On Habermas, Marcuse, and the Relevance of the Critique of Technological Rationality Today

This the article examines the political status of technology through the lens of the perspectives of Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas, arguing that technology constitutes a historically situated social form of power organization . Starting from a critique of the illusion of technical neutrality , an ideological mechanism that naturalizes domination in technologically advanced societies , the text analyzes How Habermas depoliticizes technology by inscribing it within a cognitively instrumental interest of anthropological basis , separating it from the normative sphere and confining critique to the communicative correctness of systemic effects . In contrast , Marcuse politicizes technology by conceiving it as a technological a priori , that is , as a material grammar that precedes and conditions the field of the possible , functionally integrating individuals into the existing order . Drawing on the mediation of Andrew Feenberg , the article demonstrates that technology can be reopened to social contestation through the notion of technical code , which reveals how dominant values and interests crystallize in artifacts and systems, naturalizing contingent decisions as rational demands . Subsequently , contemporary diagnoses of platform capitalism are mobilized to show how technological rationality intensifies and spreads in digital regimes, operating as a ubiquitous environment for the management of life . It is concluded that emancipation requires effective mastery of the material codes and processes of technology , as well as concrete contestation over its design, a condition for ensuring that political imagination is not reduced to the administration of the existing technology thus reveals itself as an arena in which what human beings can be is decided , rather than as an inevitable destiny .