The dialectic subjection/emancipation: elements for a Critical Theory of Digital Technologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present research aims to analyze the relationship between subjection and resistance/emancipation from the essayistic elaboration of a critical theory of digital technologies. As a main theoretical reference, we start from the work of the American/Canadian thinker Andrew Feenberg, who, while moving through the philosophy of technique and critical theory, produced a critical theory of technology, which he later named critical constructivism.The central concepts worked by this philosopher are technical code and subversive rationalization. With these categories, the author thinks, respectively, the production and appropriation of technologies in contemporary capitalist society. For him, the technical code refers to the set of guidelines that direct the production of artifacts and tools, while the subversive rationalization refers to the capacity of appropriation and free use of these same artifacts by users, which often even results in modifications of the codes. In this sense, Feenberg believes in the existence of a trend within the very dynamics of technologies that points to a democratic use of them. We will take Feenberg's ideas as a reference, but we intend to rehearse a critical theory of digital technologies. We believe it is necessary to fill some gaps that Feenberg's analysis leaves open: the potential use of digital technologies for the consolidation of new forms of control. To study this data we will bring as references Tim Wu, Manuel Castells, Byung-Chul Han and other researchers who analyze the new digital technologies and the network society with their specific problems. To conclude we will propose a discussion about the category of Feenbergian subversive rationalization and Wu's cyclical thinking. Such discussion focuses on analyzing the possibilities of dismantling the interest of corporate monopolies in cyberspace. We aim to verify a possible dialectical tension between the forces of domination and those of resistance in today's technological society. By re-reading Feenberg's concepts and analyzing the aspects related to digital technologies, we question whether it is possible to nod in the direction of a critical theory of digital technologies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".