The preceding chapter was an extended meditation on some of the conceptual underpinnings of philosophical nihilism and of its close relation, relativism. Specifically, that chapter represents an attempt to vindicate the standpoint of the meaningful by clearing a rational space for a critique oriented by such a standard. Both nihilism and relativism are today associated with a social and cultural condition labeled ‘postmodern’ or with that subset of intellectual positions labeled ‘poststructuralist.’1 Hence the ultimate point of my critique in that chapter was to justify our continuing to take projects of critical rationality seriously-to justify the legitimacy of critical reason in the face of the poststructuralist or postmodern challenge. It makes a difference, of course, whether one understands the characteristics and tendencies commonly called to mind by these labels to be attributes of an historical condition or stage or, alternatively, to be those of a family of intellectual stances or sensibilities coexisting, however uneasily, with other, contrasting stances or sensibilities. However, what will interest me for now are those very characteristics and inclinations, be they of a really existing constellation of historical and cultural forces or of a consciousness that would celebrate those forces. My concern in this chapter is to draw the threads of my treatment of technology together with those of my allusions to postmodernismarguably technology’s current social context, at least in the West-to the end of making explicit some of the implications of my discussion for the conduct of a life and for the role of technology within it.