"The Question Concerning Technology" by Martin Heidegger,1954

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The somewhat mythical concept of "that which precedes all: the earliest".
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Everything has an essence, yet that essence is concealed to humans. To access this essence, we must engage in "a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought"; this is "not the absurd wish to revive what is past, but rather the sober readiness to be astounded before the coming of the dawn". The ideal, then, is the "bringing-forth," in Greek poiesis: bringing-forth is to challenge the unconcealment of the essence, rather than to accept the concealed, what we see without or before poiesis.
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Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment.
Bringing-forth propriates only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing [das Entbergen]. The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say “truth” and usually understand it as correctness of representation.
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The ideal here is the attainment of "truth," or "correctness of representation," because the forms we see are figures of concealed histories; the true forms are concealed, and only through "unconcealment," or the removal of that which is concealed, can we access the truth.
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Heidegger turns to technology, the nominative subject of the essay, etymologically: the word stems from the Greek techne, which is "the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts". For the Greeks, techne was intimately linked to poiesis, the poetic, and thus linked to the "bringing forth" so essential in the pursuit of aletheia/veritas/truth.
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Technology, in its modern form, is thought more as manufacturing; in revealing the Greek origins of the modern term, Heidegger initiates his discussion of technology – "It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth … Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens".In this initiation, he performs his argument, by bringing-forth the concealed roots of the word "technology." In doing so, he asserts that modern technology, as with techne, is a bringing-forth, a revealing. Focusing his terminology further, he writes, "the revealing that rules modern technology is a challenging" (320). Now, Heidegger aligns a slew of terms all of which are modes toward aletheia/veritas/truth – "bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen]" (317), "unconcealment",'revealing [das Entbergen]" "challenging [Herausfordern]".
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Unconcealing his questioning concerning technology further, Heidegger aims centrally at defining the modern technology’s essence, which he names "Gestell [enframing]". Here, "Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e. challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve". Put somewhat more lucidly, enframing refers to the calling out, impelling, or challenging-forth, of humans to reveal, or unconceal the "actual" (the aletheia/veritas/truth) as ever-present and "on call"(the "standing-reserve"). Put differently, "Enframing, as a challenging-forth into ordering, sends into a way of revealing. Enframing is an ordaining of destining, as is every way of revealing. Bringing-forth, poiesis, is also a destining in this sense". Enframing is “destining”, from which "the essence of all history is determined". Enframing is the essence of modern technology, for Heidegger, because he roots modern technology in techne: it is a means for sourcing true forms and ideas that exist before the figures we perceive.
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