Feb 30 reactions - Misa, Brey, and Feenberg

When someone asked him why the Chinese civilization, being more ancient than any of the western world, never arrived in a scientific stage, Albert Einstein simply replied that the point was not why they didn't do it, but why the western civilization did. The social and economic environment that gave birth to the philosophy in Greece shaped the western civilization in such way that, for him, the 'technological stage' was a necessity and a natural consequence. In other words, Brey says flatly: “Technology is socially shaped” (p 50).

Reading this book makes me fell that we all live, as nicely put by Misa, in the “impossibility of escaping this tangle of technology and modernity…” (p. 4). That is: to think of technology (=the tools) detached from modernity (=the environment). However, some of the authors, although they mention the decisive contribution of Marx, Weber, and the School of Frankfurt to the theory of modernity, seem to frame technology as an isolated phenomenum. To me, that can't be such, since many technologies existed years (if not centuries) before they become necessary in the system in which they were employed. Galileo said: "Eppur si muove", facing the sad fact that his science did not match the social needs of his time.

Misa offers a possible answer to this problem in the beginning of the book: "The micro-approach destroys the macro-analysis of technology, since it presents in great detail the context in which certain technologies were created and deployed." (p. 10)

"The artist is the antenna of the race", said Ezra Pound in his book "Art and Physics". As such, he's able to foresee a change, to imprint his vision in some way, and such artistic expression is seen as the expression of change itself. Perhaps the blurry atmosphere envisioned by George Orwell in his 1984 didn't come to reality quite in the way he described it, are we sure that we are not recreating some of those things with other names and shapes? Aren't we fighting for or against the same values, only for different reasons? Aren't some of the techniques employed by the governing forces of that book the same we regard as being capital in our state-nations?