Abstract

This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as ‘technoscience’ and ‘technoculture’. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must probe the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierarchies privileging the West. In examining the extension of technology from machines that make things to ‘machines that think’, including biotechnology and computerized ‘aritificial life’, something implied in every historical iteration of technology is laid bare: defining the technological activates the border between nature and culture, and goes to the heart of what it means to be human.