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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…

[...] As members of a society in which extensive technology use has made access to goods, like illumination, simple and convenient, we have lost our appreciation of the centrality of revelatory experience and of our own activity in determining that experience. We have closed on possibilities of rev…

[...] a second dimension to the operation of power. This involves influence and authority, rather than force and coercion. Analysis of two-dimensional power draws attention to the way that compliance is secured from subject populations by making them perceive the world in such a way that certain qu…