The Myth of Neutral Technology

Chapter 5 of my Upcoming Book "The Ten Myths of Progress"

Welcome readers to the 5th Chapter of upcoming book, The Ten Myths of Progress. A lengthy chapter preview is provided for all here, as well as the entire chapter for paid subscribers.

We’re raised to think technology is the product of human brilliance. It is praised as neutral invention born of problem-solving, a tool that brings value, efficiency, and convenience to our lives. A hammer drives nails. A wheel rolls carts. A phone makes calls. If we benefit, it must be good. If it’s useful, it must be progress.

But what happens when the value it provides isn’t as simple as it seems?

Take the smartphone. It gives you access to your email, your calendar, your coworkers and clients at any time of day. That’s value, right? But that “value” comes at a cost: constant accessibility, no real off-hours, and a mind conditioned to compulsive checking. The tool that promised to free you instead extends the workplace into your bedroom, your dinner table, your vacation. Suddenly, you're always on call.

Or social media. It lets you build a broader network, stay in touch with friends across continents, promote your work, share your voice. But what does it extract in return? Hours of scrolling, endless comparison, dopamine spirals, the gnawing anxiety of performance. The tool becomes a world where your worth is measured in clicks, likes, and visibility.

Even the car, an emblem of freedom, mobility and modern life. It gets you farther, faster. You can explore distant cities, escape the grid. But soon, you’re driving to everything. Work, groceries, coffee, community. You pass a dozen people you’ll never meet, speed through towns you’ll never know. You leave behind the walkable village, the front porch, the park bench. And instead of connection, you find yourself alone behind glass, in traffic, in motion.

Technology doesn’t just give us more options. It reshapes the terms of our lives. It imposes its own rhythm, its own scale, its own logic. And slowly, we come to believe that its costs are natural, inevitable, even noble. Because the myth isn’t just that technology is neutral. The deeper myth is that its trade-offs are worth it, even when we forget what we traded away.

I used to believe this myth too. That better tools simply made for a better life. But over time, I started to notice a pattern: the more connected I became, the less grounded I felt. The more “efficient” my tasks, the more fractured my time. The more control I gained through devices, the more dependent I became on systems I didn’t understand and couldn’t escape.

The machine in my pocket promised everything. But it never told me what it would take.

Defining the Myth – “It’s Just a Tool”

Maybe you’ve heard some of these:

“It’s not the tool. It’s how you use it.”
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

It’s the go-to defense for every new innovation, from social media to surveillance drones. Technology, we’re told, is neutral. A hammer can build a house or bash a skull. A smartphone can share a poem or spread disinformation. A car can rescue a life or run one down. The morality lies in the user, not the machine.

But what these neat little phrases ignore is that tools aren’t created in a vacuum. They’re born in cultures, forged within power structures, shaped by specific intentions. And most importantly: they shape us back.

Industrial civilization doesn’t just invent tools… it invents tools that reinforce its logic: speed, extraction, control, scale. The idea that a tool could be used equally for liberation or oppression ignores the vast economic, social, psychological structures that determine how tools are deployed, who controls them, and what kinds of behavior they normalize.

Is a surveillance camera “just a tool”? Not when it’s embedded in a system of policing that spies on its citizens.
Is a smartphone “just a tool”? Not when it’s designed to be addictive, to mine data, to sell attention as a commodity.
Is AI “just a tool”? Not when it’s trained on biased data, built by corporations with profit imperatives, and deployed in systems of wage automation, algorithmic sentencing, and predictive policing.

When we say technology is neutral, we blind ourselves to its politics. Because all technology comes with a worldview. A hand tool suggests human scale, autonomy, tactile feedback. A factory robot suggests hierarchy, centralization, the replacement of living labor with mechanized process. Each tool encodes a way of relating to the world.

Even what counts as “technological advancement” is shaped by power. Why do we pour billions into automating delivery systems, but barely invest in public water access? Why do we innovate in apps and digital finance while soil regeneration or midwifery are treated as antiquated? It’s not about what’s useful… it’s about what’s profitable.

To say a tool is neutral is to pretend it landed from the sky, free of context, untouched by ideology. But tools are proposals. They make suggestions about how we should live, work, move, think, and relate.

And once adopted at scale, those suggestions become realities.
Not because we freely chose them. But because they became the only way.

Industrial Technology as Embedded Power

If tools carry embedded values, then industrial technology is perhaps the most value-laden of all. It didn’t just appear. It was engineered within systems designed for control, centralization, and mass extraction. And in doing so, it didn’t just change how we work. It changed who has power.

In the world before industrialization, tools largely conformed to the human scale. A spade fit your hand. A loom fit in your home. A fishing net required a few pairs of hands and some skill. But as machines became more complex, they outgrew the cottage and the commons. They demanded factories, managers, energy inputs, and workers… a whole new architecture of social control.

Industrial machines not only got bigger, they became gatekeepers. They concentrated production into fewer hands, turning independence into employment, subsistence into wage labor. Those who once worked for themselves now punched clocks. Those who once lived by the rhythms of land and season now lived by the rhythms of the shift bell and the factory whistle.

The scale of technology changed the scale of society. Cities swelled, rural life emptied, and governance bent toward the needs of centralized systems. Power plants, highways, railroads, and refineries required top-down coordination and state enforcement. The infrastructure demanded obedience.

Make no mistake… this was not a neutral transition. It birthed the modern nation-state, the corporate monopoly, the military-industrial complex. It carved out a society where everything from movement, to energy, agriculture, communication, flows through systems owned by a powerful few and regulated for their benefit.

And once those systems are in place, they shape every choice that comes after.

You don’t get to walk to work when your city is designed around cars.
You don’t get to unplug when your job requires constant connectivity.
You don’t get to fish the river when the dam has turned it into a dead lake.

We forget this. We grow up inside the machine and call it normal. But Lewis Mumford warned us long ago: the real threat of technology isn’t that it fails—it’s that it succeeds, and in doing so, remakes us in its image.

These systems are not passive. They direct energy, attention, labor, and life into specific channels. They require hierarchy. They demand submission. And they defend themselves with everything from propaganda to policy to police.

To speak of technology as neutral in the face of this is to miss the point entirely.
It’s not just the tools we use, it’s the world they require, and the people they remake.

The Algorithm Has a Boss