The Myth of Neutral Technology

Why Every Tech Always Embodies Values and What That Means for the Futures We’re Building

This essay is Part I of a three-part series exploring the philosophies of technology shaping our future: Instrumentalism, Substantivism, and the Critical Theory of Technology.

Why begin here? Because how we think about technology doesn’t just reflect our beliefs—it actively shapes the futures we’re able to imagine and build. The philosophy of technology isn’t abstract theory; it’s the invisible architecture of our politics, economies, and sense of agency. Every design, every platform, and every tool carries an implicit worldview about power and change. To create technoprogressive futures, we must first surface and challenge those assumptions. This series is devoted to that task.

Each essay examines one of the major frameworks that define our relationship with technology: instrumentalism, substantivism, and Critical Theory of Technology (CTT). These frameworks don’t merely describe technology; they determine what kinds of futures are thinkable—and therefore possible. By tracing how each interprets the bond between society and technology, we can see why so many reform efforts fail to transform the systems that shape our world, and what it would take to build a genuinely technoprogressive future.

Sociotechnical transformation demands both a clear philosophy of technology and a critique of the frameworks that constrain our collective imagination and capacity for worldbuilding. Philosopher Andrew Feenberg, in his seminal work Transforming Technology, argues that two of the most pervasive perspectives—instrumentalism and substantivism—are intellectually seductive yet deeply limiting. Though often presented as opposites, both ultimately foreclose our potential for human flourishing: one by treating technology as a neutral tool, the other by treating it as an autonomous force. Together, they trap us between social and technological determinism, leaving little room for transformation.

In this first essay, I turn to instrumentalism, the commonsense idea that technology is neutral—ready to serve whatever ends we choose. It seems pragmatic, even democratic, but beneath its surface lies a set of hidden assumptions that narrow what we can create with one another and with our machines. Drawing on Feenberg’s analysis, we’ll explore four key ways this neutrality claim takes form and why, from a technoprogressive standpoint, it obscures how technology is always already political, social, and cultural–bound up with what it means to be human, and the futures we might yet create together.

The Instrumental View of Technology

According to Feenberg, instrumentalism “offers the most widely accepted view of technology. It is based on the commonsense idea that technologies are ‘tools’ standing ready to serve the purposes of their users. Technology is ‘neutral,’ without values of its own.” But what does this “neutrality” actually mean? Feenberg breaks it down into four claims:

1. Neutrality as instrumentality: Technologies are indifferent to the ends they serve. A hammer can build a house or smash it.

2. Neutrality across politics: Tools seem transferable across societies, unlike institutions such as law or religion. A turbine is a turbine whether under capitalism or socialism; only cost hinders its transfer.

3. Neutrality through rationality: Because technology is grounded in universal scientific truths, it appears independent of particular social or political contexts.

4. Neutrality through efficiency: Technologies embody the same norm of efficiency everywhere. Productivity can be measured across eras, countries, and civilizations.

Yet the promise is deceptive. Redirecting how tools are governed without transforming their design logic or institutional embedding often reproduces the very relations reform seeks to overcome. To see this clearly, one need only look to one of the grandest experiments in technological redirection: the modernization of the Soviet Union.

The Blank Slate of Socialist Modernization

After the Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks faced a country shattered by civil war, famine, and industrial ruin. They imagined they could rebuild society from something like a blank slate—a rare chance to reorganize the world along rational and egalitarian lines. James C. Scott, in Seeing Like A State, identifies the Soviet project as a quintessential case of authoritarian high modernism: utopian in ambition but constrained by entrenched sociotechnical structures.

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks called this trajectory socialist modernization—the subordination of technology to centralized planning and bureaucratic control rather than democratic experimentation. Its goal was to accelerate development, overcome scarcity, and make socialism “catch up” with the West in a single generation. The Bolsheviks sought to harness the most advanced industrial systems of their age—many imported from the United States—to embody what they imagined as the rationalized will of the proletariat.

Nowhere was this clearer than in Lenin’s embrace of Taylorism, the system of “scientific management” pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s method sought to maximize efficiency by breaking every task into timed motions and enforcing strict managerial oversight. Lenin recognized its brutality but believed its scientific precision could be detached from capitalist exploitation and applied to socialist construction:

The Taylor system… like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of its great scientific achievements… The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field.

Here the neutrality thesis appears in its purest form: technology’s social meaning depends only on the class that commands it.

Socialism with Taylorist Characteristics

In practice, Taylorism could not be easily repurposed. As Nick Dyer-Witheford observed in Cyber-Marx:

The Leninist party in its division of party managers from proletarian masses uncannily emulated the Taylorist division of labour. The Soviet state carried this mirroring yet further in its concept of socialism as ‘soviets plus electrification,’ its embrace of scientific management, the adoption of the stopwatch, the assembly line, its gigantism of industrial factories, and standardization of social life.

The result, he writes, was “a version—hideously enlarged to Russian, rather than English, and twentieth rather than eighteenth-century scale—of capitalism’s era of ‘primitive accumulation.’” State socialism, in this view, became “a competitor with, but not an alternative to, capitalism.”

In practice socialist modernization was a form of hyper-Taylorism. According to Weeks:

Lenin distinguished between two phases after the overthrow of capitalism: the first, socialist phase, in which ‘factory discipline’ is extended over the whole of society; and the final phase of true communism. The socialist stage—a lengthy transition period between capitalism and communism whose precise duration is unknown— requires workers’ ‘self-sacrifice,’ ‘perseverance,’ and a commitment to ‘the proper path of steady and disciplined labor.’ To ensure that communism is achieved in the future, the offensive against capital must be partially suspended during the transition. Socialism thus involves a temporary intensification of capitalism, whereas communism is imagined abstractly as its pure transcendence. In the meantime, ‘the task that the Soviet government must set for the people in all its scope is—learn to work.’

Factories were to be as rational as the human body, cities as efficient as factories, and workers as interchangeable as machine parts. The vision was total—the factory became the metaphor for the nation.

High Modernism as Neutrality in Practice

Seen through this lens, the Soviet project was not the transcendence of capitalism but its perfection. It embodied the neutrality thesis with unmatched conviction: the belief that existing technologies could be wielded for socialist ends without rethinking their design or their social embedding.

The consequences were staggering. The USSR achieved rapid industrialization, mass electrification, universal education, and impressive public-health gains. A similar trajectory later unfolded in 1980s China, whose technocratic model of development—Leninist in structure, capitalist in method—produced growth on a scale the Soviets only dreamed of. But the wager in both cases was the same: that discipline could deliver utopia, that coercion was a price worth paying for modernization, and that technologies built for hierarchy could simply be redirected toward emancipation.

The neutrality thesis gave these projects their moral coherence. It allowed leaders to imagine that the same tools that produced exploitation could, in different hands, produce liberation. Yet the logic of those tools—Taylorist control, Fordist discipline, bureaucratic hierarchy—was never neutral. These were not blank instruments but sociotechnical systems built within and for particular power structures. When transplanted wholesale into socialist institutions, they reproduced many of the same alienations, only under new ideological banners.

Beyond Neutrality

Industrial modernity was not a mistake. Factories, schools, and hospitals remain among the greatest achievements of modern civilization. They improved literacy, longevity, and prosperity on a scale unimaginable in all of human history. The problem lies not in their existence but in their form—systems built to maximize control rather than autonomy, a narrow view of efficiency rather than creativity, uniformity rather than participation.

Achieving another kind of technological society is therefore not simply a matter of seizing the tools inherited from history; it is a matter of reinventing the tools themselves. To build a freer and more abundant world, seizing the means of production must also mean inventing new means. This is the heart of the technoprogressive project: the redesign of the infrastructures of everyday life so that abundance and freedom advance together.

Technology is not neutral; it is ontological. Every device, system, and process encodes assumptions about who acts, who decides, who benefits, and who obeys. These design decisions are political through and through. For technology to serve democracy, those assumptions must become the terrain of politics.

The neutrality thesis claims that emancipation lies in wielding existing tools for new ends. Technoprogressivism insists that emancipation requires transforming the tools, the systems, and the social relations that shape them. To democratize technology is not merely to take control of the machine—it is to reimagine what a machine can be.

If authoritarian high modernism demonstrates anything, it is that the dream of mastering technology from above inevitably ends in control, not liberation. The path forward is not to abandon modernity’s achievements but to extend their promise—to design systems that enhance creativity, collective agency, and social well-being while providing for universal material needs.

Technoprogressivism begins from this dual commitment: abundance and freedom must rise together. It rejects both the fatalism of neutrality and the despair of technophobia. Technology is not destiny; it is design—and design can be democratic.

Capitalist Technologies or Neutrality as Contamination

There is a second and increasingly influential way to interpret neutrality — call it neutrality as contamination — that needs close scrutiny. The argument runs like this: if technologies are shaped by the relations that produce, own, govern, and control them, then most of the tools in hand today are already inscribed with capitalist logics. In this view, modern information systems, time-management apps, algorithmic platforms, and the sociotechnical practices they enable carry embedded norms about time, productivity, visibility, and value. Using these technologies therefore participates in, reproduces, and normalizes capitalist modes of being and belonging.

Audre Lorde’s famous formulation captures the core worry: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The claim is not merely moralistic; it is structural: tools designed within and for a system will tend to reproduce the system’s affordances and incentives. A calendar app that encourages time-blocking by the hour, for instance, does not merely help organization — it channels a particular, commodified conception of time into everyday life. Social apps that reward “shareable” moments invite a visibility economy that reshapes how people relate to one another and to themselves. Under the contamination diagnosis, technology is not a neutral medium; it is a vector for social reproduction.

The practical implication of this thesis can be stark: if existing technologies are thoroughly imbricated with capitalist power, then reform or appropriation of those technologies may be ineffective or even complicit. For some who accept this diagnosis, the only credible route to emancipation is rupture: dislodge the ruling class, dismantle its technological bases, and rebuild new infrastructures under different relations of ownership and design. Until such a rupture, the argument goes, technological change can only mirror or deepen domination.

This position contains important warnings, but it also contains serious strategic risks. It can collapse into a form of technological essentialism or political purism that forecloses practical pathways for democratizing infrastructure here and now. If all existing platforms and protocols must be discarded before any emancipatory project is possible, then political energy is forced into a single “after the revolution” horizon. That posture tends either toward paralyzing fatalism or a romantic fetish for rupture. Neither helps build durable, plural, democratic alternatives that can be fought for in the present.

A more fruitful technoprogressive response treats contamination as a real constraint but not a fatal one. The aim should be to politicize the design choices embedded in existing systems, contest the incentives they create, and combine institutional reforms (public platforms, open standards, cooperative ownership) with efforts to invent genuinely different sociotechnical forms. In short: the master’s tools are not worth uncritical worship, but neither are they a reason to abdicate the political struggle over technology here and now.

Contestable Futures

There is critical work to be done in harnessing the immense powers of technology so that it may be perfected toward the most socially beneficial ends. Yet this has never been a new or uniquely contemporary task. The world we inhabit is already deeply shaped by earlier struggles over the design, governance, and purpose of technology. At every stage of industrial and digital development, competing social forces have left their marks on how technologies take form. We do not live—nor have we ever lived—in a world where ruling interests alone are inscribed into technical systems, even if those interests often dominate.

In the sphere of information technology in particular, the history of open-source development, decentralized peer production, and other cooperative modes of creation has significantly altered what might have emerged from a purely corporate, capitalist order. The very infrastructure of the internet, from TCP/IP protocols to Linux servers and open standards, bears the imprint of collective experimentation and nonmarket collaboration. Moreover, as future essays in this series will explore, major technology firms have repeatedly co-opted or acquired innovations that originated outside their walls—technologies, protocols, and design philosophies that continue to carry traces of their alternative origins even after being folded into corporate platforms.

The true character of technology, then, is far more complex than the notion that we inhabit a world entirely determined by capital. Capital remains a central relation, but not the only one. Beneath and alongside it are other relations—cooperative, communal, insurgent—that contest and reshape the technological landscape. As Part III will argue, capital’s ability to reproduce itself through technology is formidable but not absolute, and within those fractures lies the real horizon of technoprogressive possibility.

Toward Part II: Substantivism and the Myth of Technological Autonomy

The neutrality thesis teaches us what not to believe, but not yet what to build. The next step is to confront the opposite temptation: the belief that technology evolves according to its own autonomous logic, immune to political will. Against this determinism, the technoprogressive view insists that the future of technology—and of democracy itself—depends on the struggles already unfolding in the present.

Part II: Substantivism and the Myth of Technological Autonomy — coming soon