Technology and Capitalism: Theses

 Just getting old trains for thought down in written form. This is a simplification of a line of thought that has been with me since my student days and has remained remarkably constant over the decades since then.

Thesis 1: Technology as a Social Product

     Modern societies often treat technology as a neutral tool that can be used for good or ill depending on human intention. This view assumes that technologies exist independently of the social systems that create them. Yet technologies arise from particular economic, political, and cultural contexts. The design of machines, infrastructures, and systems reflects the priorities of the society that produces them. Industrial technologies that emphasize scale, speed, and efficiency express the priorities of industrial capitalism. They are therefore better understood as social artifacts rather than neutral tools.

 

Thesis 2: Technology Embodies Power

Technologies organize relationships between people. They determine who controls resources, who performs labor, and how decisions are made. Large technological systems often centralize authority and reduce local autonomy. Lewis Mumford described modern technological civilization as a megamachine in which technical systems, bureaucratic organization, and economic power operate together. Technologies therefore distribute power in specific ways. Some technologies reinforce centralized authority while others enable decentralized participation.

 

Thesis 3: Technology Reflects the Dominant Social Order

The form technologies take depends on the structure of the society that develops them. Karl Marx argued that the tools and machines of an era reflect the mode of production. Industrial capitalism favors technologies that increase productivity, reduce labor costs, and expand markets. This preference shapes technological development long before the technology reaches everyday life. A society organized around capital accumulation tends to produce technologies that serve large-scale production and centralized control. Technologies that promise otherwise are either assimilated or suppressed.

Thesis 4: Technology Reshapes Human Life

   Once introduced, technologies alter the structure of daily life. They change patterns of work, communication, and social organization. They may create new needs while rendering older practices obsolete. Because technological systems reshape the environment in which people live, they gradually transform social expectations and habits. Technologies therefore influence human anthropology, the ways in which people understand themselves and their relationships.

 

Thesis 5: Technology Expands Scale

   Many modern technologies encourage expansion in scale. Industrial machines allow production to occur in large factories rather than small workshops. Agricultural machinery encourages large farms rather than small farms. Transportation networks integrate distant regions into a single economic system. As scale increases, economic and social life becomes organized through large institutions rather than local communities. The tractor is a clear example: it increased productivity but also encouraged farm consolidation and the decline of small farming communities.

 

Thesis 6: Technology Reshapes the Built Environment

   Certain technologies reorganize entire landscapes. The automobile provides a striking example. The widespread adoption of cars transformed the design of cities and rural communities. Roads, suburbs, parking systems, and long-distance commuting became normal features of daily life. These changes did not simply add a new tool to existing communities. They reorganized space itself and weakened many local forms of social interaction.

 

Thesis 7: Communication Technology and Consciousness

    Technologies of communication influence the structure of social attention. Printing expanded literacy and public debate. Radio and television centralized communication around large institutions. Digital networks have created new forms of connectivity and information exchange. Yet these technologies also reshape psychology. Social media platforms encourage constant self-presentation and comparison, often amplifying emotional and polarizing content. The technological medium therefore shapes habits of mind as well as the content of communication.

 

Thesis 8: Technology Develops Under Economic Imperatives

     Most technological development occurs within institutions driven by economic competition, military research, or bureaucratic expansion. Decisions about the design and deployment of technologies are rarely subject to broad public deliberation. The early internet illustrates this dynamic. It began as a research network connecting universities and scientific institutions, but commercial pressures transformed it into a platform dominated by large corporations whose business models depend on advertising and data extraction.

  

Thesis 9: The Ideology of Technical Progress

     Modern societies often assume that technological progress is inevitable and inherently beneficial. This belief discourages critical examination of technological change. If innovation is assumed to be both inevitable and desirable, political debate about technological development appears unnecessary. Yet technological choices always involve trade-offs and social consequences. The ideology of progress therefore obscures decisions that are fundamentally political.

 

Thesis 10: The Modern Metaphysics of Nature

      Modern technological civilization rests on a distinctive metaphysical view of nature that emerged in early modern philosophy. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes rejected older conceptions of nature as a meaningful and purposive order. Instead, nature increasingly came to be understood as a system of inert matter governed by mechanical laws. In this view natural processes possess no intrinsic purposes or values. They are simply arrangements of matter in motion that can be analyzed, predicted, and manipulated.

     Once nature is understood in this way, technological intervention appears not only possible but natural. If the natural world is merely a collection of mechanisms, then human beings can legitimately redesign those mechanisms for their own purposes. The modern program of scientific research and technological development therefore rests on a metaphysical assumption that the natural world exists primarily as a field for human transformation and control. This orientation toward the domination of nature became a defining feature of modern technological civilization.

 

Thesis 11: The Transformation of Knowledge into Power

    Alongside this metaphysical shift occurred a transformation in the meaning of knowledge itself. In classical philosophy (which admittedly was not a perfect mirror of the culture that gave rise to it) knowledge was understood primarily as contemplation of an intelligible order. For thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, the highest form of knowledge consisted in understanding the nature and purposes of things. Knowledge therefore had an ethical dimension because understanding the order of reality helped orient human life toward wisdom.

    Early modern philosophy introduced a different conception. For Bacon and many of his successors, the purpose of knowledge was no longer primarily contemplative but practical. Scientific inquiry sought to produce reliable methods for manipulating natural processes and expanding human technical capacity. Bacon summarized this orientation in the famous phrase that knowledge is power. The success of knowledge came to be measured less by understanding than by effectiveness.

    This transformation gave modern science and technology their extraordinary dynamism. Yet it also created a persistent tension. When knowledge is defined primarily as the ability to control natural processes, the question of the proper ends of that power becomes secondary. Technological development can proceed rapidly even when societies have not carefully considered the consequences for human communities, cultural life, or the natural environment.

 

 Thesis 12: Technology as Constitutional Structure

    Large technological systems shape the conditions under which social life operates. Transportation networks determine patterns of settlement. Communication systems influence public discourse. Energy systems shape industrial production and environmental conditions. Because such technologies define the framework within which society functions, they resemble constitutional structures. For this reason technological development should be treated as a subject of political deliberation rather than as a purely technical matter. Just because some corporation or research group can develop a particular technology is no reason that they should develop it.

 

Conclusion

Technological development alters the organization of society as profoundly as changes in political institutions. Technologies shape patterns of power, forms of work, the structure of communities, and even the psychology of individuals. Yet decisions about technological systems are often made without the kind of public deliberation that accompanies constitutional change. If democratic societies wish to preserve meaningful self-government, technological development must become an object of political reflection and collective decision, rather than as private property of enormous corporations, themselves fictively considered “persons” for legal purposes. The most important task is to bring technology back under the control of human beings devoted to human flourishing (community, the common good) and ecological sanity. This goes hand in hand with the task of going beyond capitalism.

      David Dickson writes in The Politics of Alternative Technology:

 

…technology plays a political role in society, a role intimately related to the distribution of power and the exercise of social control. It does this…in both a material and ideological fashion…. At a material level technology sustains and promotes the interests of the dominant group of the society within which it is developed. At the same time it acts in a symbolic matter to support and propagate the legitimating ideology of this society – the interpretation that is placed on the world and the individual’s place in it.

Like Dickson, I imagine a post-capitalist world in which an alternative technology serves real human needs:

This technology would embrace the tools, machines, and techniques necessary to reflect and maintain non-oppressive and non-manipulative modes of social production, and a non-exploitative relationship to the natural environment.

I hope and pray for that world. 

Technology – Selected Bibliography

 

Axelos, Kostas. Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx. Translated by Ronald Bruzina. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.

 

Dickson, David. Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change. London: Fontana, 1974.

 

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

 

Leiss, William. The Domination of Nature. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943.

 

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988.

 

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.

 

Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. London: Penguin, 1975.

 

McMurtry, John. The Structure of Marx’s World-View. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

 

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1934.

 

Mumford, Lewis. The Pentagon of Power. Vol. 2 of The Myth of the Machine. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

 

Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

 

Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 1982.

 

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

 

Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.

 

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

 

    The works listed above belong to an intellectual tradition that examines the social and philosophical foundations of modern technological civilization. I was introduced to most of these books by Professor Herbert Reid, University of Kentucky. I also recall Professor Ernest Yanerella as stimulating my thinking on this important part of political philosophy.