Hackear a tecnologia: um estudo sobre a teoria crítica da tecnologia de Andrew Feenberg

Abstract

This dissertation intends to offer a study of Andrew Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology, reflecting on the plausibility of realising his project of cultural and political transformation. Feenberg aims to re-signify the instrumentalization of technology and to restore a democratic political space for its development under the control of human intentionality, and according to a holistic conception of the two-dimensional essence of technology. He starts from the assumption that the current model of technological development widens inequalities while serving the social domination by those who control it, in addition to generalizing environmental and humanitarian crises. Feenberg understands capitalism as a technically structured rational system and intends to show the potential of modern technological development as an instrument of alternative intervention capable of transforming the technologically mediated relations in industrialized societies. It is this revolutionary potential that, in this work, we interpret as an effort to hack technology. Feenberg's hacking goals are to break the barriers of control and the technocratic assertion of hegemonic capitalism, to decipher the standard of technoscientific rationality and its associated technical code and to subvert the conception and current use of technology, pointing to a development that integrates its instrumental and social dimensions.