ABSTRACT

Technology circulates within society and reconfigures foundational social relations. As Marx wrote, technology ‘lays bare the process of the production of social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that from flow those relations’ (Marx 1867: 493–4). Technology – a system of knowledge, skills, practices and discourses arranged in order to make some change the world (Barry 2001) – is neither static nor separated from human capacity; rather, it is emergent and shifting in relation to social life. Science and technology scholars detail the complex, political dimensions that technologies, devices and practices bear on social life (Barry 2001; White and Wilbert 2009) and how rending problems ‘technical’ is a political practice and exercise of power (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007; Robertson 2010).