Doubts and Critical Perspectives on Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Other Technocracies
The articles and essays in this web site represent years spent observing and examining the less apparent effects and consequences of biomedical science and its new technologies, electronic and information control technologies, and the ways in which costs and harms are entrained with benefits. Also included here are—or soon will be—an array of published articles on the related topics of work life, the dynamics of organizational change, and an essay on the perils of retirement.
Among the emerging outcomes well worth considering are:
- Shifts in shared moral and ethical values
- A commodification and “thingification” of human life
- Heightened status and influence of expert elites
- The crowding out of citizen participation in governance
- Displacement of practical understanding and vernacular speech
- An undermining of lifeworld and worklife solidarities
- Depletion and dumbing-down of language by managerial grammar and techno-speak
- The neutralization of popular critique of social and political issues by the opinion polling industry
- Intrusion of utilitarian outlooks and commercial interests into higher education
- Growing apprehension that, in its totality, technology and parallel technocracy have become autonomous and beyond control, guidance and restraint
–Thomas H. Fitzgerald