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[...] Technology and power are implicated in one another historically and in contemporary social arrangements. There is no experience of technology that is not at the same time an experience of a kind of social power, but it does not always involve domination. [...]
[...] part of technology design is precisely the art of making clear to the user what they can and cannot do with it. Technology design always involves both a closing off of the technology's innards into a "black box" and the projection of messages on its outer surface that will guide the user into successful operation of the artefact. There is a concealed politics here, akin to statecraft. How technological artefacts are presented to users involves a politics of design that reflects features of the social content. It is here that we find the politics of the relationship between technology and social power. [...]
[...] 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 questions are not asked. Exercise of this kind of power proceeds not by making threats but by suppressing problems before they are thematized in any public discourse. If two-dimensional power is used effectively, the result will be that people are influenced into doing what the powerful want them to do, or they may simply see it as the obvious right thing to do. Here it is not necessary to deploy a superior capacity for violence in order to exercise power. [...]
drawing on Steven Lukes, who himself draws on Robert Dahl's one-dimensional conception
[...] 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 revealing the world other than those that conform to the model of throwing a switch to get what we want. Modern culture is uniquely embedded in technology and in consequence we have a limited view of the world, which Heidegger calls "enframing". What is regrettable about technology is that it obscures or even destroys other ways of finding meaning. And the kind of life that it opens onto is one in which means and ends are separated so that we find ourselves performing instrumental routines aimed at consumption, rather than appreciating the full range of meaning possibilities available to us as a matter of existential fact. [...]
[...] 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 abstraction; it is life in a uniquely ordered, regimented society in which formal rule-following overrides any attachment to substantive principles or values that are not susceptible to rational, scientific analysis. [...]
whoa
[...] 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. [...]
on Andrew Feenberg's critical theory, developed to address the mistaken (in his opinion) assumption that technology is predominantly being used to oppress workers simply because capitalism is "scientific"
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 School's definition of modern instrumental reason:
An effective hegemony need not be imposed in a continuing struggle between self-conscious agents but one that is reproduced unreflectively by the standard beliefs and practices of the society it dominates. Tradition and religion played that role for millennia; today, forms of rationality supply the hegemonic beliefs and practices.
In modern societies being instrumentally rational is common sense and capitalist efficiency is a value that we all strive to maintain. Failure to do so is widely perceived as evidence of some kind of defect, perhaps even immorality. [...] Hegemonic technological rationality enframes the judgements made about technology about key players in the design and implementation process, making some technologies appear sensible and obvious to them while others seem inherently less interesting or likely to succeed. The people making these kinds of choices [...] operate within a horizon that is set by this hegemonic rationality; they make decisions and judgements, but always within the parameters set by this ordering of the world. When presented with alternative designs they assess them in terms of the hegemonic technological rationality as it applies to their situation. They look for efficiency and they understand this in terms of enhanced control over the production process because this is the way to reduce costs and maximize desired outputs. [...]
cited from Feenberg's 2002 book Transforming Technology
this is pretty great
link this to the fact that the technologies behind FB/Google et al have BECOME implicated in the production process because a new market was created (for data in order to sell people shit)
[...] 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 involves experimenting with different moves and assessing the artefact's response to see if they are appropriate but in Foucauldian terms this is exploring the margin of manoeuvre allowed us by disciplinary power. Aligning technology with discourse in this way enables Feenberg to view the hegemonic codification of technical elements that defines capitalist ideology as a kind of contestable "truth". [...]
[...] 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 use of the technology. This is perhaps best understood in terms of Feenberg's notion of a technologically implemented hegemony.