I have started reading The Cultural Logic of Computation, by David Columbia.

This, from Chapter 1:

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Computers come with powerful belief systems that serve to obscure their real functions, even when we say we are acutely aware of the consequences of our technologies. The thought surrounding issues like global climate change and genetics (and, in an earlier time, research into atomic physics) suggests that technologies have strong inherent destructive potentials, even when we don't see them.

The fact that computers empower users is not in doubt; what is in question is what power it gives which users, how, and why. In a world where corporations already inhabit an ideal personhood (exported uniquely from an Anglo-American model) that obscures what we understand as human being (not least because the humans who inhabit them are rarely held accountable for a corporation's actions), and as with commercials for detrimental technologies like always-on wireless connectivity, it is all the more necessary to articulate the ideological operations of the computational tropes as they come into being, rather than afterwards.

We need to find a way to generate critical praxis even of what appears as an inarguable good. What historicist and poststructuralist writers like Foucault and technological skeptics like Ellul and Innis share is the view that social transformations emerge anywhere other than political movements, even when their overriding trope is technological. The lesson from that work that this book deploys is that we have to learn how to critique even that which helps us (much as computers help us to write books like this one, among many other things). It would be better not to have computers, in that sense, than to live in a world where many more people come to believe that computers by themselves can "save us," can "solve our problems."

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