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[...] Google is popular because it is popular and it is seen as the search tool of choice essentially because other people believe that other people see it in those terms. But this standardization of a key filter for most web users in the information age must be seen as a powerful constraint on our…

[...] technical reason and its imperatives are "encoded" in technological artefacts. [...] Rather than coming at a technology and trying to work out how to use it, the human subject is in a sense constituted by the object; produced as a user as an effect of its power. Using technology still involve…

The idea of hegemonic technological rationality is intended to encompass what the Frankfurt School called instrumental reason and what Weber analyzed as societal rationalization as these apply to technology design as a social practice. Feenberg introduces it in terms that clearly echo the Frankfurt…

[...] technology can embody valid knowledge and constitute a set of reliable, seemingly neutral tools or points of leverage over nature and at the same time constitute an instance of prevailing, hegemonic social rationality and so be implicated in social power. [...]

[...] He uses the metaphor of "mechanical petrifaction" to convey the sense that by instrumentalizing our actions in the pursuit of efficiency we have effectively deprived ourselves of any reason for acting in the first place. Weber's thesis is that modernity is the cultural experience of abstracti…