Criticism of technology

Critique of technology is a theory which analyzes the negative impacts of technologies. Proponents of these theory argue that, in all advanced industrial societies (whether capitalist or not), technology becomes a means of domination, control and exploitation, or more generally something which threatens the survival of humanity.

Prominent authors elaborating a critique of technology are, e.g.. Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Langdon Winner, Joseph Weizenbaum, Theodore Roszak, Neil Postman and Lewis Mumford.

In the 1970s in the US, the critique of technology became the basis of a new political perspective called anarcho-primitivism, which was forwarded by thinkers such as Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, and David Watson. All former marxists, they proposed differing theories about how it was industrial society, and not capitalism as such, that was at the root of contemporary social problems. This theory was developed in the journal Fifth Estate in the 1970s and 1980s, and was influenced by the Frankfurt School, the Situationist International, Jacques Ellul and others.

The critique of technology overlaps with the philosophy of technology but whereas the latter tries to establish itself as an academic discipline the critique of technology is basically a political project, not limited to academia. It features prominently in neomarxism (Herbert Marcuse), ecofeminism (Vandana Shiva) and in postdevelopment (Ivan Illich)

Further reading

• Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Cornell University Press 1990
• Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1964. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Rev. ed.: New York: Knopf/Vintage, 1967. with introduction by Robert K. Merton (professor of sociology, Columbia University).
• Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology. A Critical Theory Revisited, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2002, ISBN 0195146158 - Feenberg offers a "coherent starting point for anticapitalist technical politics"
• Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, B&T 1982, ISBN 0061319694
• David Watson, Against the Megamachine, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1998, ISBN 1-57027-087-2 - The title essay is available online here
• Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation, W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd, New Edition 1976
• Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Contol as a Theme in Political Thought, MIT Press 1977, ISBN: 978-0262230780

See also

• Critical theory
• Frankfurt School
• Luddite
• Social criticism
• Paradigm shifts
• Social effect of evolutionary theory
• Deep ecology
• Development criticism

External links

• Collection of early anarcho-primitivist articles published in Fifth Estate
• S. Ravi Rajan - Science, State and Violence: An Indian Critique Reconsidered