ABSTRACT
Most significant philosophy of technology has been critical of instru-mentalism. Critics of modernity from Rousseau to Adorno and Heidegger have argued that technique does not merely extend our capacities making it easier to hunt, kill or cook but radically alters our self-understanding, our aims and our relationship to the world. Unlike Heidegger, Ellul does not use a transcendentalist methodology to formulate his substantivist account. The problem confronted by Berners-Lee was that work at CERN required a very large quantity of information to be made available to computers using different viewing software, for example, with incompatible fonts or formats. A metaphysics of technical repetition needs, then, to be sensitive both to the abstract, repeatable nature of the technical individual emphasized by Simondon and the historical particularity of modes of repetition. Andrew Feenberg believes that technology should be more democratic and argues that the democratic control and legitimation of technology is possible where design choice is under-determined relative to individual techniques.
