TECH - A Guide to the Politics and Philosophy of Technology

constructed. She describes how the distinctions between natural and artificial, mind and body, machine and organism, have all become ambiguous and says that we should fight domination by forming alliances based on affinity rather than identity.

Some have critiqued Haraway’s cyborg metaphor for encouraging the idea that we should just accept or even embrace technological realities: as we are so intimately connected with technologies, we shouldn’t waste our time trying to affect how they manifest. Others argue that while a common interpretation, this is a misunderstanding. They respond that she is actually saying we are tangled up both in technology and in our own domination. Instead of just accepting this and being open to all aspects of it, we can chose to form specific alliances within this interconnected world in order to advance our own liberatory aims [89].

Questions Here are some questions relating to the various existing political positions on technology: - How can we use approaches and cultures such as hacking, without losing the critique of the ‘progressivist’ understanding and role of technology? What are the limits of a hack approach and how can people decide when a ‘hacked’ technology is appropriate and useful or just an amended version that still suffers from the same underlying structural problems or embodied ideologies?

- What useful things can be learned and applied from primitivists’ critiques? For example: how could abstract systems of power or impersonal institutions be prevented from forming in the development of technological processes? How can it be ensured that technological systems don’t alienate users from their tools or from the things they 81