For those of us who would like to see a revival of the ‘techno-critical’ tradition in public debate (the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Langdon Winner, inter many alia), it is a cause of some irritation that the hegemonic view of technology remains the instrumental one. Here, technology is deemed to be neutral, in a way that precludes any serious analysis of its constitutive role in human affairs. Technologies, it is said, are merely tools to serve the needs of their users; they have no political content per se. I can use a hammer to drive in a nail or bludgeon my next-door neighbour to death. It is my actions that matter, not the hammer itself.

One effect of the instrumental view (which will strike many readers as common sense) is to herd all discussions of new technologies towards the door marked ‘regulation’. For if technologies have no political content – if they do not shape, and are not shaped by, the societies into which they emerge – the issue of their relationship to ‘human nature’ or ‘the human condition’ will never arise. Instead, the discussion will tend to focus on matters of misuse or safety, before moving on to what the state can do to keep this or that technology within ‘guardrails’. The question of where the road between the guardrails is going, and where it originates – and indeed of who built the road, and why – is almost always left unasked.