A bookcase topples over and crushes a reader sitting at its base. A discarded lead pipe poisons the waters that have become its resting place. A staircase precludes wheelchair users from accessing the second floor. Technologies can harm without being put to use. Their causal powers can contribute to harms without users exercising their affordances. These types of harmful non- use relations with technology are generative relations, as they are harmful by virtue of what technologies do to the other entity comprising the relation. As we saw in Chapter 7, malfunctioning and dysfunctioning technologies can contribute to harms beyond use. This chapter will further explore how such failures can result in exclusionary harm relations, but, importantly, it also catalogues a range of different harms beyond use that do not necessarily result from technologies malfunctioning or dysfunctioning.

To do this, I undertake a (post)phenomenological analysis of harmful ‘non- use’ relations with technology. In cases where humans are the victims of such harms beyond use, such an analysis involves examining how artefacts appear – or do not appear – to us in events that do us harm. As such, it involves addressing the intentionality structure of the relation between the technology and the entity harmed by it. Is our attention directed at the artefact when it harms us, or are we left unsure about the source of our injury? Are we aware that we are being harmed at all, or do we only recognize the harm well after our encounter with the technology? And in instances where our attention is directed at the artefact, does it harm us by refusing and excluding us as users of one or more of its affordances? Or is our attention drawn to the technology when it harmfully happens upon us?