Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Inside Technology)

The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge
society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change,
energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the
technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems
are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects
that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the
lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in
constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of
technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of
reason--scientific knowledge, technical rationality--and experience. Feenberg
examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and
society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has
pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic
interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced
design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest
and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of
technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the
relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg
considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and
Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg
argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.