Andrew Feenberg > Quotes

“Yet because the foundations of our political philosophies and constitutions were elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is still a tendency to distinguish sharply between politics and technology, the one supposedly based on rights, the other on knowledge. Much political theory argues that consensus can be achieved through the democratic exercise of those rights. In reality, political consensus is largely shaped by the available technological form of life rather than rational deliberation. But today most technological choices are privately made and are protected from public involvement by property rights and technocratic ideology. What can be done to reverse the tide? The”
― Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity

“As more actors gained access to the design process, a wider range of valuative considerations would inform technical choices. These formal changes would result in new technical designs and new ways of achieving the efficiencies that characterize modern technological activity. Whether”
― Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity

“An alternative modernity worthy of the name would recover the mediating power of ethics and aesthetics. This would be accomplished not by a return to blind traditionalism but through the democratization of technically mediated institutions. Power”
― Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity

“History does matter. If the option finally chosen seems superior to the others (for instance, the combustion engine that made the development of electric vehicles difficult or even impossible, or a technological standard that prevails owing to the network externalities created by the first adopters), it is because it has benefited from incomparably greater technical, scientific, economic, and political investments than have the alternatives. As the economists of innovation say, it is not because it is superior that a technology is chosen, but rather because it is chosen that it becomes superior. This”
― Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity

“To paraphrase Feenberg commenting on Heidegger, we could say that the form taken by technologies stems not only from experts' intervention but also from that of the concerned groups that have been allowed to contribute to their shaping. And just as there are good and bad sculptors who are more or less skilled in seeing what is inessential in the stone they are sculpting, so too there are good and bad ways of identifying and involving (or not involving) concerned groups. To”
― Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity

“Keeping the future open by refraining from making irrevocable decisions that one could eventually regret, requires vigilance, reflection, and sagacity at all times. Politics, as the art of preserving the possibility of choices and debate on those choices, is therefore at the heart of technological dynamics.”
― Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity