Fear of new technology

Fear of technological innovation
Techno-fear
Techno-phobia
Irrational rejection of technological change
Antipathy towards innovation
Technikfeindlichkeit
Technophobia

Nature

Technology may be regarded as uniformly bad or suspect. In its naive radical form this is based on an appeal to nature in its naturalness, whereby technology is always regarded as a corruption of the pristine state. A more sophisticated perspective sees technology as denying the purity of the life-world.

Claim

The effect of new technologies on living systems has been consistently overlooked. New technologies have been introduced often in almost total ignorance or disregard of the biological and ecological systems that they subsequently disturb, and of the dynamic and evolving nature of living systems.

Counter-claim

The radical technophone is incorrect, since to be human is to break the bond of natural innocence. The use of tools alters the environment and transforms the world. All philosophical appeals to an immediacy of nature in its naturalness, or to the purity of lived experience, are self-defeating.

To be technophobic in our time is to be willing to accept starvation and slavery. The question is not of eliminating machines but of keeping open the instrumental power of technologies in a properly human context.

At the instrumental level, to lack technical knowledge is to lack a certain kind of power, to which technophobia based on ignorance precludes even minimal access. Without the possibility of such access, people are limited in real choices from the outset, whether pro or con.