Quotes from Ch. 4: The Bias of Technology

The division of labor is a civilizational issue, affecting not merely workers' productivity and working conditions but their very identity. (65)

If this is true, socio-technical transformation cannot be conceived in terms of instrumental categories because the very act of using technology reproduces what is supposed to be transformed. (65)

This is the paradox of reform from above: since technology is not neutral but fundamentally biased toward a particular hegemony, all action undertaken within its framework tends to reproduce that hegemony. (65)

According to Foucault, power/knowledge is a web of social forces and tensions in which everyone is caught as both subject and object. This web is constructed around techniques, some of them materialized in machines, architecture, or other devices, others embodied in standardized forms of behavior that do not so much coerce and suppress the individuals as guide them toward the most productive use of their bodies. (71)

Capitalism is a kind of collective automaton, the parts of which are human beings organized into a self-reproducing, self-expanding web of dependencies. (73)

When [Marcuse] writes, for example, that science is "political" or that technology is "ideological," he makes the strong point that "technology as such cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put." (75)

The revolutionary significance of capitalism lies in the fact that its hegemony is based on simply reproducing its own operational autonomy through appropriate technical decisions. This is sufficient because power in modern societies can be wielded through technical control without titles of nobility or religious sanctions. (79)

Operational autonomy is the power to make strategic choices among alternative rationalizations without regard for either customary practice, workers' preferences, or the impact of decisions on their households. Whatever other goals capitalists pursue, all viable strategies implemented from their peculiar position in the social system must reproduce their operational autonomy. (79)

The essentially social character of technology lies not in the logic of its inner workings, but in the relation of that logic to a social context. (82)

Struggles over control of technical activities can now be reconceptualized as tactical responses in the margin of maneuver of the dominated. Just because a measure of discretion is association with the effective implementation of any plan, the use the dominated make of their position in the system is inherently difficult to foresee and control. (89)

• Opportunity for subversion and agency for those dominated by technology?

In sum, technology opens a space within which action can be functionalized in either one of two social orders, capitalism or socialism. It is an ambivalent or "multistable" system that can be organized around at least two hegemonies, two poles of power between which it can "tilt." (89)