The interweaving of the fate of human beings with technology is one of the defining features of modern life. But while technology can enhance life, it just as often endangers our existence. Today, the threat posed by new technologies looms large – artificial intelligence, drones, hypersonic missiles, new forms of bioweapons, chemical agents, and the like, form the subject matter of grim reports in the news. In Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought(2024), Caroline Ashcroft analyses how technology has been employed as a political concept. Ashcroft writes of her study, ‘it explores, not technology per se, but a particular idea of technology and its implications’ (p. 2). In particular, she investigates how a loose grouping of post-war intellectuals introduced and popularised a ‘catastrophic’ concept of technology, mobilising public anxiety about mechanisation, mass communication, and atomic war. Ashcroft traces this concept to the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Günther Anders, and Hans Jonas, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul, and the writer Lewis Mumford. Ascribed to them is the view that modern technology and the social practices attached to it threaten to degrade, disfigure, and ultimately destroy the foundations of civilised society.
Ashcroft’s main task is to show that the thinkers she is interested in share a distinct approach to theorising technology. She does this by clarifying, in two different domains, the special meaning they attach to it. These are, on the one hand, the rhetorical, and on the other, the political or critical theoretic. In their rhetoric, these theorists share a sense of gloom and pessimism, which at times veers into apocalypticism, and imbibes their writings on technology with a one-sidedness that distinguishes the catastrophic technology concept from other, rival, more generous critiques of technological change. Indeed, one noticeable feature of the critique of technology assessed in the book is the seemingly deliberate exclusion on the part of these theorists of any mention of the material benefits associated with technological progress. Ashcroft traces this shared negativity in part to German intellectual influences (p. 41–6), but also to the direct, traumatic impact of Nazism and the Second World War. In the 1930s, the Nazis forced Anders, Jonas, Arendt, Adorno, and Horkheimer into exile. All settled eventually in the United States as refugees. Afterwards, most came to see the war as an expression of technology’s destructive potential. Lastly, this definition by way of rhetorical analysis also does important boundary work for Ashcroft. For example, Herbert Marcuse, who flits in and out of the book’s narrative, is excluded prima facie from the group because he is too optimistic (p. 37).
Rhetorical analysis supplements Ashcroft’s core thesis, which draws from these thinkers not merely a critique of technological change, but also a critical dissection and undermining of liberalism. Liberalism, according to these thinkers, is underpinned by a commitment to rationalising the transformation of the world by technology. This rationalisation proceeds from the view that technology is value neutral. Ashcroft deftly shows how the thinkers she has focused on challenge this assumption. First, they invert the dominant historical narrative, according to which technological prowess is preceded by scientific endeavour, instead arguing – with the notable exception of Jonas – that the technologisation of life has ancient roots and that modern science is more recent (p. 63–73). Accordingly, technology can no longer be said to simply embody established scientific truths. Second, they analyse the totalising effects of technology on society; that is, the way in which technology suppresses difference. Ashcroft documents how these allegedly ineluctable tendencies are theorised in relation to war and nuclear weapons (Chapter 3), production and the economy (Chapter 4), mass communication (Chapter 5), and biotechnology (Chapter 6). The effect is compelling: easily obscured, the essentially political thrust of this critique of technology is placed on firmer ground thanks to Ashcroft’s treatment.
As for her description of these thinkers’ critique as a ‘Cold War phenomenon’ (p. 8), however, Ashcroft is less convincing. Some of the figures she analyses published their most important works some ten or twenty years before the start of the Cold War. Mumford’s widely influential Technics and Civilisation, for example, came out in 1934. And while it’s true that Heidegger’s seminal essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, was published in 1954, its rudiments were in place by 1949, and the rest of his philosophical output largely predates the Cold War – most notably, Being and Time (1927) and Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). Likewise, the bulk of Horkheimer’s work predates 1947, the year commonly cited as marking the start of the Cold War, and the year he and Adorno published The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which they had mostly written between 1941 and 1944.
These bibliographical anomalies would be of less significance if Ashcroft managed to firmly tie the emergence of a catastrophic discourse surrounding technology to the geopolitics of the Cold War. Yet less of the book is dedicated to this kind of contextualisation than one might expect. More time is spent showing how the writers’ shared experience of the Second World War, the discovery of the Holocaust, and, for some, flight as German-Jewish refugees to the United States, shaped their views (see Chapter 1). In fact, juxtaposed against these other contextual factors, the contemporaneous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union begins to fade from view.
Moreover, Ashcroft herself notes that many of these thinkers, especially Adorno and Horkheimer, Arendt, Ellul, Heidegger, Mumford, and Marcuse, use the notion of a technological society hurtling towards catastrophe precisely as a means of transcending Cold War distinctions, linking technology with totalitarianism (p. 16–17, 80–6, 148, 220). Technology becomes a critical concept enabling these thinkers to pick out what is flawed in the condition of both superpowers, implying that the problematic at the core of their analyses is in fact extraneous to the politics of the Cold War. Rather than framing their conclusions, the Cold War appears to be something these thinkers wanted to get away from. And while Ashcroft does draw some concrete connections between individual texts and writers and Cold War politics, there remains a strong suspicion that the popularity and scope of mid-century critiques of technology is better explained in other ways: either in the context of modernisation as a global social and economic process, the migration from Weimar Germany to the United States of a particularly acute variety of technological pessimism, or the lingering memory of the Second World War.
The book’s concluding chapter is a meditation on the contemporary relevance of the critique of technology advanced by these thinkers, especially insofar as the critique can be read as an attack on the idea that technology is value neutral. Ashcroft first notes that as critics of the relationship between technology and the environment, these thinkers anticipated many of the themes which are now discussed under the rubric of the ‘Anthropocene’ (p. 212–14). Specifically, they were concerned with decoding the ways in which worldliness, as such, has come to be transformed by technology, in ways that mirror contemporary discussions of the anthropocentric character of our age. The organising principle of such a transformation is the emergence of a new kind of existential threat, one that unifies the world in a negative relation to it. Ashcroft observes that where once the threat of nuclear war shaped the consciousness of the Cold War, climate change and the prospect of irreversible environmental disaster similarly stalks contemporary society (p. 220). In both instances, this way of conceptualising our global interconnectedness opens the door to renewed international cooperation.
Finally, Ashcroft points to the way in which these thinkers agreed that a political alternative was needed to counter the risks posed by technology. Because technology is not value neutral, they said, its intractable catastrophic potential could only be solved by bringing about revolutionary changes in the organisation of society and the philosophies that underpinned it. Technology itself needed to be dethroned, deprived of its privileged status. This perspective provides a valuable contrast to the still-dominant narrative around technological risk, which encourages governments to address the problem through well-designed regulation and technocratic fixes. Instead, technological change should be understood as a genuinely political phenomenon, and the effects ought to be exposed to democratic contestation. Amid panics over AI safety, the effect of social media access on children, the use of autonomous weapons systems in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and countless other technologically-inflected hazards, Ashcroft’s intervention is especially well-timed. If nothing else, it reminds us that the lines dividing techno-optimists from pessimists today – distinctions drawn ever starker as debates over AI and social media, for example, emerge as mainstream political concerns – are hardly recent inventions. On the contrary, they were drawn almost a century ago, in large part by the thinkers brought to life in this book.
Jesse Roberts is an MPhil student in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge.