“Technology, as a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices, and contrivances which characterize the machine age, is at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)
The Ambivalence of Technology
Few thinkers of the 20th century were as alive to the double-edged nature of technology as Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School. Writing in an age of automobiles, television, and nuclear power, he refused both utopian celebration and dystopian despair. Instead, Marcuse argued that technology is never neutral—it always carries a social logic.
Machines, infrastructures, and systems are not just tools; they embody decisions about labor, control, and values. Technology, in this sense, is not only about efficiency but about power.
From Liberation to Domination
Marcuse’s analysis builds on Marx’s insight that technological development has the potential to liberate humanity from toil. Automation, in principle, could shorten the working day, expand leisure, and enable creativity.
But under capitalism, technology does not serve freedom. It is bent toward profit, surveillance, and control. Factories, assembly lines, and later digital networks discipline workers, reduce them to interchangeable parts, and maximize productivity. “Progress” becomes complicit with domination.
In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse describes this process as the creation of a technological rationality—a worldview in which efficiency and functionality are treated as unquestionable goods, masking the political choices that shape them. The result is a society that takes its own instruments of domination for natural necessity.
The Technological Veil
What makes technological rationality so insidious, Marcuse argued, is its ability to appear apolitical. A factory process, a voting machine, a social media algorithm—they seem objective, scientific, inevitable. But each reflects choices about who benefits and who controls.
This “veil of neutrality” is one reason advanced societies so effectively reproduce themselves. When politics hides in devices, domination is naturalized. To resist it, we must learn to see the politics within the machine.
Imagining a Different Technology
Marcuse did not call for abandoning technology. He insisted it could be reorganized for qualitative ends: not more production, but more freedom; not endless growth, but human flourishing. Technology, in other words, could be designed to serve a different rationality—one centered on life rather than profit.
This utopian dimension of Marcuse’s thought is often overlooked. He believed the very same tools that repress us could, under transformed social relations, liberate us.
