CONCEPT

Technological Rationality

Marcuse's 1941 argument that technology is not a tool used by people but a social process in which people and machines are integrated into a single system with its own logic—a logic of efficiency, optimization, and measurable output that constitutes a form of domination more effective than any ideology because it presents itself not as a belief but as reality.

In 1941, before Horkheimer and Adorno published the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Herbert Marcuse made a move that changed the stakes of critical theory. The question, he argued, was not what technology does to people who use it but what it means that people are themselves integral parts and factors of a technological process. Technology is not a tool. It is a social arrangement, and the arrangement has its own rationality: a way of determining what counts as a good reason, a valid question, and a legitimate form of understanding. The logic of efficiency, optimization, and measurable output does not argue for itself—it assumes itself, presenting itself as common sense, as the way things naturally are. This is what makes it domination: not prohibition but the structuring of reality so that alternatives become unintelligible. Artificial intelligence

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