PERSON
Andrew Feenberg
The Canadian philosopher of technology (b. 1943) who dismantled the
myth of the neutral tool—arguing, through four decades of critical constructivism, that every technical artifact encodes a politics, that the design of technology is a scene of struggle over whose values it will serve, and that democratic intervention in that design is both possible and necessary.
In 1999, Andrew Feenberg published a sentence that would take a quarter-century to find its most consequential application: “What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements.” It is a claim so large it is easy to mistake for rhetoric, but Feenberg meant it literally and could argue it rigorously: technology is not neutral in the soft sense that “it depends how you use it,” which Silicon Valley has domesticated into a marketing slogan, but in the hard sense that the design of a technical system embodies specific values, privileges specific users, and forecloses specific alternatives regardless of the intentions of anyone who picks it up. The theory he built to demonstrate this—he calls it
critical constructivism—synthesizes
the Frankfurt School’s