This chapter contains sections titled: Technology and the Development of Capitalism Monopoly and Welfare State Capitalism Technology and Late Capitalism.

A dazzling blend of business vision, history, social psychology, and economics, The Support Economy starts with a compelling premise: People have changed more than the corporations upon which their well-being depends. In the chasm that now separates the new individuals from the old organizations is the opportunity to forge a capitalism suited to our times and so unleash a vast new potential for wealth creation. In recent years, many books have offered fixes for this crisis, but they have dealt (...) only with its symptoms. The Support Economy is the first book to critically examine its cause: Managerial capitalism has outlived the society it was once designed to serve. It successfully achieved the efficient production of goods and services, but today's individuals want more. They want to take their lives into their own hands and are ready to pay for the support and advocacy necessary to fulfill that yearning. The next leap forward in wealth creation depends upon developing a new capitalism that speaks to the needs of people today. The Support Economy will be the next "must read" big think book. It speaks to every business and technology leader, as well as every reader interested in the future of the economy and society. (shrink)

The last one hundred years has seen unimaginable technological progress transforming every aspect of human life. Yet we seem unable to shake a profound unease with the direction of modern technology and its ideological siblings, global capitalism and massive consumption. Philosophers such as Marcuse, Borgmann and especially Heidegger, have developed important analyses of technological society, however in this book David Lewin argues that their ideas have remained limited either by their secular context, or by the narrow conception of (...) religion that they do allow. This study guides the reader along the newly formed paths of the philosophy of technology, arguing that where those paths come to an abrupt end, a religious discourse is needed to articulate the ultimate concerns that drive technological action. It calls for a meditation on the central insight of many religious traditions that, in an ultimate sense, we 'know not what we do.' To acknowledge that we know not what we do is the first step towards a theology of technology that draws upon insights from the mystical theological tradition, as well as from recent developments in the continental philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The debate on sustainable globalized development rests on two clearly stated economic assumptions: that "development" proceeds, solely and inevitably, through industrialization and the proliferation of capital intensive high-technology, towards the creation of service sector economies; and that globalization, based on a neoliberal, capitalist, free market ideology, provides the only vehicle for such development. Sustainability, according to the proponents of globalized development, is merely a function of market forces, which will generate the solutions for all problems (...) including the environmental dilemmas that loom over the globe today. The social focus of globalized development is clearly the "individual" and the much-touted goal of development in the context of these debates, is the emancipation of the individual from want. This glorification of the individual, so characteristic of the Enlightenment, has defined all aspects of modernity, leading to approaches that are self-focused and that give little thought to the needs of society or even the social context. The increasing impoverishment of human life and the growing environmental degradation, however, provide a poignant counterpoint to this onrush of capital interests, demanding a reassessment of sustainability separate from the logic of industrialization and globalized development. This paper examines the unfolding of the logic of capitalism, which underlies the structure of the Rostowian model of development and the problems in the assumptions underlying today''s globalized development process. The evident impossibility of sustainability in the current growth-based market system leads to the examination of alternatives including a reflexive understanding of the choices and the inclusion of opportunity costs, related to the social, environmental and economic aspects of decision making. The integration of all factors of production into the logic of development provides a sustainable alternative to the current system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Nature (Ziran 自然) of Technological and Economic Development in Early DaoismYumi Suzuki (bio)I. IntroductionEric Nelson's Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life provides comprehensive guidance on how early and later Daoist thought could offer both ideological and practical solutions to contemporary environmental issues. Nelson does not simple-mindedly claim that Daoists are environmentalists or that Daoism is comparable with modern environmental thought. His monograph has a more sophisticated, and (...) also more ambitious and consequently philosophically provocative, goal: to evolutionally develop old Daoist thought to directly address contemporary philosophical discourses on the environment.1I have summarized elsewhere what I find to be the most significant and meaningful contributions this book has made.2 I think its goal has successfully been achieved in various ways: Nelson gives careful and accurate interpretations to each passage from the original texts.3 What he calls "the new Daoism" deployed on the basis of these interpretations is reasonable and uncontroversial. The monograph overall offers an exemplary model of how wisdom acquired through studying the history of philosophy can be adapted to cogitating on newly emerging philosophical questions, despite differences in the intellectual contexts that we are required to warily distinguish. Moreover, by focusing on the Daoist tradition in East Asia, it well demonstrates how other systems of philosophical thought can be usefully employed to critically reflect on fundamental assumptions that an existing system is already committed to and that could be the very cause of relevant philosophical and pragmatic problems.While I mostly agree with his arguments in chapters 1–4 and 6, the only part I found unsatisfactory is chapter 5, "Early Daoist Biopolitics and a New [End Page 771] Daoist Political Ecology" (pp. 100–118). The present review aims to elaborate reasons for my resistance to Nelson's all-out endorsement of what he regards as the sociopolitical implications of Daoism. When it comes to politics, it appears to me, early Daoist texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi express often disappointingly ambiguous and agnostic attitudes toward what can be done with respect to their doctrinal opponents and outsiders. My suggestion is that if we examine the explorations of their contenders, that is, mainly Confucians and Legalists, concerning political and technological devices, they may present an altogether less biased and more balanced range of solutions to a question Nelson raises regarding an environmental challenge associated with a competitive globalized economy and rapidly developing technologies in our modern age.II. A Challenge to the Current Environmental MovementChapter 5 begins with the following statement:Appeals to encountering the myriad things in their environmental contexts and relations are necessary for an ecological transformation of existing cultures and societies. Yet an environmental ethos and culture of nature is not sufficient given how systematically reproduced social-economic processes in advanced capitalist societies meditate, entangle, and obstruct the transformative potential of such encounters. To this extent, an adequate environmental philosophy must concurrently be social-political philosophy that can offer an environmentally oriented critique of existing social structures and institutions that directly and indirectly harm creatures and degrade ecosystems in myriad ways such that transformations must transpire in economic and societal structures as well as at the level of individual cultivation and reflections.(p. 100)Nelson maintains that even though it is cardinal to transform the ways in which the myriad things encounter and mutually correspond with each other, as well as alter their own existential state, by cultivating an environmental ethos and culture of nature in each individual and society, one of the most serious challenges for such transformations could originate with already existing capitalist, materialist, and consumerist social structures and institutions widely prevailing and deeply embedded in the highly complex economic and political systems of our age.This, I think, captures the core problem of modern environmentalism. An individual, a group of people such as nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, or a single city or country might be convinced by the Daoist "biospiritual" mode of life. Nevertheless, it appears to be far more difficult in practice to have certain countries or multinational mega-firms abandon their steadfast, primary commitment to national, industrial, commercial, or corporate missions to pursue their own benefits that deprioritize or... (shrink)

The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved in clinical (...) reproductive applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

El artículo menciona el giro en favor de los enfoques participativos o comprometidos políticamente en el campo CTS, realizando una propuesta para su profundización desde una senda alineada con la teoría crítica de la tecnología. Inspirado en los aportes de Andrew Feenberg y Johan Söderberg, el artículo emprende esta tarea mediante la conjunción de conceptos de la perspectiva de la construcción social de la tecnología con aquellos de una tradición hegeliano-marxista interesada en visiones del sistema capitalista como una totalidad que (...) limita la contingencia en el desarrollo tecnológico. Así, propone el rescate de conceptos como clase, capitalismo y lógica del capital, para la comprensión del desarrollo tecnológico. En el curso de esta tarea, el relativismo constructivista es considerado un problema central para profundizar este giro y se lo reemplaza por una evaluación de los códigos técnicos y del contexto social más amplio que el capitalismo representa. En el trascurso del texto, se expone una reutilización de los conceptos constructivistas con arreglo a los intereses de una posición alineada con la teoría crítica de la tecnología. Así, el concepto "marco tecnológico" se asociará con el de "código técnico", de Feenberg, y con el rescate de la lógica mercantil pregonada por la teoría crítica y Söderberg. The paper mentions the turn in favor of participatory or politically engaged approaches in the STS field, and outlines a proposal for deepening this turn within a critical theory of technology route. Inspired in the contributions of Andrew Feenberg and Johan Söderberg, the paper undertakes this task through a combination of concepts from the perspective of social construction of technology with those of a Hegelian-Marxist tradition interested in visions of the capitalist system as a whole posing limits to contingency in technological development. Thus, it offers to rescue such concepts as class, capitalism, market relations and logic of the capital, to better understand technological development. During this task, constructivist relativism is considered a central problem to deepen this turn and thus replaced by an assessment of the technical codes and the wider social context represented by capitalism. In the following parts the paper presents a reuse of constructivist concepts according to the interests of a position aligned with critical theory of technology. Thus, the concept of "technological frame" will be associated with Feenberg's "technical code" and with the rescue of the market logic advocated by critical theory and Söderberg. (shrink)

All biotechnology-related promises are based upon its technological potential; yet, many of these promises assure the solution for chronic socio-economic problems in the Third World through a new technological revolution in agriculture. The forecasting is that such a revolution will start delivering its most profound impact early in the 21st century. However, 11 years before the year 2000, a critical analysis of its promises against its current trends indicates that the future use and impact of biotechnology in the Third World (...) rely presently upon crucial contradictions.As a result of such contradictions—Social Goals vs. Private Gains, Social Problems vs. Technical Solutions, Agricultural vs. Industrial Revolution, Cooperation vs. Competition, and Control over Nature vs. Control Over People—there is a high likelihood that (1) traditional farming will become increasingly obsolete, (2) technological and economic dependence of developing on developed countries will persist and even increase, (3) food and fiber production will be increasingly dislocated from developing to developed countries and from farms to industries, (4) the market for specific tropical products will be destroyed and therefore entire economies may collapse, (5) hunger and poverty will persist and even increase, and (6) social unrest may increase worldwide. (shrink)

International economic law is peculiar. It claims universal character, yet eschews engagement with many, if not all, the racialised features of the global political economy. Its scholars mostly ignore imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; they exclude slavery, predation, and racism altogether. In the following article, we draw upon Walter Rodney’s dialectics of development to offer a racial capitalist critique of international economic law. The disciplinary boundaries and operative logic normalised by its denizens corral us in a white, Eurocentric episteme. (...) Ahistoricism, decontextualisation, and externalisation are three epistemic devices at the forefront of the exclusionary discourse of IEL. In this space, the histories and epistemologies of Black peoples are ghettoised, treated as alien to the framework. After identifying this bias, we use the Black Radical Tradition to evaluate IEL’s amenability to the racial capitalism critique. (shrink)

Economist-philosopher Amartya Sen's writings on social and political issues have attracted wide audiences. Section 2 introduces his contributions on: how people reason as agents within society; social determinants of people's (lack of) access to goods and of the effective freedoms and agency they enjoy or lack; and associated advocacy of self-specification of identity and high expectations for ‘voice’ and reasoning democracy. Section 3 considers his relation to social theory, his tools for theorizing action in society, and his limited degree of (...) attention to work by sociologists and to capitalism and power structures. Section 4 characterizes a style marked by conceptual refinement, emphases on complexity and individuality, including personal individuality, and reformist optimism. Section 5 shows the features from Sections 3 and 4 at work in his conception of personhood that advocates freedom to make a reasoned composition of personal identity. Similarly, Section 6 addresses his conception of public reasoning and neglect of the sociology of democracy. It contrasts the ideal of a reasoning polity with features in many countries. Sen's programmes for critical autonomy in personhood and for reasoned politics play, nevertheless, a normic role, while his analytical formats help investigation of obstacles to more widespread agency, voice, and democratic participation. (shrink)

Formal, informal and material institutions constitute the framework for human interaction and communicative practice. Three ideas from institutional theory are particularly relevant to technical change. Exclusion cost refers to the effort that must be expended to prevent others from usurping or interfering in one’s use or disposal of a given good or resource. Alienability refers to the ability to tangibly extricate a good or resource from one setting, making it available for exchange relations. Rivalry refers to the degree and character (...) of compatibility in various uses for goods. The paper closes with a note on how attention to these factors might be useful ways to conceptualize what Langdon Winner has called “the technological constitution of society,” and what Andrew Feenberg has theorized as “secondary rationalization,” as well as within more practical contexts of technical research, development and design. (shrink)

This article represents a preliminary attempt to conceptualize the relationship between technology and global inequality, using a political economy of the world-system perspective. Despite the crucial role that technical innovation and adaptation play in the process of international development, many macroanalyses of social change focus little explicit attention on technology. Only neoevolutionary theory discusses its role in long-term social change, and then in ways that miss some key dimensions. The author argues that technology is a social (...) product designed to fit the needs of the rich and powerful. In the contemporary world, it is usually produced by a highly organized research and development industry, often explicitly linked to military- industrial complexes. Rhetoric about increased globalization notwithstanding, technology is a key resource in the present capitalist world-economy that is very unevenly dtstributed, with the advanced industrial "core" states controlling technological innovation and dissemination. Even newly industrializing countries like South Korea, which many consider technologically sophisticated, experience profound technological dependence, limiting their prospects for truly autonomous economic growth. Differential control of technology and techno logical innovation is a defining trait of global inequality in the late twentieth century. (shrink)

Taking the Heideggerian critical ontology of technology as its base, this volume looks at postcolonial modernization and development in the global south as the worldwide expansion of the western metaphysical understanding of reality. We live today in an increasingly globalizing technological society that Martin Heidegger described in the middle of the last century as 'the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man.' Consequent upon this cultural-intellectual globalization, the ahistorical, violent, individualistic, calculative and capitalistic logic of the metaphysics of (...) class='Hi'>technology is permeating the life-world, even of the world's poorest peoples, in ways they could neither choose nor control. This volume questions the political ethics and justice of post-war development discourse in the light of the egalitarian aims of modern societies, cultural freedom of communities and nations, and the ecological limits of the planet. The final chapters discuss the alternative proposal of development as various conceptions of good life and equitable human flourishing amidst equally flourishing non-human life and non-living beings. This unique volume is the first book-length treatment of the ontology of modernization and development in the global south from a Heideggerian stance. (shrink)

The developing countries are currently undergoing a perhaps unprecedented technological revolution that has given new credence and life to the concept of alienation after a period of relative decline in which M arxian, existentialist, and other modern discourses were replaced with postmodern perspectives skeptical or critical of the concept of alienation. In this paper, I want to suggest that emergent information and communication technologies and the restructuring of global capitalism require us to rethink the problematics of technology and (...) alienation. If it is true that we are undergoing a Great Transformation, one of the epochal shifts within the history of capitalism, that the new technologies are taking us into a novel field of cultural experience and that the very nature of human identity and social relations are changing, then obviously we need to develop fresh theories to analyze these changes and politics to respond to them.2 For many, the changes underway on a global scale are as thorough-going and dramatic as the shift from the stage of market and competitive and laissez-faire capitalism theorized by M arx to the stage of state monopoly capitalism critically analyzed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.3 Theorizing this ongoing and epic transformation requires critical social theory to engage anew the relations between the economy, state, culture industry, science and technology, social institutions and everyday life as radically as the Frankfurt School revised classical M arxism in the 1930s. In this context, talking about technology and alienation is not just an academic affair, the latest twist in the discourse of alienation or of technology, but rather concerns the fate of the human being in the contemporary world and thus requires serious reflection and discussion whether the changes in society, culture, and human existence are or are not beneficial, and what we can do to promote a positive outcome and prevent a harmful one.. (shrink)

One effect of late capitalism – the commodification of practically everything – is to knock down the Chinese walls between the natural and productive realms, to use a Marxist framework. Women's labour in egg extraction and ‘surrogate’ motherhood might then be seen as what it is, labour which produces something of value. But this does not necessarily mean that women will benefit from the commodification of practically everything, in either North or South. In the newly developing biotechnologies involving stem (...) cells, the reverse is more likely, particular given the shortage in the North of the egg donors who will be increasingly necessary to therapeutic cloning.Although most of the ethical debate has focused on the status of the embryo, this is to define ethics with no reference to global or gender justice. There has been little or no debate about possible exploitation of women, particularly of ovum donors from the South. Countries of the South without national ethics committees or guidelines may be particularly vulnerable: although there is increasing awareness of the susceptibility of poorer countries to abuses in research ethics, very little has been written about how they might be affected by the enormously profitable new technologies exploiting human tissue. Even in the UK, although the new Medical Research Council guidelines make a good deal of the ‘gift relationship’, what they are actually about is commodification. If donors believe they are demonstrating altruism, but biotechnology firms and researchers use the discourse of commodity and profit, we have not ‘incomplete commodification’ but complete commodification with a plausibly human face. (shrink)

The fundamental question in the Marxist theory of revolution is that of the socioeconomic and class content of a revolution. Under today's conditions this question takes on primary significance and is central to the ideological struggle. Compelled to recognize the role of revolution in the development of society, bourgeois sociologists strive, however, to give the concept of revolution a new content, eliminating its class essence. Inasmuch as the revolution in science and technology now in progress is significantly changing (...) the face of the contemporary world, it is characteristic of leading Western sociologists that they seek to present the changes resulting from the technological revolution as a qualitative change in the existing system, a "transformation" of capitalism. "It is a fact," writes the prominent American sociologist and economist Adolph Berle, "that during and after the First World War the entire world was steeped in revolution, and that its base was substantially more technological than social." Technological and not social changes in society are thus proclaimed to be the most important problem of our time. (shrink)

The process of integration of digital technologies into the structure of social production and distribution leads to a series of definite trends in capitalist development. These trends are regular and interdependent. The acceleration of information exchange provides an opportunity to replace the Fordism with a thriftier network model, which involves outsourcing and reducing the longevity of contractual obligations and hiring relationships, which leads to the precarization of labor of a certain social group, which can be described as “precariat”. The (...) change in working conditions leads to the change in ways of increasing labor productivity, which is the reason for the emergence of “societies of control” characterized by: distributed power, embedding previously external coercion into the personality, affective engineering, prolongation of the educational process, increasing tempo and rhythm of work, spreading the project as the form of work replacing routine forms, and the emergence of a liquid short-term identity inherent in representatives of the precariat. This article aims to discover and demonstrate the interconnection between these processes. Achieving this goal will open the way to a more thorough separate study of each of these processes in the future but this research will be made from the perspective of their systemic unity. According to the purpose of the article, the structure of work is the following: the first section is devoted to the acceleration of social time, which is connected with the compression of social space and with the change in scale in which commercial and state enterprises can operate. Quick positive feedback, which is provided by the digital network, leads to changes in the infrastructure of enterprises and the transformation of production and logistics models. In addition, the acceleration of the feedback between the employee and the employer leads to the precarization of labor, which is accompanied by the appearance of “societies of control”. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) pervades humanity in 2022, and it is notoriously difficult to understand how certain aspects of it work. There is a movement—_Explainable_ Artificial Intelligence (XAI)—to develop new methods for explaining the behaviours of AI systems. We aim to highlight one important philosophical significance of XAI—it has a role to play in the elimination of vagueness. To show this, consider that the use of AI in what has been labeled _surveillance capitalism_ has resulted in humans quickly gaining the capability (...) to identify and classify most of the occasions in which languages are used. We show that the knowability of this information is incompatible with what a certain theory of vagueness—_epistemicism_—says about vagueness. We argue that one way the epistemicist could respond to this threat is to claim that this process brought about the end of vagueness. However, we suggest an alternative interpretation, namely that epistemicism is false, but there is a weaker doctrine we dub _technological epistemicism_, which is the view that vagueness is due to ignorance of linguistic usage, but the ignorance can be overcome. The idea is that knowing more of the relevant data and how to process it enables us to know the semantic values of our words and sentences with higher confidence and precision. Finally, we argue that humans are probably not going to believe what future AI algorithms tell us about the sharp boundaries of our vague words unless the AI involved can be explained in terms understandable by humans. That is, if people are going to accept that AI can tell them about the sharp boundaries of the meanings of their words, then it is going to have to be XAI. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that the world is accelerating. With advances in communication, transportation and information processing technologies, it is clear that the pace of events in global politics is speeding up at an alarming rate. The implications of this new speed however, continue to be a significant source of debate. Will acceleration lead to a more interconnected, productive, peaceful, and humane world; or a nightmarish descent into ecological devastation, economic exploitation and increasingly violent warfare? The Politics of Speed attempts to map (...) the contours of the new global space of speed, and investigates key issue areas âe" including democratic governance, warfare, capitalism, globalization and transnational activism âe" to uncover the ways in which acceleration is shaping the world. The book uses contemporary political theory (especially the works of Deleuze and Guattari) to develop an ontological account of speed, showing how its effects are frequently far more complex and surprising than we might expect. The result is an attempt to craft a way of engaging with global acceleration that might help avoid the dangers of speed, while embracing the possibilities it provides us with to produce a safer, more egalitarian, democratic and pluralistic world. (shrink)

This book offers a critical analysis of the rise of the US to global hegemony against a background of increased erosion of democracy and rule of law, and a rising linear pattern of near-absolute capitalist development. The author argues that the significant shrinkage of the ideological spectrum globally, as a result of worrisome levels of business and government interpenetration, has created a dangerous 'prefascist configuration' whereby unthinkable levels of violence have been normalized through the use of technologies such as (...) drones, increasingly condoned even by 'liberal' groups and the so-called political left. Using the example of the Obama administration and its increased reliance on drone assassinations, the volume makes a case for the dangers that lie in today's unique convergence of lack of transparency in government, business-government interpenetration, informal social regimentation, and militarization of capitalism. (shrink)

Weber’s improvised reply to Werner Sombart’s lecture on ‘Technology and Culture’, presented at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society in 1910, opens and closes with an appeal to uphold the principle of ‘value-freedom’ in academic discussions. Referring to the capitalist development of antiquity as an illustration, Weber argues for a factually precise conception of technology and against a Marxist definition in terms of economic causality or property relations. Turning to the influence of technology in (...) the development of formal aesthetic values, his primary emphasis is on how the modern metropolis gives rise to new forms of literature, painting, architecture and especially orchestral music. The editorial notes to this translation place Weber’s remarks in the context of his critical relationship to predecessors and contemporaries and within the thematic development of his career-long studies on the rise of occidental rationalism. (shrink)

This thesis studies the enabling properties of ICT and their effects and potential for social change, and prepares the ground for a sustainability-oriented ethico-political assessment of this technology. It primarily builds on interdisciplinary scholarship to describe and explain the multifaceted co-evolution between the global deployment of ICTs and the emergence of the Information Society, understood as a socioeconomic restructuring of capitalism. Beyond the role of ICTs in this regime transition, the thesis delivers other philosophical insights about crucial aspects (...) of ICT development, applications and management. These include arguments about how we should conceptualize ICTs on the basis of their different roles in extending human communication and in performing or facilitating the remote control of humans and animals, machines and systems operations; about the entanglement between telecommunications, transport networks, urban development and work and organization; and about the relations between ICTs, culture and human values. Examples are offered to illustrate the potential that these empirical and philosophical lessons may hold for the construction of a framework for the ethico-political assessment of ICTs. (shrink)

In the light of Jacques Ellul's ideas on technology and Ivan Illich's views on education, what follows is a discussion of the present attempt of Botswana (amidst the Southern African Countries) to expand and modernize its educational system through the use of new technology to educate its people. The problems encountered in adopting technology are used as cautions for the Third World countries attracted to new technology for educating the vast majority. Illich's proposal for replacing the (...) formal schools with the tools of conviviality for the learners is considered useful and relevant. (shrink)

It is necessary to transform the educative experiences into the classrooms so that they favor the development of intellectual abilities of children and teenagers. We must take advantage of the new opportunities that offer information technologies to organize learning environments which they favor those experiences. We considered that to arm and to program robots, of the type of LEGO Mind Storms or the so called "crickets", developed by M. Resnik from MIT, like means so that they children them and (...) young people live experiences that favor the development of their intellectual abilities, is a powerful alternative to the traditional educative systems. They are these three tasks those that require a reflective work from pedagogy and epistemology urgently. Robotics could become in the proper instrument for the development of intelligence because it works like a mirror for the intellectual processes of each individual, its abilities like epistemologist and, therefore, is useful to favor those processes in the classroom. (shrink)

This article provides a history of private sector tracking technologies, examining how the advent of commercial surveillance centered around a logic of data capitalism. Data capitalism is a system in which the commoditization of our data enables an asymmetric redistribution of power that is weighted toward the actors who have access and the capability to make sense of information. It is enacted through capitalism and justified by the association of networked technologies with the political and social benefits (...) of online community, drawing upon narratives that foreground the social and political benefits of networked technologies. I examine its origins in the wake of the dotcom bubble, when technology makers sought to develop a new business model to support online commerce. By leveraging user data for advertising purposes, they contributed to an information environment in which every action leaves behind traces collected by companies for commercial purposes. Through analysis of primary source materials produced by technology makers, journalists, and business analysts, I examine the emergence of data capitalism between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and its central role in the contemporary information economy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTGiven its intimate relationship with the human body and its environment, biotechnology innovation, and more particularly stem cell research innovations as a part thereof, implicate diverse social and moral/ethical issues. This paper explores some of the most important and controversial moral concerns raised by human embryonic stem cell research , focusing on concerns relating to the wellbeing of the embryo and the wellbeing of society . It then considers how and whether these concerns are dealt with in regulatory instruments in (...) Argentina, a southern developing country, examining in particular whether the values underlying these concerns have been translated into practical and effective rules reflective of the primary moral positions advanced. It concludes that Argentina's current state of stem cell research governance fails to consistently reflect the moral positions that have formed and is inadequate given Argentina's activity in this field. (shrink)

Unlike the first generation of critical theorists, contemporary critical theory has largely ignored technology. This is to the detriment of a critical theory of society – technology is now a central feature of our daily lives and integral to the contemporary form of capitalism. Rather than seek to rescue the first generation’s substantive theory of technology, which has been partly outmoded by historical developments, the approach adopted in this article is to engage with today’s technology (...) through the conceptual apparatus offered by the early Frankfurt School. This rationale is guided by the conviction that the core ideas of critical theory still offer a sound basis for assessing the nature of technology today. Through a reconstruction and engagement with some of the core concepts of first-generation critical theory, as well as the work of Bernard Stiegler and Andrew Feenberg, we can arrive at a more robust theory of technology, capable of critically interrogating the role of technology in contemporary society. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 293-302.

This book introduces and explores a theory of global development ethics, revealing some of the challenges to projects of global development and including coverage of core topics such as immigration, technology, famine, race and capitalism. It is ideal for advanced-level courses in Global Ethics, Development Ethics and Applied Ethics.

The conventional wisdom is that the best way to alleviate poverty is to provide the maximum freedom for individual entrepreneurs and corporations to create wealth. Drawing on the case of Latin America, this article contends that there are serious defects in analyses based on such assumptions. New technologies and restructuring of international capitalism have accelerated wealth creation worldwide but amid growing inequalities. Technology is mainly controlled by large multinational corporations and not directed at relieving the deprivation suffered by (...) the world's poor. Pervasive, persistent economic inequality and lack of access to appropriate education and training have all been significant in Latin America's failure to develop rapidly during the twentieth century. Most successful “latecomer” countries in the past two hundred years have adopted heterodox autonomous growth strategies, and the authors suggest that such strategies are necessary now to counter the powerful processes that sustain inequality. (shrink)

In order to solve a series of problems brought about by rapid development of science and technology, it is necessary not only to conduct in-depth research on science and technology ethics, but also to strengthen ethics education in science and technology. China’s five technical universities exemplify the specific situation and characteristics of ethics at Chinese technical universities, and can be compared to the situation in South Africa. China’s ethics education in the 5TU emphasizes the use of (...) traditional ideological and cultural resources, and practical cases. The teaching methods focus on combining traditional Chinese ethics with foreign experience and teaching methods, aiming at cultivating students’ ability to solve specific problems in the real world. This paper also evaluates and reflects on the short-term and long-term effects of China’s ethics education in science and technology, revealing some special problems. Ethics education in science and technology at the 5TU is based on the principle of “unity of knowledge and behaviour”. It is hoped that China’s ethics education founded on traditional Chinese thought, can make a valuable contribution to the development of global engineering ethics. (shrink)

Feenberg’s new book, Technosystem: the social life of reason, makes an important intervention in the study of technological systems by showing that instrumental reason requires value judgement at the moment of its realization in this world. It fosters hope that technological development can be redirected towards the fulfilment of human needs through public interventions of nonexperts. However, Feenberg does not sufficiently engage with the political dilemmas that inevitably accompany these interventions as a result of the formal capitalist bias of (...) the technosystem. The books by Bridle and Bucher underline the importance of confronting these dilemmas as they encounter them in various domains and provide possible ways for dealing with them. (shrink)

In order to solve a series of problems brought about by rapid development of science and technology, it is necessary not only to conduct in-depth research on science and technology ethics, but also to strengthen ethics education in science and technology. China’s five technical universities exemplify the specific situation and characteristics of ethics at Chinese technical universities, and can be compared to the situation in South Africa. China’s ethics education in the 5TU emphasizes the use of (...) traditional ideological and cultural resources, and practical cases. The teaching methods focus on combining traditional Chinese ethics with foreign experience and teaching methods, aiming at cultivating students’ ability to solve specific problems in the real world. This paper also evaluates and reflects on the short-term and long-term effects of China’s ethics education in science and technology, revealing some special problems. Ethics education in science and technology at the 5TU is based on the principle of “unity of knowledge and behaviour”. It is hoped that China’s ethics education founded on traditional Chinese thought, can make a valuable contribution to the development of global engineering ethics. (shrink)

In order to solve a series of problems brought about by rapid development of science and technology, it is necessary not only to conduct in-depth research on science and technology ethics, but also to strengthen ethics education in science and technology. China’s five technical universities exemplify the specific situation and characteristics of ethics at Chinese technical universities, and can be compared to the situation in South Africa. China’s ethics education in the 5TU emphasizes the use of (...) traditional ideological and cultural resources, and practical cases. The teaching methods focus on combining traditional Chinese ethics with foreign experience and teaching methods, aiming at cultivating students’ ability to solve specific problems in the real world. This paper also evaluates and reflects on the short-term and long-term effects of China’s ethics education in science and technology, revealing some special problems. Ethics education in science and technology at the 5TU is based on the principle of “unity of knowledge and behaviour”. It is hoped that China’s ethics education founded on traditional Chinese thought, can make a valuable contribution to the development of global engineering ethics. (shrink)

'Development' operates as an allegedly value-neutral concept in the policy world. This essay describes four mechanisms that have helped to strip development of its subjective and meaning-laden elements: persistent misreading of technology as simply material and inanimate; uncritical acceptance of models, including economic ones, as adequate representations of complex systems; failure to recognize routine practices as repositories of power; and erasing history and time as relevant factors in producing scenarios for the future. Failure to take these elements (...) into account has led to inequality, injustice and unintended consequences in many development projects. Interpretive analysis of development tools and concepts is a much-needed corrective. (shrink)

This article situates the (human) body as a signifier for society at large, arguing that developments in many societies of structural and systematic violence that targets minorities such as refugees and first nation peoples, points to a failure of democratic values. Using two examples, we elaborate technology and digital devices as prosthesis of the body, that are also acting as proxy for state violence. The first example is from the carceral archipelago of Manus Island as a site of remote (...) detention of refugees carried out by the Australian government. Refugees held on Manus Island describe the treatment they experience as torture. The second example is drawn from the Australian mainland, telling the stories of First Nations children subjected to abuse and violence in juvenile detention centers. A judicial inquiry (Royal Commission) found that a systematic approach aimed at punishing children constituted torture. The concepts developed in this article are those of bordering and racialization, while the intertwining of human and “more than human life” helps to understand and challenge the necropolitical power evident in (liberal) capitalism. (shrink)

In public opinion, as represented by everyday speech, the relationship between technology and culture is characterized by mutual exclusion. The argument against that stance is made in two steps: (1) technology as a result of goal-oriented rational action is a constitutive part of culture; (2) cultural development can be described through an action theoretical model of technological development. Thus, technology being of the form of culture comes to be the reason for culture being of the (...) form of technology. (shrink)

The article discusses the features of the development of Chinese primitive porcelain. The purpose of the article is to reveal the periodization of the development of Chinese porcelain in the early stages of its history and the influence of proto-porcelain on the so-called "mature" porcelain of later periods. Primitive porcelain, which is the transitional stage from earthenware to real porcelain, dates back to the era between the Shang Dynasty and the Eastern Han Dynasty. The study was conducted using (...) historical and comparative methods, as well as the method of formal stylistic analysis. It was important to determine the characteristics of primitive porcelain and to reveal its role in the development of the global art of folklore production. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it not only reveals the time frame for the production of primitive porcelain in China and determines its technological and chemical properties, but also points out the influence factors of primitive porcelain on the historical development of Chinese and world porcelain. It was revealed that the origin of primitive porcelain dates back to the 16th-11th centuries BC, its development took place in the XI-II centuries BC, and the end of the era of primitive porcelain refers to the II-III centuries BC. Primitive porcelain has evolved over nearly two millennia. Having reached its peak, the technology of its manufacture provided the technological basis for the creation of "mature" porcelain. The conclusion is made about the significant influence that primitive porcelain had on Chinese, and through it – on world porcelain, largely determining the formation of this significant phenomenon of material culture. (shrink)

Consider a stylized contrast between medical and business ethics. Both fields of applied ethics focus on a profession whose activities are basic to human welfare. Both enquire into obligations of professionals, and the relations between goals intrinsic to the profession and ethical duties to others and to the society. I am struck, however, by a fundamental difference: whereas medical ethics takes place against a background of almost universal consensus that the practice of medicine is admirable and morally praiseworthy, the business (...) profession is embedded within the framework of firms in a capitalist market economy, and for the last century and a half there has been sustained debate about the moral and economic justifiability of such an economy. To be sure, even under socialism there might be an “ethics of socialist managers,” and there would be some overlap between such an ethic and contemporary business ethics. Nevertheless, many of the characteristic problems of business ethics — e.g., what are the obligations of a corporation to its shareholders? — arise only in the context of a private property-based market economy. This raises a deep problem for business ethics: can one develop an account of ethical practices for an activity (i.e., business) while ignoring that the context in which this activity occurs (i.e., capitalism) is morally controversial? It is as if the work in medical ethics proceeded in the midst of widespread disagreement whether medicine was a good thing. Another way of thinking about the problem is: if one teaches business ethics, does this commit you to accepting that business can be ethical? And doesn’t this commit you to accepting that capitalism is justifiable?1 I suspect that this is a serious problem for many teachers of business ethics. Many were trained in academic philosophy, and within academic philosophy there are many who think — or at least suspect — that capitalism is basically unjust, or perhaps that only a greatly modified capitalism would be acceptable.. (shrink)