Criticism of technology is an analysis of adverse impacts of industrial and digital technologies. It is argued that, in all advanced industrial societies (not necessarily only capitalist ones), technology becomes a means of domination, control, and exploitation, [1] or more generally something which threatens the survival of humanity. Some of the technology opposed by the most radical critics may include everyday household products, such as refrigerators, computers, and medication. [2] However, criticism of technology comes in many shades.
Prominent authors elaborating a critique of technology include Donna J. Haraway, Jacques Ellul, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Joanna Bryson, Kate Crawford, Gilles Deleuze, Ted Kaczynski, Ivan Illich, Ritesh Kumar, Langdon Winner, Joseph Weizenbaum, Theodore Roszak, Günther Anders, Neil Postman, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Pentti Linkola, Andrew Feenberg, David Skrbina, Mike Cooley, John Zerzan, Lewis Mumford, Derrick Jensen, and Layla AbdelRahim. Some authors such as Chellis Glendinning and Kirkpatrick Sale consider themselves Neo-Luddites and hold that technological progress has had a negative impact on humanity. Their work focused on seeking meaning out of technological change, specifically wrestling with the question of "how tools and their affordances change and alter the fabric of everyday life." [3] Ellul, for instance, maintained that when people assert that technology is an instrument of freedom or the means to achieve historical destiny or the execution of divine vocation, it results in the glorification and sanctification of Technique so that it becomes that which gives meaning and value to life rather than mere ensemble of materials. [4] This is echoed by rhetorical critics who cite the way technological discourse damages institutions and individuals who make up those institutions due to its idealization and capacity to define social hierarchies. [5]
In its most extreme, criticisms of technology produce analyses of technology as potentially leading to catastrophe. For instance, activist Naomi Klein described how technology is employed by capitalism in its commitment to a "shock doctrine", which promotes a series of crises so that speculative profit can be accumulated. [4] There are theorists who also cite the cases of the global financial crises as well as the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters to support their critique. [4] Critiques also focus on specific issues such as how technology - through robotics, automation, and software - is destroying people's jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the incidence of poverty and inequality. [6]
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. They proposed differing theories about how it became an 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 neo-Marxist (Herbert Marcuse and Andrew Feenberg), ecofeminism (Vandana Shiva) and in post development (Ivan Illich)
Anarcho-primitivism, also known as anti-civilization anarchism, is an anarchist critique of civilization that advocates a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organization and all technology other than prehistoric technology. Anarcho-primitivists critique the origins and progress of the Industrial Revolution and industrial society. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation, and social stratification.
Green anarchism, also known as eco-anarchism, is an anarchist school of thought that puts a particular emphasis on ecology and environmental issues. A green anarchist theory is normally one that extends anarchism beyond a critique of human interactions and includes a critique of the interactions between humans and non-humans as well. Beyond human liberation, green anarchist praxis can extend to some form of non-human, total liberation and an environmentally sustainable anarchist society.
John Edward Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocates drawing upon the ways of life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication and symbolic thought.
Continental philosophy is a term used to describe some philosophers and philosophical traditions that do not fall under the umbrella of analytic philosophy. However, there is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Prior to the twentieth century, the term "continental" was used broadly to refer to philosophy from continental Europe. A different use of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as well as branches of Freudian, Hegelian and Western Marxist views.
Social philosophy examines questions about the foundations of social institutions, social behavior, and interpretations of society in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers emphasize understanding the social contexts for political, legal, moral and cultural questions, and the development of novel theoretical frameworks, from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, natural law, human rights, gender equity and global justice.
Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor who was a noted Christian anarchist. Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored more than 60 books and more than 600 articles over his lifetime, many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics.
Neo-Luddism or new Luddism is a philosophy opposing many forms of modern technology. The term Luddite is generally used as a pejorative applied to people showing technophobic leanings. The name is based on the historical legacy of the English Luddites, who were active between 1811 and 1816.
Techno-progressivism or tech-progressivism is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change. Techno-progressives argue that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments. One of the first mentions of techno-progressivism appeared within extropian jargon in 1999 as the removal of "all political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization".
"Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" is an article written by Bill Joy in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine. In the article, he argues that "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species." Joy warns:
The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.
Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological change.
Andrew Feenberg is an American philosopher. He holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His main interests are philosophy of technology, continental philosophy, critique of technology and science and technology studies.
Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the philosophy of science. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour among others, and has written widely on the history of science as well as philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres.
Postdevelopment theory holds that the whole concept and practice of development is a reflection of Western-Northern hegemony over the rest of the world. Postdevelopment thought arose in the 1980s out of criticisms voiced against development projects and development theory, which justified them.
Technology society and life or technology and culture refers to the inter-dependency, co-dependence, co-influence, and co-production of technology and society upon one another. Evidence for this synergy has been found since humanity first started using simple tools. The inter-relationship has continued as modern technologies such as the printing press and computers have helped shape society. The first scientific approach to this relationship occurred with the development of tektology, the "science of organization", in early twentieth century Imperial Russia. In modern academia, the interdisciplinary study of the mutual impacts of science, technology, and society, is called science and technology studies.
Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience, especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.
Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that assumes that a society's technology progresses by following its own internal logic of efficiency, while determining the development of the social structure and cultural values. The term is believed to have originated from Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), an American sociologist and economist. The most radical technological determinist in the United States in the 20th century was most likely Clarence Ayres who was a follower of Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. William Ogburn was also known for his radical technological determinism and his theory on cultural lag.
Industrial Society and Its Future, generally known as the Unabomber Manifesto, is a 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber". The manifesto contends that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology, while forcing humans to adapt to machinery, creating a sociopolitical order that suppresses human freedom and potential. The 35,000-word manifesto formed the ideological foundation of Kaczynski's 1978–1995 mail bomb campaign, designed to protect wilderness by hastening the collapse of industrial society.
The Technological Society is a book on the subject of technique by French philosopher, theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul. Originally published in French in 1954, it was translated into English in 1964.
Feminist science and technology studies is a theoretical subfield of science and technology studies (STS), which explores how gender interacts with science and technology. The field emerged in the early 1980s alongside other relativist theories of STS which rejected the dominance of technological determinism, proposing that reality is multiple rather than fixed and prioritizing situated knowledges over scientific objectivity. Feminist STS's material-semiotic theory evolved to display a complex understanding of gender and technology relationships by the 2000s, notable scholars producing feminist critiques of scientific knowledge and the design and use of technologies. The co-constructive relationship between gender and technology contributed to feminist STS's rejection of binary gender roles by the twenty-first century, the field's framework expanding to incorporate principles of feminist technoscience and queer theory amidst widespread adoption of the internet.
