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.
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.
^Lorenzano, Pablo; Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg; Ortiz, Eduardo; Galles, Carlos (2010). History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Oxford: EOLSS Publishers Co. Ltd. pp. 124–125. ISBN 9781848267763.
^Watson, Sara (October 2016). "Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2018-10-19.
^ abcJeronimo, Helena; Garcia, Jose; Mitcham, Carl (2013). Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media. p. 116. ISBN 9789400766570.
^Enos, Theresa (2013). Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. New York: Routledge. p. 619. ISBN 978-0824072001.
^Rotman, David. "How Technology Is Destroying Jobs". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2018-10-19.
Layla AbdelRahim, Children's Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation: Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness, Routledge, 2018 paperback ISBN 9781138547810; 2015 hardback ISBN 9780415661102
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Cornell University Press 1990
Braun, Ernest (2009). Futile Progress: Technology’s Empty Promise, Routledge.
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).
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff, Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.
Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology. A Critical Theory Revisited, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2002, ISBN 0-19-514615-8 - Feenberg offers a "coherent starting point for anticapitalist technical politics" [citation needed] to overcome what he considers to be the "fatalism" of Ellul, Heidegger, and other proponents of "substantive" theories of technology.
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, B&T 1982, ISBN 0-06-131969-4
Huesemann, Michael H., and Joyce A. Huesemann (2011). Technofix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, ISBN 0865717044.
Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004, ISBN 1-931498-52-0
Mander, Jerry (1992). In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, Sierra Club Books.