The philosophy of technology provides us with conceptual frameworks for understanding the ethical, epistemological, and ontological implications of technological advancements. What is technology, and how does it differ from science, art, or other human activities? Is technology inherently neutral, or does it carry values and biases? How does technology shape and reflect human intentions and goals, and what is its relationship with human creativity? How does technology mediate human perception and interaction with the world, and does it enhance or diminish human autonomy and agency? What ethical responsibilities do engineers, designers, and technologists have, and how should we address the unintended consequences of technological innovation? Is there a moral obligation to develop or restrict certain technologies, such as AI or genetic engineering, and how do we balance technological progress with environmental sustainability? How does technology influence social structures, power dynamics, inequality, globalisation, and cultural homogenisation, and what role does it play in labor, work, and economic systems? Can technology promote democracy, or does it threaten privacy and freedom? Can we predict or control the long-term consequences of technological development, and how do we ensure that technological progress aligns with human flourishing? How do different cultures perceive and integrate technology, and what can we learn from past technological failures or successes?

By engaging with philosophical questions about the nature of technology, we hope to develop politically and ethically informed approaches to regulation that align with broader social goals and human well-being. In the absence of these foundations, attempts to answer research questions about digital regulation and social systems risk being overly technocratic, reductionist, or ethically underdeveloped.

The sub-discipline has its roots in the early 20th century, with foundational contributions from thinkers like José Ortega y Gasset and Martin Heidegger. Ortega y Gasset, in Meditations on Technology (1939), emphasised technology as a fundamental human activity, integral to the project of human self-realisation. Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology (1954), framed technology as a mode of revealing that shapes human existence and the world, arguing that modern technology risks reducing nature and humanity to mere resources. These originating works laid the groundwork for understanding technology as both tool and transformative force in for both industrial and civil society.

The 1960s and 1970s saw increasing philosophical engagement with technology as a force shaping power, subjectivity, and social organisation. Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (translated into English in 1964) argued that “technique” develops autonomously, following its own internal logic rather than human needs or ethical constraints, thereby transforming all aspects of social life into problems of efficiency and optimisation. Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man (1964), argued that technological rationality perpetuates domination by embedding societal control into the very fabric of technological systems. These early critiques – earlier than the commercial Internet and a generation before social media and artificial intelligence – were already concerned with the tension between technological progress and human autonomy. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) traced the historical emergence of disciplinary power, showing how technologies of surveillance – such as Bentham’s panopticon – function not merely as instruments of repression but as mechanisms that produce self-regulating subjects. Jean Baudrillard, in The System of Objects (1968) and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), explored how consumer society turns objects into signs that circulate within an economy of meaning, severing them from their material function and contributing to the rise of simulation—a reality increasingly shaped by representations rather than material conditions.

The late 20th century saw a shift toward more nuanced perspectives, with thinkers like Langdon Winner and Albert Borgmann. Borgmann, in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984), introduced the concept of device paradigms, contrasting technologies that foster engagement with those that promote disengagement and commodification. Winner, in The Whale and the Reactor (1986), questioned whether technologies have inherent political qualities, arguing that their design and implementation can reinforce or challenge power structures. Borgmann illustrates his concept of device paradigms with examples like the contrast between a traditional hearth, which fosters communal engagement, and central heating, which provides warmth but removes social interaction, while Winner famously examines how the design of low-hanging overpasses in New York — allegedly intended to prevent buses from passing through — served to reinforce racial and class segregation, demonstrating how technological choices can embody political intentions.

The 1990s witnessed a cyberpunk turn in the philosophy of technology, characterised by a fascination with the intersection of technology, identity, and embodiment, and the movement in alt-literature and science-fiction cinema that centred on the paradox of “high tech, low life,” as exemplified by Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson, and movies like Ghost in the Shell (1995) and The Matrix (1999). This period saw the rise of posthumanist feminism, with theorists like Donna Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 1991) challenging traditional boundaries between human and machine, organic and synthetic. Haraway’s cyborg metaphor, famously articulated in A Cyborg Manifesto, became a powerful tool for rethinking identity, agency, and resistance in a technologically mediated world, using the cyborg as a figure that transcends binary oppositions such as human/machine and male/female. Similarly, Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman, 1999) critiqued the erasure of embodiment in discourses of digital disembodiment, emphasising the materiality of information and the persistence of corporeal existence, drawing on case studies such as artificial intelligence research and the history of cybernetics to challenge the notion that human consciousness could be fully separated from the body. Alongside these interventions, more esoteric theoretical approaches emerged, such as the work of Sadie Plant (Zeros + Ones, 1997), which explored the gendered histories of computing, linking Ada Lovelace’s pioneering work on algorithms to contemporary cybernetic systems and arguing that digital technology carries an inherently subversive potential tied to feminist thought. These contributions collectively reoriented the philosophy of technology toward questions of hybridity, fluidity, and the destabilisation of fixed categories, reflecting broader cultural anxieties and possibilities opened up by the rapid technological transformations of the late 20th century.

Gilles Deleuze extended Foucault’s insights in his later essay Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990), where he argued that the rigid disciplinary institutions of the modern era were giving way to fluid, networked forms of power enabled by digital and informational technologies, replacing fixed enclosures with continuous monitoring and modulation. Towards the end of this period, Zygmunt Bauman’s early sociological work foreshadowed Liquid Modernity (2000), in which he argued that technological acceleration dissolves stable social structures, producing a world of continuous uncertainty, precarity, and individualisation. Deleuze uses the example of digital passwords and bank cards to illustrate his argument that power is no longer exercised through physical enclosures (such as factories or prisons) but through continuous access control and modulation, where individuals are constantly tracked and adjusted within networks of influence. Similarly, Bauman discusses the shift from long-term employment to short-term, precarious work as an example of how technological and economic changes create an unstable, constantly shifting social landscape where individuals must continuously adapt, lacking the security of fixed institutional structures.

In contemporary scholarship, the philosophy of technology has seen a revival of interest in the work of Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) whose theories of individuation and technicity have gained renewed relevance. Bernard Stiegler, a key figure in this revival, expanded on Simondon’s ideas in his three-volume work Technics and Time (1994–2018), arguing that technology is constitutive of human temporality and memory. Stiegler’s critique of hyper-industrial society and his call for a pharmacological approach to technology—viewing it as both poison and cure—have influenced contemporary debates on digital culture and automation. Yuk Hui, in On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016) and Recursivity and Contingency (2019), draws upon both Simondon and Stiegler to develop a cosmotechnical framework that situates technology within diverse cultural and historical contexts.

The philosophy of technology provides regulators and practitioners with critical tools to encourage reflection on the broader societal impacts of technological systems and avoid uncritical adoption of technologies that may reinforce inequality or harms. We intend for our research project to enable more responsible and equitable decision-making from both political and technological practitioners, ensuring that technological development serves the public good rather than narrow interests. (Dis)connections is a theoretical space where abstract questions of space and power and conceptual clarification exists in service of practical vigilance about the role of technologists, engineers and regulators as actors within a wider web of networked power.