ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relation between cultural and ecological critiques of advanced technology, on the one hand, and the moral and political critique that it is unjustly distributed, on the other. It traces and defines the so-called Luddite tradition as referring to diverse condemnations of how the impersonal logic of the market can yield technical contraptions that empower some while disempowering others. Because such discontents are moral, experiential, and difficult to articulate in rational terms, the artifacts themselves are frequently challenged. Critiques of technology are traced from nineteenth-century Romantic literature in Britain and the United States through critical philosophers and historians of technology to modern environmentalists and ecosaboteurs. The Luddites, the Romantics, the dystopian philosophers, and the environmentalists have all challenged a technological rationality conditioned by the world market – a general science of designing means-ends procedures as efficiently as possible – but their critiques have not been connected to concerns about inequities of global distribution. No longer constrained by local affordances, the modern disembeddedness of technological rationality is entwined with the disembeddedness of the market. In not recognising these social prerequisites of artifacts, the imputation of volition to the aggregate forces of technology can be seen as a form of fetishism.
