows its mechanism, and an obsolescence test, concerning whether a device works toward its own obsolescence or its own perpetuation. The transparency test has antecedents and is, on its own, defeated by overt capture; the obsolescence test survives that case, requires no attribution of mental states, and is what the contemporary case turns on. I close by arguing that operators are captured by their own devices, so the point of leverage is the selection environment rather than operator ethics.