Shaping Concepts of Technology Book

In Transforming Technology (2002), Andrew Feenberg proposes and develops a critical theory of technology, drawing on the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School, Marx, and Foucault. He critiques the instrumental theory of technology that views technology as neutral tools, and the substantive theory that views technology as a "system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control" (5-6). Both of these views tend to propose that we limit technology, rather than transform it (8). 

According to Feenberg, "Critical theory argues that technology is . . . an 'ambivalent' process of development suspended between different possibilities. . . . On this view, technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle" (15). Potentiality is central to Feenberg's argument: existing society contains suppressed potentiality for better alternatives (27) and technologies should be opened to a wider array of values (34). He also proposes the term "technical code" to understand "the rule under which technical choices are made in view of preserving operational autonomy (i.e., the freedom to make similar choices in the future" (77). These codes classify actions as possible or forbidden and attaches those actions to meanings or purposes to give them explanatory power (76).