CONCEPT
Technological Literacy
The capacity to read technology the way a citizen reads legislation — identifying embedded values, evaluating alternatives, and making informed judgments about whether the design serves her interests.
Technological literacy is Feenberg's name for the capacity citizens need to participate meaningfully in democratic rationalization. It is not the ability to code — though coding can be a component. It is the ability to examine a technical system and perceive the values encoded in its design, to imagine alternatives that would embody different values, and to make informed judgments about whose interests the current configuration serves. Technological literacy operates on the same logic as the literacy required for informed democratic citizenship in general: the citizen who can read legislation can participate in political deliberation in a way the citizen who cannot is structurally excluded from. For AI specifically, technological literacy is the precondition of political engagement with the technology rather than mere consumption of it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Technological literacy has multiple components. First, the capacity to recognize that technology embodies values — to see through the apparent neutrality of technical systems to the political choices they contain. This is