Technological Rationality as Domination

Marcuse's 1941 redefinition of technology, maintained and deepened across four decades: technology is not a set of tools people use but a social process in which humans and machines are integrated into a single system with its own rationality. The rationality embedded in the apparatus — optimization, efficiency, measurable output — does not merely influence those who use it. It constitutes them. It becomes their way of seeing the world. This is domination more effective than any ideology because it does not present itself as a belief. It presents itself as reality. Artificial intelligence is technological rationality in its most complete expression: every interaction with a large language model is an exercise in optimization, and every exercise reinforces the assumption that optimization is the appropriate relationship to the world. The colonization proceeds domain by domain — writing, education, parenting — each conquest extending the territory of operational thinking into regions that had operated according to different logics.