Transforming Dystopia with Democracy: The Technical Code and the Critical Theory of Technology

Abstract

This chapter addresses the impress of values beyond the strictly technical pursuit of effective means onto new technology and asks how the political ramifications of that process should be understood. It focuses on Andrew Feenberg’s idea of a technical code, which is a key concept in his thesis that technology design and use are always political. The idea of the technical code explains how nontechnical meanings and values get inscribed in technology, govern its use and place it in our social and cultural imaginaries. Its effectiveness runs from overdetermination of actions at the scene of design to the assignment of a particular symbolic place for technology, as against other classes of artifact, in social life. This signification varies between historical cultures and is one of the stakes in what Feenberg presents as a contested process involving social networks that include actors who may take sharply opposed interests in any given technology design. Feenberg’s progressive technical politics recommends democratic design practice to counter what he calls “hegemonic technological rationality,” which controls and is reproduced through the technical code. I argue that this conception of technical politics is inhibited in its development by the enduring influence of an outmoded conception of our technological culture, which Feenberg himself has repudiated as “dystopic.” The dominant articulation, hegemonic at the scene of design, is no longer best opposed solely with reference to democratization: other values must be brought into play.