“The world in which we live today and which surrounds us, is a technological one,” wrote Günther Anders in 1979. The Cold War world, just as much as our own, was a world fundamentally shaped by technology. Technology’s promise included the automation of work, the possibility of abundance, the discovery of new cures for diseases, and the extension of life. These more hopeful claims sat alongside technological fears of the apocalyptic madness of the atom bomb, the dehumanizing effects of machine dominance, or the intrusion of mass media into every corner of the individual’s life. Such hopes and fears might also be held simultaneously: technology, it has so often been said, is merely a tool, a neutral instrument whose effects are the result of its operators.
A major group of political theorists in the Cold War period rejected the neutrality thesis, instead asserting that the character of modern technology was essentially totalitarian. These thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, Max Horkheimer, Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger, and Günther Anders, were radical sceptics of twentieth-century technology. It was a precondition for totalitarianism (enabling tools of propaganda, the control of persons, and the organisation of genocide), but more than this, these thinkers believed modern technology was totalitarian in an intrinsic sense. “In the face of the totalitarian features of this society, the traditional notion of the ‘neutrality’ of technology can no longer be maintained,” argued Marcuse. The justification for this claim is not immediately apparent. Technology, especially the technology of the Cold War, might provoke fear through the existential threat it seemed to pose to the world, but apocalypticism is not equivalent to totalitarianism as a form of political rule. So, in what sense was technology considered ‘totalitarian’?
Totalitarianism—as political reality—was known to these thinkers. In many cases, their worlds had been broken by totalitarianism. Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt, Anders, and Jonas were German-Jewish exiles; Ellul served in the French Resistance during the war, hiding from the French regime; Mumford lost his only son fighting on the Italian Front against the Nazis, having already lost his faith in the moral integrity of the Allied forces, who utilized, he argued, the same totalitarian means as their opponents. Heidegger, as a Nazi sympathiser and beneficiary of the regime (at least for a time), breaks the mold—but he also, of course, had a front row seat. Totalitarianism, all agreed, comprised a rupture in human history and a novel threat that was not limited to the Fascist or Soviet regimes, and had not been conclusively defeated by the fall of those regimes, or their most prominent leaders. Rather, totalitarianism was a pervasive threat of modernity, to be found anywhere and everywhere.
These theorists talked and wrote about ‘technology’ as such, in a style of usage which—although superficially familiar to the modern reader—in fact entails a set of claims about what technology is. They are not referring to an amalgamation of technologies, either as material objects, or even forms of knowledge, but rather claim that technology is a kind of practice in itself, one found only in modernity, and which realizes, through its enactment, the actual or material reality of ‘technologies’ in the world.
Modern technology is not only potentially destructive, these critics argued, but rather, destructiveness is written into modern technology. Contemporary technologies of war are distinct, they observed, because whereas technologies of war have historically been limited both in their potential, and the use they were put to, contemporary technologies of war are total in scope and ambition. They contain, in their capabilities, and in the intentions that produced such capabilities in the first place, the type of wholly irrational impulse to destruction that these thinkers believed characterized totalitarianism: a movement which did not simply use violence or war as a means to an end, but rather was premised upon perpetual violence.
Twentieth-century technology was also seen to embody, like totalitarian regimes, a radical form of wholly dehumanizing domination. Technologization as a form of social organization—sometimes referred to as ‘technique’—is an instrument for control and political domination, they argued, which moves towards an increasingly pure instrumentality. That is to say, technique is instrumental for the end of increased technological efficiency and expansion, rather than for the benefit of humans. Furthermore, the dynamic of such technology evades human control; it acts as a necessary force, restricting or abolishing spaces of freedom. It possesses its own principles of action, distinct from human ends or intentionality. Its domination is thus structural and insidious, akin to the ‘rule of no one,’ as Arendt describes modern bureaucratic rule. Thus, “it is necessity which characterizes the technical universe,” Ellul insisted. Totalitarianism was not the result of a “relapse into barbarism,” wrote Marcuse. It was the implementation of scientific and technological domination. The system “determines a priori the product of the apparatus,” he summarised. The tendency of the machine, claimed Anders, was to subjugate the world in its totality; “political totalitarianism…only represents an effect and variant of this fundamental technological fact.”
These critics of technology tended towards fatalism, or at least, the insistence that modernity, entangled in a fundamentally problematic technological system, would itself have to experience radical change if it were to escape the coming technological catastrophe. But they also offered more tangible political critiques, albeit not with straightforward solutions. Technology was a feature of modernity, present in all technologically developed nations, East and West. But, they argued, while Soviet leadership leaned into the ‘benefits’ of totalitarian technology for the purposes of control or surveillance, Western liberal democracies fancied their ideologies freed them from the threat of technological totalitarianism. The critics of technology told a different story. It is a central belief of liberalism, they argued, that history is progressive. For the critics, ‘technology’ and ‘progress’ describe equivalent processes, as modern society has come to understand them. A faith in ‘progress’ therefore equals a faith in technology: liberals are not only therefore blind to the intrinsic problems of technology, but their ideology accelerates technological totalitarianism. A similar story, it might also be said, could be told of the self-perceived progressiveness of communist politics in the Soviet Union. The supposed bipolarity of the world, the critics of technology argued, masked the global march towards the eventual triumph of technology over humans.
Yet, the predictions of the critics of technology have not come to pass. While we live, more than ever, in a technological world, with all its attendant problems, politics has not given way to totalitarianism. So why might we be interested in this extreme critique of technology today? Beyond the fact that this position was held by some of the most influential thinkers in twentieth-century political thought, and in attenuated versions, by many more of their peers, these writings might also alert us to some truths about the character of modern technology. In particular, this critique can help us to recognize the now-unavoidable politicization of the concept of technology. This has two aspects. First, because from at least the mid-nineteenth century, technology has become part of politics, in the sense that it has become embedded in our political ideologies, even our ways of thinking about the world. It has become an essential political concept. Furthermore, the fact that we use the term so frequently and with such familiarity does not mean it easily corresponds to the material technologies it seems to refer to. What, after all, do dishwashers and tractors substantially have in common with AI or vaccines, beyond their ‘technological’ character? The idea of ‘technology’ is itself an ideological construction. This might take different forms, ‘technology’ might be thought to change the world for better, or worse, but the politicization of the term means that it cannot be understood as a mere neutral, background process. Thus, claims for the neutrality of technology, whether they may have been plausible in the past, are today wholly unsustainable.
Caroline Ashcroft
Caroline Ashcroft is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford. She works in twentieth century political theory and history of political thought and her current research explores the intersection of science and technology with politics in the twentieth century, particularly in radical critiques of technology and environmental political theory. Her most recent book is Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
