CONCEPT
One-Dimensional Thought
Marcuse's 1964 diagnosis of the cognitive pathology of advanced industrial society: the reduction of reason to instrumental calculation — and the contemporary concern that AI is producing a new form of one-dimensionality.
One-dimensional thought is the term Herbert Marcuse gave in 1964 to the characteristic cognitive pathology of advanced industrial societies — the systematic reduction of reason to instrumental calculation, the closure of the horizon of alternatives, the absorption of critical distance into the dominant system's operational logic. In Marcuse's diagnosis, the system's success at satisfying the needs it had generated produced a population incapable of recognizing needs the system did not generate. The critique was not that the system was oppressive in the classical sense but that it had become so effective at providing what it defined as satisfaction that the cognitive capacities required to imagine alternative forms of satisfaction had atrophied.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Feenberg's engagement with the concept throughout his career has been more complex than either wholesale endorsement or rejection. From Marcuse, Feenberg inherited the analytical framework — the recognition that advanced industrial technology shapes not only what people do but how they think, the concern