Quotes from Introduction to Critical Theory of Technology

Social critics claim that technical rationality and human values contend for the soul of modern man. This book challenges such cliches by reconceptualizing the relation of technology, rationality, and democracy. My theme is the possibility of a truly radical reform of industrial society. (3)

I argue that the degradation of labor, education, and the environment is rooted not in technology per se but in the antidemocratic values that govern technological development. (3)

At the highest level, public life involves choices about what it means to be human. Today these choices are increasingly mediated by technical decisions. What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements. (3)

The design of technology is thus an ontological design fraught with political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from participation in this decision is the underlying cause of many of our problems. (3)

[Instrumental theory] is based on the common sense idea that technologies are "tools" standing ready to serve the purposes of their users. Technology is deemed "neutral," without valuative content of its own. (5)

Substantive theory, best known through writings of Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger, argues that technology constitutes a new type of cultural system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control. This system is characterized by an expansive dynamic which ultimately mediates every pretechnological enclave and shapes the whole of social life. The instrumentalization of society is thus a destiny from which there is no escape other than retreat. Only a return to tradition or simplicity offers an alternative to the juggernaut of progress. (7)

The issue is not that machines have "taken over," but that in choosing to use them we make many unwitting cultural choices. Technology is not simply a means but has become an environment and a way of life: this is its "substantive" impact. (8)

Despite their differences, instrumental and substantive theories share a "take it or leave it" attitude toward technology. [. . .] In neither case can we change it: in both theories, technology is destiny. Reason, in its technological form, is beyond human intervention or repair. (8)

Finally, the very project of bounding technology appears suspect. If we choose to leave something untouched by technology, is that not a subtler kind of technical determination? (10)

Defenders of the instrumental view sometimes draw comfort from the conjunction of democratic reform with the decision of Westernization. Ordinary citizens appear to have refused the trade-offs required to sustain traditional or future-oriented values in competition with well-being in the present. The conquest of society by technology is not due to any occult power of the "technical phenomenon"; rather, technology, as a domain of perfected instruments for achieving well-being, is simply a more powerful and persuasive alternative than any ideological commitment. (12)

But critical Marxism argues, on the contrary, that an alternative may yet be created on the basis of workers' control, requalification of the labor force, and public participation in technical decisions. If the Japanese and Soviet experiments failed, this is because they rejected the democratic path for one convergent with authoritarian industrialism. (12)

But, with the notable exception of Marcuse, these Marxist critics of technology stop short of actually explaining the new relation to nature implied in their program, and none of them come close to meeting the demand their work elicits for a concrete conception of the "new technology" they invoke. (13)

• This is my criticism of Feenberg's Questioning Technology. Curious whether he'll provide a more concrete view of the democratization of technology in this book.

In choosing our technology we become what we are, which in turn shapes our future choices. (14)

Critical theory rejects the neutrality of technology and argues instead that "technological rationality has become political rationality." The values and interests of ruling classes and elites are installed in the very design of rational procedures and machines even before these are assigned a goal. (14)

[The dominant form of technological rationality] stands at the intersection between ideology and technique where the two come together to control human beings and resources in conformity with what I will call "technical codes." (14)

The most significant such distinction is the power differential between those who command and those who obey in the operation of technical systems. That power differential, organized through a variety of institutions, is one of the foundations of the existing technological civilization in both its capitalist and communist forms. Since the locus of technical control influences technological development, new forms of control from below could set development on an original path. (15)