ABSTRACT
Technology is touted typically as an agent of social dynamism. Technical progress is said to perpetuate a culture of creative destruction by subverting established practices in ways that enhance the dynamic of control to the ostensible benefit of humankind. What remains largely unquestioned with this popular reading of technological advance is the set of assumptions that sustain the worldview upon which the technological project is grounded. Is the ethic of control that informs the progressive reordering of reality aligned with the order of things in a manner that permits the realization of the technological ideal of total mastery? It is argued here that, by misreading the ’reality problematic’, the technological worldview sets up the conditions that lead to the undermining of the ethic of control. Employing Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of technology as a guide, it is shown how the modern project to humanize reality is itself subverted by a dynamic of greater potency. In an ironic twist, working to have the world conform to our designs for it leads simultaneously to a heightened awareness of the ways the world eludes domination.
