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criticisms of technology
Criticisms of technology come from various political movements as well as from some religious and spiritual movements. Technology has been criticized by political movements like green anarchism, anarco-primitivism etc. Environmentalism and ecofeminism often criticizes certain aspects of technology, though may not reject it completely. Green syndicalism also criticizes some forms of technology.
Technology has been criticized for having negative impact under conditions of advanced technological development. In all advanced industrial societies (whether capitalist or not) technology is or becomes a means of domination, control and exploitation, or more generally something which threatens the survival of humanity. In a wider sense a sceptical attitude towards technology which is not necessarily fully theoretically developed can also be related to the critique of technology.
In Europe skeptical attitudes towards technology became more prominent in the 1970s, e.g. in the anti-nuclear movements. In the eyes of some critics, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 seemed to confirm the impossibility of controlling large scale technology. The Internet euphoria of the 1990s favored more positive attitudes toward technology. Nevertheless fears about the increased possibilities of transhumanism and technological surveillance are still widespread.
Prominent authors elaborating a critique of technology are, e.g.. Günther Anders, Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford. In a wider sense some writings of Martin Heidegger and the critical history of technology (David F. Noble) are also part of the critique of technology.
In the 1970s in the US, the critique of technology became the basis of a new political perspective, anarcho-primitivism, which was forwarded by thinkers such as Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, and George Bradford aka 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, 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
- W. Mark Cobb, “Marcuse, Habermas and the Critique of Technology†In: Herbert Marcuse : a critical reader, ed. by John Abromeit New York, NY [u.a.]: Routledge, 2004, pp. 309-342
- 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" [1].
- Tee L. Guidotti, "Critical science and the critique of technology", Public Health reviews, 1994;22(3-4):235-50.
- Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, B&T 1982, ISBN 0061319694
- Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, Penn State University Press, 1991, ISBN 0271008024
- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation, W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd, New Edition 1976 - a humanist critique of instrumental rationality
