Below I've included some snippets from my lecture on Technological Rationality from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

Last class we discussed the essay "Can Technology Replace Social Engineering" and then finished off with perhaps the most well-known dissenting voice towards technology, the Luddites of the early 19th Century. There were of course other dissenting voices towards technological progress throughout that century. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1816), or the modern equivalence, the movie Jurassic Park, was essentally a fable about an out-of-control technology. Shelly's story is an early warning against something that Lewis Mumford in the 1960s called the Technological Imperative: i.e., if it is technologically possible to make something, then it should be made.

In America there were also dissenting voices. In Melville's Moby Dick, captain Ahab is often described in mechanistic/technological language. Ahab says "All my means are sane, my motives and my object is made." Ahab is a story about a man who has become a machine working against a white whale that represents a pre-technological Nature. Melvilles's work is an early example of a growing unease amongst a minority of thinkers towards the rapidly changing world of the late 19th Century. Perhaps two of the most insightful of these turn of the century dissenters were Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen.

Veblen was an American sociologist and economist whose writings focused on the social development of American-style capitalism. In our reading from The Theory of Business Enterprise, Veblen argues that the "technological character of the machine process" has an impact outside of the factory or office. Technology and its processes has a "disciplinary effect" on the people using it; it "compels the adaption of the worker to his work."

The "discipline of the machine industry inculcates in its workers ... regularity of sequence and mechanical precision." That is, it "inculcates thinking in terms of cause and effect to the neglect of those norms of validity that rest on usage."

Thus, for Veblen, efficiency has become the ruling evaluative/normative framework of life inside and outside of the office.

Weber was a German sociologist and economist whose writings focussed on the development and eventual triumph of modern rationality. I've given you a selection from the conclusion of his most important and well-read book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This book is still available, is still being read, and is still debated, unlike perhaps Veblen.

In the earlier part of the book, Weber argues that modern capitalism (and thus the modern world) requires a certain way of thinking, a certain way of looking at the world. Weber's thesis was that this way of thinking developed as a result of the early Protestant/Calvinist/Puritan ethic of predestination. This gloomy theological doctrine insists that since God is all-knowing, He knows and has chosen in advance who will be saved and who will be damned. The somewhat surprising result of the early protestant embrace of presdestination is that it instilled a type of individualism, since believers could gain some self-assurance of their salvation through tireless labour in their profession. According to Weber, Catholics performed good works when needed to assage guilt, Protestants systematically laboured. This ascetic ethic thus favoured the rational pursuit of economic gain (not riches but investments) by these Protestants.

In our reading, Weber concludes his book by noting that with the religious basis of capitalism long gone, all that is left is the machinery of modern capitalism and its way of thinking.

The "modern economic order ... is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determines the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism ... with irresistable force." It will "determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt."

What does Veblen and Weber have to say to us today? Recall our definition of technology: that it is not just the things, but the processes, and their system, meaning roughly the type of thinking that technology requires. These two writers are focusing not on the things but on the way of thinking that modern technology requires. Both these writers see humans locked into a way of being as a result of their technology. Both see technology imposing a way of thinking.