Spe 67
نویسنده
چکیده
I ntroduction The degree to which the ongoing transformation of the world into a single global market has been represented as a natural and inevitable process indicates how successful that project has been so far. As a result, opposition to this process is often seen as a quixotic crusade, quaint and poignant but ultimately irrelevant and dismissible in mainstream debates. But the origins of this appearance of inevitability are not clear: how does a process arising from a set of political and economic decisions made by humans come to be represented as natural? The factors that contribute to this illusion are no doubt complex and numerous, but one such factor—the understanding of the role of technology—can be identified as central. Technologies are often seen as the physical manifestation of natural scientific truths, and if the operation of the technologies is understood as requiring a certain structure of social relations, then the conclusion must be that the existing structure is the only option available for society. The social forces that they support can appear to be in accordance with the way the world works, in some apparently objective sense. The source of the historical change can be identified as the technology itself, since its introduction can be represented as inevitable, since it merely manifests objectively existing powers in nature. This line of thought, known as “technological determinism,” is one of the most important forms of ideology behind the contemporary neoliberal discourse, constituting a new form of reification: the tendency to make social relations and the products of human decisions look natural. This essay examines this idea and its deployment, and attempts to present a more critical understanding of the relationship between technological development and political and economic change.
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