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The Clockwork Commune, Bright B. Simons

Bright B Simons

This paper accepts the thesis that technology is not value-free. It then focuses on technology’s form as being institutional in nature and characteristic. On that basis, it argues that technology “absorbs the surrounding ethos and regurgitate pieces of the normative pattern back into the social kaleidoscope of choices, and by thus doing influence the thrust of liberty.” Hence, rather than the real danger lying in runaway technologies that deepen the process of surveillance and control, and thus curtail liberty, it resides, instead, in the possibility that technology’s role could be usurped to justify otherwise unjustifiable redefinitions of the rights of …