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Genealogía de la Razón Técnica: Crítica a sus Efectos Políticos, Económicos y Culturales - Genealogy of Technical Reason: Critique of its Political, Economic, and Cultural effects
Guido Selim Arditi
Affiliation: University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Keywords: Technique; Technology; UBI; Technological Unemployment
Categories: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Demetrios Project
DOI: 10.17160/josha.12.5.1108
Languages: Spanish, Castilian
This dissertation critically examines the contemporary technical phenomenon from a historical and philosophical perspective, challenging the assumption of its neutrality. Rather than functioning as a mere set of tools, the technical system constitutes a normative framework that defines its own criteria of efficiency and control, shaping social life across political, economic, and cultural domains. Guided by a genealogical and critical approach, the study traces the historical conditions and capitalist dynamics that have captured knowledge and subordinated it to the logic of accumulation. Drawing on classical and contemporary thinkers such as Marx, Marcuse, Ellul, Habermas, Berardi, Rifkin, Coeckelbergh, Fisher, and Srnicek, it analyzes how technical rationality transforms politics into technocracy, economics into an abstract and self-referential system, and science into an instrument of utilitarian and financial interests. The findings reveal that the autonomy of technical systems reinforces the subordination of democratic deliberation to efficiency metrics, fosters structural technological unemployment, labor precarity, and the privatization of collectively produced knowledge. The rise of platform capitalism and artificial intelligence exemplifies this trend, converting human interaction into a monetizable resource and delegating decision-making to opaque algorithms. However, the same processes also hold emancipatory potential if reoriented toward democratic and ethical ends. The thesis concludes by proposing pathways to reclaim collective agency over technical development through the social appropriation of knowledge (General Intellect), redistribution of productive surplus, reduction of working hours, establishment of a Universal Basic Income, and transparent public governance of emerging technologies, arguing that only through such measures can the technical system cease to serve as an instrument of exclusion and become a vehicle for social emancipation.