Technology Critique

Directory

Who's who in technology criticism

Evgeny Morozov on the U.S. tradition:

"Most contemporary American critics of technology—from Jaron Lanier to Andrew Keen to Sherry Turkle—fall into the cultural-romantic or conservative camps. They bemoan the arrogant thrust of technological thinking as it clashes with human traditions and fret over what an ethos of permanent disruption means for the configuration of the liberal self or the survival of its landmark institutions, from universities to newspapers. So do occasional fellow travelers who write literary essays or works of fiction attacking Silicon Valley—Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, and Leon Wieseltier have all penned passionate tracts that seek to defend humanistic values from the assault of technology. They don’t shy away from attacking Internet companies, but their attacks mostly focus on the values and beliefs of the companies’ founders, as if the tech entrepreneurs could simply be talked out of the disruption that they are wreaking on the world. If Mark Zuckerberg would just miraculously choose a tome by Isaiah Berlin or Karl Kraus for his ongoing reading marathon, everything could still go back to normal.

Meanwhile, a more radical strand of tech criticism, confined mostly to university professors, barely registers on the public radar. Those—like Robert McChesney or Dan Schiller or Vincent Mosco—who work on technology, media, and communications within Marxist analytical frameworks, hardly get any attention at all. The last radical critics to enrich the broader public debate on technology were probably Murray Bookchin and Lewis Mumford; for both, technology was a key site for struggle, but their struggles, whether for social ecology or against hierarchical bureaucracy, were not about technology as such." (http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism)