Abstract
This thesis deals with the political nature of modern technology. Technology, as a mode of social rationality, defines not only the premises of social organization, but also the opportunities of the individual within society. It does this by fostering a rationality which takes society to be a formal system of formally equal instrumental objects. This line of thought is a development of the Marxian idea of the commodity fetishism, which in this thesis becomes a technical fetishism. Use-value does not matter, only technical or instrumental value. This system de-realizes aspects of social practice which are considered “outside” what is technically realizeable and calculable, for example ethics, aesthe- tics and politics. Thus, I will argue that technology represents a pure activity of administration, which disregards the social foundation on which it is based; in other words, it disregards the social ontology of its subjects, replacing it with a society of pure function. The effect of this, I argue, is a monological or total administration, in the sense that all of the powers and rights are centralized in the system which exerts power, and none of the powers and rights are afforded the subjects of power. The subject of technology is always an object of information, never a subject in communication. Finally, I will use this theoretical groundwork to examine three modern technologies, namely privacy-self management, big data or surveillance, as well as biometrics.