This essay is Part II of my ongoing series on the philosophies of technology shaping our future. Read Part I: The Myth of Neutral Tools and stay tuned for Part III: Democratic Design.
In Part I, we explored instrumentalism—the commonsense view that technology is a neutral tool, ready to serve any purpose we assign to it. While that framework seems pragmatic, it conceals the power relations and values embedded in every design.
In this second essay, we turn to substantivism, a philosophy that inverts instrumentalism. Rather than seeing technology as neutral, substantivism claims that it develops according to its own internal logic, its momentum shaping society whether we wish it to or not. It is the worldview behind the familiar warning that technology is out of control. Substantivism animates much of today’s “doomer” discourse: the conviction that we are hurtling toward dystopia and that little can be done to change course.
Substantivism captures a real intuition—that modern life is organized around machines, infrastructures, and systems that seem to possess autonomy. Yet by treating technology as an independent force, it risks telling a totalizing story of technological determinism. The challenge for technoprogressivism is to recognize what substantivism gets right—the embedded power of technical systems—without surrendering to its fatalism.
No Escape Other Than Retreat
Technology constitutes a new cultural system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control. This system is characterized by an expansive dynamic that ultimately overtakes every pretechnological enclave and shapes the whole of social life. Total instrumentalization is thus a destiny from which there is no escape other than retreat.
— Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology
Feenberg’s summary of Heidegger and Ellul’s critique has become a near-orthodoxy in modern discourse. Many assume that humanity is careening toward collapse or totalitarianism, that no better future with machines is possible, and that the only escape is retreat—toward simplicity, nature, or an imagined past.
On the political right, this takes the form of reactionary traditionalism: a yearning for purity, order, and mythic restoration. On the left, it often appears as degrowth, green anarchism, or anti-civilization politics, extending the critique of capitalism to all of modernity. Some reject not only industry and science, but even literacy, symbolic thought, and agriculture. Whether expressed as eco-fundamentalism or techno-pessimism, the impulse converges on a single belief: modernity was a mistake.
Across these positions, familiar themes return. Progress is suspect, humanism is arrogance, liberal democracy is decadent, and reason and science are to be distrusted. The result is a politics of despair, one that equates technological development with degradation and treats collapse as the only moral resolution.
The Substantivist Tradition: Ellul and Heidegger
Andrew Feenberg traces substantivism’s philosophical roots to Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger. Both describe how technosystems impose their own logic—what Ellul calls “technique” and Heidegger calls “enframing.”
For Ellul, the “technical phenomenon” defines modern society across all ideologies. “Technique has become autonomous,” he writes; technology now carries imperatives that exceed any human intention. This view resurfaces in the AI doomer movement, where predictions of machine apocalypse are treated as inevitable outcomes of progress. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s instantly infamous book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is a recent example. While advocates of artificial intelligence see it as a tool for amplifying human creativity and productivity, Yudkowsky and others insist that its development will unleash forces beyond human control.
Heidegger similarly warns that “technology is relentlessly overtaking us,” transforming the world—and ourselves—into “standing reserve,” raw material to be optimized. For him, modern technology expresses a nihilistic will to power that reduces both nature and humanity to instruments of control.
These critiques reveal how technological rationality reorganizes life around efficiency, surveillance, and mastery, often without conscious intent. Substantivism therefore offers a penetrating diagnosis of how technosystems become totalizing. Yet it leaves little room for collective agency or transformation. It frequently collapses into fatalism, replacing politics with metaphysics. It remains, nonetheless, deeply influential—the tone of countless dystopian narratives and much of contemporary theory.
In fact, substantivism’s structure quietly underlies much of social theory today. Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower and biopolitics—the management of life through institutions such as medicine, education, and policing—extend this logic. Technology, in this framework, becomes the infrastructure of control.
From Power to Psychopolitics
Foucault showed that power does not only repress; it produces subjects. His insight remains vital, but in much of the literature inspired by him, power has hardened into an omnipresent network that captures resistance before it begins.
Byung-Chul Han carries this line into the digital age. In Psychopolitics, he argues that Big Data and social media have transformed external domination into self-management. We optimize ourselves, display our lives, and call it freedom. “Persons,” he writes, “are being positivized into things which can be quantified, measured, and steered.” Han’s diagnosis is precise, but his conclusion—a retreat into silence and refusal—withdraws from politics altogether. If the world is too compromised to fix, purity can only be preserved through distance.
The Long Arc of Anti-Modern Thought
Follow this logic further and it arrives at the anti-civilization tradition: John Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, Ted Kaczynski, and others who regard modernity as irredeemable. Their answer is not reform but reversal—abandoning industry, agriculture, and sometimes even language. This is substantivism’s purest expression: a belief that technological society can only end, never change. Liberation requires undoing civilization itself.
Convivial Tools and Appropriate Technology
Not all critiques of modern technology take such an extreme form. Ivan Illich, E. F. Schumacher, and Victor Papanek represent a more humane branch of substantivist thought. They share the worry that modern systems have outgrown human scale, but they respond through design rather than renunciation.
Illich’s Tools for Conviviality calls for technologies that empower users rather than dominate them—bicycles over freeways, workshops over corporations. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful advocates for “appropriate technology”: tools that are locally maintainable, ecologically sustainable, and fitted to human needs. Papanek’s Design for the Real World urges designers to prioritize social value over prestige or profit.
Their work remains a touchstone for ethical design. They remind us that scale and accessibility matter, and that technology should serve life rather than consume it. Yet even these visions tend to move inward—toward simplification and limits. The world they imagine is gentler but also smaller, less capable of meeting global needs at scale. The imagination of abundance, coordination, and democratic high technology is largely absent.
Austerity Ecology and the Anti-Political Drift
Across these variations—from Foucault’s disciplinary systems to Han’s psychopolitics, from Illich’s convivial tools to Zerzan’s primitivism—a pattern repeats. The stronger the critique of domination, the weaker the space left for collective agency. Action contracts into ethics, lifestyle, or refusal. Substantivism offers profound insights into technological power but ultimately leads to resignation.
Leigh Phillips calls this austerity ecology: the anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-human tendencies that have taken hold within sections of the contemporary left. He argues that these movements, while motivated by genuine concern, repeat the logic of past reactionary ideologies. They moralize limits rather than reorganize production. In Austerity Ecology & The Collapse Porn Addicts, he warns that this outlook “is the descendant of a very old, dark, and Malthusian set of ideas.” Whether in the small-is-beautiful localism of Schumacher’s admirers, the degrowth movement’s call to scale down industry, or the ecocentric suspicion of human agency, the narrative is similar: humanity as parasite, technology as corruption, progress as hubris.
Phillips’s critique is not a dismissal of ecological thought but a reminder that it often inherits a quiet misanthropy. In seeking to rescue the planet, many writers end up portraying humanity as the problem. When appeals to “natural limits” replace questions of ownership, production, and justice, environmentalism risks echoing Malthus and Ehrlich, turning scarcity into a moral principle rather than a political problem.
Technoprogressivism rejects that premise. It accepts the ecological critique’s concern for sustainability but refuses its theology of guilt. The task is not to shrink the human presence but to reorganize it: to build technologies and institutions that sustain both humanity and the biosphere. The goal is abundance within stewardship, not austerity in the name of virtue.
Beyond the Dead Ends: Phillips and Democratic Modernism
Phillips argues that the Left’s path forward lies in revival, not retreat—a return to internationalist, high-technology, democratic socialism. Against the mood of eco-austerity, he insists that we already possess the scientific and technical capacity to reverse climate change, eliminate scarcity, and expand human freedom. What blocks this potential is not nature but capitalism’s organization of growth. “The problem,” he writes, “is not growth, but capital’s need for self-valorization.” Firms must expand or die, and so growth under capitalism takes the form of endless accumulation. The alternative is democratic planning: production for use rather than profit, innovation for need rather than accumulation.
For Phillips, science and technology are not the enemy. They are instruments that can be reoriented. Renewable energy, advanced nuclear power, precision agriculture, and automation already contain the means of transition. What is missing is the coordination that only democratic planning can achieve. His goal is “rational, democratically planned societies” capable of organizing resources at planetary scale. The point is not to power down civilization but to power it differently.
Anti-modernism, he argues, leads not to salvation but to stagnation. Climate change is a collective systems problem, and only large-scale, advanced systems—mass transit, continental grids, green steel, synthetic fuels, and international cooperation—can meet it. “We need more, not less, capital over the world to apply its technology,” he writes, turning the standard green narrative upside down. The Promethean ambition often condemned by ecological romanticism is, paradoxically, our best hope for survival.
Phillips is unsparing toward the cult of the small. Local agriculture, artisanal production, and micro-energy projects may appear virtuous, but they are often inefficient and exclusionary. They express what he calls “a deep pessimism: the assumption that we can’t make large-scale, collective social change.” To mistake smallness for virtue is to abandon the very possibility of socialism.
In place of this, Phillips defends modernity—reason, science, and technological ambition—as the foundation of a democratic future. He urges the Left to embrace high-energy, high-modern solutions, including nuclear power and large-scale renewables. “Nuclear’s EROEI is roughly seventy-five to one,” he notes, “compared to hydro’s thirty-five to one and solar and wind’s far lower returns.” These are the levels required to sustain industrial civilization. A democratic Left should reclaim such capacities for collective good rather than abandon them to private or authoritarian control.
At the heart of Phillips’s argument is a moral inversion. Where austerity ecology finds virtue in restraint, he finds hope in abundance. Socialism’s purpose was never to distribute poverty more evenly but to make prosperity universal and just. “Inequality should be replaced by equality of abundance,” he writes. The Left cannot fight austerity while calling for degrowth; they are functionally identical. To do both is to speak the language of progress while practicing the politics of retreat.
Phillips’s provocation is not that growth is inherently good, but that planning—collective, rational, democratic planning—is the instrument of justice. The target is not modernity but the capitalist mode of production that turns progress into exploitation. “Let’s take over the machine,” he writes, “not turn it off.” That phrase captures the technoprogressive horizon: a politics of mastery without domination, abundance without waste, and shared control over the immense productive powers humanity has already built.
Toward a Critical Theory of Technology
Phillips’s call to “take over the machine” points to the terrain where political economy meets philosophy. His vision of democratic planning demands more than new institutions; it requires a new way of understanding technology. That is where Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology enters the discussion. Feenberg builds on the emancipatory hopes of socialism while confronting the very question that substantivism and eco-austerity leave unanswered: how can we transform the technical systems that shape our lives without retreating from them? His answer begins from a simple premise: technology is neither neutral nor autonomous but a field of struggle shaped by values, power, and design.
In the next essay, we turn to Feenberg’s framework and the possibilities it opens for technoprogressive praxis. If Part II mapped the dead ends of retreat and despair, Part III explores reconstruction: a philosophy of technology for building the just, high-tech, and abundant world the Left has too long forgotten to imagine.