4.2. Herbert Marcuse and the Computer
4.2.1. The Computer as a Tool of Control, Domination and Exploitation
Herbert Marcuse lived in a time that saw the rise of the computer and its increasing impacts on the economy, politics, culture and everyday life. Marcuse again and again reflected on the positive potentials and negative realities of the computer. Here are some examples.
Marcuse on the one hand stressed the role of the computer as a tool of control, domination and exploitation.
The formal rationality of capitalism celebrates its triumph in electronic computers, which calculate everything, no matter what the purpose, and which are put to use as mighty instruments of political manipulation, reliably calculating the chances of profit and loss, including the chance of the annihilation of the whole, with the consent of the likewise calculated and obedient population (Marcuse 1965, 224–225).
4.2.2. The Computer’s Dialectic
He (on the other hand) identified liberating potentials of the computer writing that Marx:
saw the possibility of reducing alienated labor already in capitalism, namely as a consequence of technical progress or, as we would say today, increasing automation, mechanization, computerization, whatever you want to call it. That, however, is only the anticipation, or the first traces, of the liberation of the human being from full-time alienated labor (Marcuse 1978, 220).
So Marcuse saw the dialectic of modern technology (Marcuse 1941b, 1964b) also at play in computer technology:
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Critical Theory of Communication