It is argued that, in all advanced industrial societies (not necessarily only capitalist ones), technology becomes a means of domination, control, and exploitation,[1] or more generally something which threatens the survival of humanity.
Prominent authors elaborating a critique of technology include Donna J. Haraway, Jacques Ellul, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Joanna Bryson, E. F. Schumacher, Kate Crawford, Gilles Deleuze, Ted Kaczynski, Paul Virilio, Ivan Illich, Ritesh Kumar, Ursula Franklin, Jean Baudrillard, Vandana Shiva, Nicholas G. Carr, Langdon Winner, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hans Jonas, Theodore Roszak, Siegfried Kracauer, Karel Čapek, Sigfried Giedion, Günther Anders, Stanisław Lem, Neil Postman, William Morris, Martin Heidegger, Vilem Flusser, Jacques Tati, Hito Steyerl, Émile P. Torres, Oswald Spengler, Pentti Linkola, Andrew Feenberg, David Skrbina, Mike Cooley, John Zerzan, Lewis Mumford, Derrick Jensen, and Layla AbdelRahim.
For instance, activist Naomi Klein described how technology is employed by capitalism in its commitment to a "shock doctrine", which promotes a series of crises so that speculative profit can be accumulated.
[4] Critiques also focus on specific issues such as how technology—through robotics, automation, and software—is destroying people's jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the incidence of poverty and inequality.
[6] In the 1970s in the US, the critique of technology became the basis of a new political perspective called anarcho-primitivism, which was forwarded by thinkers such as Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, and David Watson.