TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, 16(4), 453–472

Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

CROSS-DISCIPLINARY EXCHANGES

An Interview with Andrew Feenberg

Mark Zachry
University of Washington

A leading thinker in the philosophy of technology, Andrew Feenberg is recognized

by many as a preeminent voice in conversations about the role of technology in
contemporary society. The author of such widely cited books as Alternative Mo-
dernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory (1995), Questioning
Technology (1999), and Transforming Technology (2002), Feenberg has published
a rich body of work influencing scholars in many disciplines. His ideas are cited by
scholars in fields as varied as science and technology studies, computer-supported
cooperative work, ethics, health communication, new media research, information
management, philosophy, and environmental studies. His work is also clearly well
known to many researchers in technical communication, who routinely cite his
publications in their own studies focused on communication, values, and technol-
ogy.
For many, Feenberg’s key contribution has been advancing the work of critical
theory by productively exploring its connections with technologies that have
emerged in recent years. His work offers a way of moving beyond the binary divi-
sion between those who are philosophically opposed to technological develop-
ment and those who champion it. The alternative he develops is based, in part, on a
theoretical framework he has advanced for understanding how technology and cul-
ture are integrally connected. As Feenberg explains through his work, the ways
through which technologies and cultures interact and affect each other are compli-
cated, varying from one instance to another. In much of the debate about the rela-
tionship between technology and society preceding Feenberg’s work, technology
was treated as an irresistible or deterministic force. His work complicates this un-
derdeveloped interpretation of technology, showing instead that in different ways
and with varying results, people have always played an integral role in making
sense of emerging technologies and in reinterpreting established technologies.
454 ZACHRY

As part of his large project, Feenberg has focused particular attention on theo-
rizing human agency. Acknowledging the many ways through which technologies
are embedded in structures that limit human choices, Feenberg also explores the
limitations of such structures. He examines, for example, the means through which
people have and continue to reflexively exert force back on the technologically re-
alized structures in which they operate. (Such force, as Feenberg richly illustrates
through his work, defines human agency in a more productive way than is implied
in traditional, romantic conceptions of individualism.) For Feenberg, the exercise
of agency takes several forms and is enacted on multiple scales. Agency, for exam-
ple, is exhibited in the unique hacks people develop to repurpose technologies to
address their idiosyncratic needs, but also in the participatory design processes
through which technologies can be developed with others. When agency is exer-
cised to affect technologies in such a way that they counteract power structures that
are undemocratic, Feenberg associates it with democratic rationalization. Such ra-
tionalization contrasts with technocratic rationalization, or the idea that the order
of culture is or should be established by what is implied in the design of contempo-
rary technologies.
Communicative practices are a recurring concern in Feenberg’s work. He has
addressed such practices from several different angles. For example, he has con-
sidered how lay activists have employed unconventional communication to influ-
ence the agendas of scientists and government agencies. In varied contexts, he has
also considered how people transform information technologies into communica-
tion technologies that better reflect their concerns as humans. (Some examples of
this are mentioned in the interview, but interested readers should consult his work
for more extended studies.) Technical communication is not a practice that Feen-
berg has paid specific attention to in his work. However, as his comments below in-
dicate, he sees the field as well positioned to play a more central role in facilitating
exchanges that can shape both professional and lay cultures.
The range of contexts through which Feenberg has explored technology is nota-
ble. His published work includes studies featuring such cases as online patient
meetings, educational technologies, distance learning networks, Japanese culture,
the Minetel network in France, AIDS and experimental medicine on humans, the
environmental movement, and the May events of 1968. As he explains in the inter-
view, he has focused particular attention on online education, a field in which he
was one of the earliest innovators, starting in 1982. Online education is an area of
ongoing interest for Feenberg, one that he continues to write about and in which he
has made contributions as a software designer. His current project is (Re)Inventing
the Internet, an edited volume that he is in the midst of preparing.
Feenberg holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the
School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Over the course of his ca-
reer, he has also taught at San Diego State University; Duke University; the Uni-
versities of California, San Diego and Irvine; the Sorbonne (Paris I); the University
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 455

of Paris-Dauphine; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; and the Uni-
versity of Tokyo. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from University of California,
San Diego. Early in his career, he was a US Department of Education Mina
Shaughnessy Scholar (1984–1985) and the coorganizer of a National Endowment
for the Humanities-funded Rhetorics of Technology conference at the Center for
20th-Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1980.
In addition to his academic appointments, Feenberg has been a research associ-
ate at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute and at the Institut de Recherche et
d’Information Socio-Économique, Université de Paris-Dauphine. He has worked
in software design, most recently on TextWeaver, a project partially funded
through a US Department of Education FIPSE grant. TextWeaver is an open source
discussion forum package designed for online education (see www.textweaver.
org). He is also a photographer whose work has been featured in exhibits in San
Diego and Vancouver, British Columbia. His photography appears in Making
Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (edited by Bruno Latour and Peter
Weibel) and on the cover of Mark Poster’s Information Please: Culture and Poli-
tics in the Age of Digital Machines.
This interview occurred on February 24, 2007, at Feenberg’s residence in Van-
couver, British Columbia.

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS BY ANDREW FEENBERG

Feenberg, A., & Leiss, W. (2007). Essential Marcuse: Selected writings of philosopher and social critic
Herbert Marcuse. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Feenberg, A. (2005). Heidegger and Marcuse: The catastrophe and redemption of history. New York:
Routledge.
Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming technology: A critical theory revisited. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Feenberg, A., & Freedman, J. (2001). When poetry ruled the streets: The French May events of 1968.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning technology. New York: Routledge.
Feenberg, A. (1995). Alternative modernity: The technical turn in philosophy and social theory. Berke-
ley, CA: University of California Press.
Feenberg, A. (1991). Critical theory of technology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Feenberg, A. (1981). Lukács, Marx, and the sources of critical theory. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Littlefield.

COMPUTERS AND COMMUNICATION

TCQ: You are widely known for your influential work in the philosophy of
technology, with much of your work focusing specifically on computer
technologies. How did you come to be interested in computers?
456 ZACHRY

Feenberg: I have been writing about the philosophy of technology for many years
now, since the mid 1980s. I believe that if you write about such a sub-
ject, it is a good idea to know something about at least one technology
so you have some grounding. Over the years, I have actually worked
with two different technologies—with medical experimentation on hu-
man subjects and with computers. My computer work started out in the
early 1980s when I was at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute.
We created the first online education program there. When this project
was being envisaged, the president of the institute came to me and said
do you want a computer? And I said, sure. At that time, a personal com-
puter cost something like $5,000, and nobody I knew had one. Of
course, people in computer companies and engineers had them, but ac-
ademics in the humanities were not likely even to be able to type, much
less operate a computer. So I got involved with computers pretty early,
and we used them for communication, which marked a kind of revolu-
tion in computer use. At that time if you asked people what a computer
was, what it was for, they would have probably said filing and calculat-
ing. Of course now if you ask people what a computer is for, the first
thing that comes to mind is e-mail. So we have added a third function to
those two original functions of computers. That was beginning to take
off in the 1980s, and at WBSI we were actually a bit ahead of the curve
because it wasn’t really until the Internet was open to the public in the
1990s that most people got involved. In the early 1980s, very few peo-
ple had computers so we used them as one of the major inducements we
could offer the faculty in our school. Professors from very important in-
stitutions—Harvard, MIT, it didn’t really matter—were enthusiastic to
get access to this magical technology. So, I was involved with commu-
nication by computer, what we call “computer-mediated communica-
tion,” from those early days.
TCQ: So your interest in computer technologies emerged from this work you
were doing in online education at the Western Behavioral Sciences In-
stitute?
Feenberg: Yes, but actually, I studied computer-mediated communication not only
in the US but also in France. I spent a lot of time in France, and I worked
for awhile at a research institute there on a project sponsored by the
French Telecom. We were supposed to introduce computer confer-
encing to the French Minitel system. We were not successful. I think it
had to do with the configuration of the Minitel, which really has a terri-
ble keyboard that is unsuitable for typing. But we did have some fun,
and I learned a great deal about the Minitel from talking to people in the
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 457

phone company and researchers who were working on this phenome-

non. I don’t know if your readers are aware of the Minitel. It was a sort
of early national version of what the Internet has become, a domestic
computing network with a very simple interface that anyone can learn
to use. The phone company distributed millions of Minitels free, which
is how they got the thing off the ground in the early 1980s. These are
just little dumb terminals, but the network is intelligent, so it can man-
age the data. The system was a success. People used it for things like
train schedules, and it gave access to the national phone directory used
by the operators so you could find anybody’s number in the country
quickly. Classified ads too. All kinds of things went on there. And the
most interesting thing is that hackers hacked the technology and intro-
duced instant messaging, which became quite popular. By the time I
had done all this work on education and the French case, I had acquired
a sort of philosophy of computer-mediated communication and its
place in the development of computing. This philosophy shows up in
chapters of books and articles I have written.
TCQ: So, you have a long-standing interest in computing technologies and in
the philosophy of technology, but now you direct a lab in a school of
communication?
Feenberg: I am trained as a philosopher and have taught in philosophy depart-
ments for most of my career, specializing in technology studies, but
here I am now in Simon Fraser’s Communications School. To anyone
who knows these fields, this may seem somewhat unusual since the of-
ficial discipline of communication and the official discipline of science
and technology studies do not communicate. There is no real contact
between them, although that is absurd since their object is pretty much
the same. Communication, except for purely interpersonal communica-
tion, involves media and is technological. And it is hard to see how you
can write about technology studies without stumbling over little things
like television or the telephone. One of the things that happened when I
was brought here was that I introduced technology studies to the stu-
dents. Our current project in the lab is a book that bridges communica-
tion and technology studies; it is called (Re)Inventing the Internet.
TCQ: What does technology studies offer that is particularly valuable for peo-
ple who study communication?
Feenberg: User agency is an important theme in technology studies. We are very
interested in the impact of users on the redesign of technology. Of
course, it is rare that users are included a priori in the design process.
458 ZACHRY

There has been some experimentation with that, especially in Scandi-

navia, but it’s very unusual still, and certainly in the American com-
puter industry you don’t find much of that. In a sense, you can say that
beta testing is a sort of user participation, except how much does it re-
ally involve design rather than just debugging? I don’t know. In fact,
when you look at the history of technology, there are many examples of
users actually innovating, finding new uses of things, or modifying
things that are provided to them by companies and engineers with dif-
ferent intent. Users’ ideas feed back into design, and so there is an a
posteriori influence of users on designers, which is quite important. In
the case of the Internet that is an overwhelming influence because the
original design (and this is true also of the Minitel system) was about
information, not communication. It was a sort of postindustrial infor-
mation society project. In both cases, users changed the purpose of the
networks. The networks did not lose their original functions, but a new
layer of functionality was added. And then of course the people manag-
ing these networks incorporated that new purpose; engineers, program-
mers incorporated the new layer and modified and improved it so that it
could function well, and things began to take off. Eventually it became
obvious that this is what the system was for. I once wrote an article
called “From Information to Communication,” and that’s a pattern in
the field of technology. It has happened more than once in more than
one place. So it seems that the people who design technologies don’t
think about human communication in the first instance. They think
about other things and communication is added on later under the influ-
ence of users.
TCQ: And this push from the people using a given technology to transform it
to serve their communicative purposes is something that happens in all
sorts of development projects?
Feenberg: Yes. For example, one of the vice presidents of the Digital Equipment
Corporation, which at the time was the second- or third-largest com-
puter company in the world, explained to me why they were interested
in computer-mediated communication. He said, our ambition was to
hook up many small machines so that people wouldn’t have to buy IBM
mainframes, and after awhile we realized that we were not just connect-
ing the machines, we were connecting the people who use the ma-
chines. So then we decided to design a program for them to communi-
cate with each other. I actually think this is the order in which engineers
arrive at the conclusion that there is human communication on a sys-
tem. It is as an outgrowth of some other project that appeals more to an
engineering mind.
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 459

CRITICAL THEORY AND DESIGN

TCQ: People in the field of technical communication have found your work
helpful for thinking about people, technologies, and social processes.
In particular, your ideas have been helpful in thinking through the rela-
tionship of technology users and the design of technology. Could you
describe what you think of the relationship between critical theory and
the processes of design?
Feenberg: By critical theory, people mean different things these days. For me, it
is about the Frankfurt school. These are the German philosophers,
Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, who from the 1930s on developed a
new version of Marxism. They were not part of the Soviet sphere of
influence. Instead, they based their work on the tradition of German
philosophy and democratic socialist ideals. This school of Marxism
culminated in the 1960s and, at least for me, in Marcuse’s book One-
Dimensional Man. It is a critique of American affluent society, con-
sumer society. The interesting thing is that One-Dimensional Man has
two sides; the larger part of it is a critique of the ways in which people
have lost the ability to understand their world—through the media,
through obsession with consumer goods and shopping, and through
changes in intellectual culture—changes that have limited their hori-
zons. It is a dystopian critique of America as a brave new world. On the
other side, the end of the book has some interesting suggestions about
how technology could be transformed in order to create a very different
kind of social world that is more harmonious and fulfilling. However,
Marcuse’s proposals at the end remain rather abstract. This book was
published in 1964 before the environmental movement really got go-
ing, or the Internet, and people’s attitudes toward technology were
much more rigid and much more technocratic at that time. Marcuse’s
book consequently was a kind of abstract challenge to that whole 1960s
technocratic mentality. But he didn’t have much to go on. That book
had a big influence on me. I was Marcuse’s student and wrote a doctoral
dissertation with him, and I was very interested in the argument of that
book from the beginning. Later on, as I learned more about technology,
I realized that there was a lot more to be said about particular technolo-
gies and about the processes of technological development than Mar-
cuse was aware of. As I was later introduced to the literature of technol-
ogy studies, I thought I could find there methods for elaborating a more
concrete version of something like what Marcuse had intended. Critical
theory of technology is a critique of domination exercised through the
organization of technically mediated institutions. The emphasis is on
460 ZACHRY

how power is centralized, how people are controlled, and their minds
shaped by these centralized technical institutions. To introduce some
sort of reciprocity, a more democratic organization of technological so-
ciety, implies a redesign of many technologies underlying these institu-
tions.
TCQ: What is an example of this in contemporary society?
Feenberg: Well, just to give one example, broadcasting. Broadcasting allows one
person like Rupert Murdoch to control the thoughts or at least to try to
control the thoughts of millions of people around the world. This is a
scandal, and totally undemocratic. The whole space of public discus-
sion is corrupted by people like him. The idea that private ownership of
the public domain in which democratic discourse goes on should be
protected as freedom of speech is outrageous. And yet, it is taken for
granted today. But that is a function of technology to a certain extent,
not just of the organization of the legal system that protects its owners,
but also of the technical nature of broadcasting. One of the interesting
things about the Internet is that it tends to break the broadcasting mo-
nopoly. If you study the issue of the media from the standpoint of tech-
nology, then the role of users appears clearly because they are innova-
tive, inventing new forms of communication, new ways of forming
communities, something that is foreclosed in the world of broadcast-
ing. There were early experiments with radio and television that might
have led to different configurations, but broadcast technologies have
long since been configured to privilege centralized control. There does-
n’t seem to be any way to reverse that whereas in the case of the Internet
there is still a tremendous amount of dynamism coming from users.
And that’s an important factor in the democratization of so-called dem-
ocratic societies. It may actually get us back to the point where people
are able to think for themselves instead of just parroting clichés put out
by propaganda machines.
TCQ: But you have also noted in your work that there is a possibility that it
could go the other way?
Feenberg: Yes. It’s also possible that the same guys who have corrupted the public
sphere through broadcasting will take over the Internet and render it too
completely useless for any kind of democratic discourse.
TCQ: So it’s all yet to be decided? You have no reason to think that it will go
either one way or the other?
Feenberg: There is no way to predict. The only thing that makes this future at all
hopeful is the fact that there is already a culture established, and that
culture is familiar to hundreds of millions of people. But of course all
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 461

the real power is on the other side. So the question is, what is going to
turn out to be more significant—the momentum of this mass culture of
the Internet, or the lobbying and the bribery that corporations will use
to get it under control?

HACKING, CREATIVE APPROPRIATION,

AND USER AGENCY

TCQ: Much of your work has focused on how technologies are made by peo-
ple through processes of creative appropriation. Do you see this sort of
hacking activity as always inevitable, or are there forces that endanger
this form of human activity? Privileged uses have evolved in the past.
Do people always find a way to hack the system, or is it possible for
other people to just close it down?
Feenberg: I think it is certainly possible to make creative appropriation much
harder. You can consider technology as representative of dimensions
of the users’ being and of the people who live with its effects. So we
can ask how well represented are we by a given technology? If a tech-
nology makes a lot of people sick, you can say that it doesn’t represent
that dimension of the user that is studied by medicine and taken care
of by doctors. Another technology, let’s say snowmobiles, may repre-
sents one dimension of people well (they are a lot of fun), but not an-
other dimension (they are not safe). You can think of people as having
many dimensions, and each technology represents some of those di-
mensions. When people hack or redesign or reinvent technology, they
are asking it to represent them better or represent more aspects of their
lives. The Internet in the very beginning was supposed to be used for
data sharing and computer time sharing, but a graduate student wrote
a little e-mail program and put it on the system, and what he was say-
ing was, this technology can represent us as people and not just as
technical experts. So here’s a whole other dimension of our being that
came to be represented by the Internet. This kind of expansion or im-
provement and, of course, vetoing of things that are harmful, is going
on all the time in the interaction of users and victims of technology
and the engineers whose job it is to make the things work. There is a
kind of translation that goes on between discursively formulated de-
mands by users—in some cases through sketchy hacks—that give an
idea what people want, and the technical specifications devised by en-
gineers to enable those expressions to guide the creation of efficient
and effective technical devices. That’s the really interesting process
462 ZACHRY

that I study, and I think of this as a way of understanding technology

as a quasi-political institution, a more or less democratic institution,
depending upon how easy it is for users and victims to communicate
their needs. (Victims are part of the story because of what we know
now about pollution; they are involved too, even if no one intended to
involve them—they go to court to prove it). What’s important is how
easy is it for users and victims to communicate, to get across their de-
mands and ideas so that the technology represents more of their hu-
manity.
TCQ: So there is a feedback loop through which users clearly can influence
the design of technologies. How do social structures—large organiza-
tions, professional cultures, etc.—then play into this equation?
Feenberg: When you study the different forces at work in the development of a
modern society, you discover that most of the technology comes from
the military and corporations. The military and corporations have a
very narrow conception of what it is they are after. So you can almost be
certain that the initial versions of things will be limited in some way
that needs overcoming. And then there is also the narrow limits of the
professional culture of the people who do the original design work. En-
gineering culture has also its own biases—for example, the bias toward
using technologies for information rather than for communication.
You can find that even in the history of the telephone. The early tele-
phone engineers were scandalized by the use of the telephone for so-
cial purposes because they didn’t think that was what their invention
was for. They thought it was for high-quality business communica-
tion, police work, and things like that. In fact, one of the early applica-
tions of the telephone was broadcasting. There were companies until
the 1920s that broadcast musical performances, opera and plays, on
the telephone networks. When women gossiped on the phone—what
was called gossiping anyway—this troubled its creators. The idea that
the telephone is an instrument of sociability instead of business and
government came as a shock. So what we think of now as the premier
instrument of human communication was not really designed with
that in mind. And this kind of bias seems to have emerged from corpo-
rate and engineering culture. It was eventually overcome under pres-
sure from users.
TCQ: So when things are functioning in the best way possible, when there is a
sort of democratic process of feedback from users of technologies to
corporations, and corporations respond appropriately, that is the ideal
that we always have to be working toward?
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 463

Feenberg: Yes, that is a more democratic configuration than one in which things
are blocked. When you think about what has happened and what is hap-
pening in the Soviet Union and China, with regard to environmental
problems, you can see how important that is. Their case shows the dan-
ger of blocking communication; preventing those translations from tak-
ing place. Eventually they have reached the point in Russia where the
pollution is so extensive that now the life expectancy of the population
is going down. This is not entirely due to pollution, but it is partly due to
the destruction of the environment. It is not as though people didn’t
know something was wrong before. It is just that people were put in jail
if they complained. So they kept quiet. Democratic capitalism is open
to some extent, certainly more than the Soviet communist system or the
Chinese communist system have been, but you can imagine going
much further in the direction of democratizing technology than we have
gone so far.
TCQ: So do you see promise that more inclusive design approaches like par-
ticipatory design out of Scandinavia could become widespread? In, for
example, a North American context?
Feenberg: Well, it would certainly be a good thing if they did. There are some
small companies that do things like that. There is a computer software
firm here that works directly with its clients. They have devised a sys-
tem of producing software in which the clients are continually in-
volved, and every iteration of the software is usable. It is really hard to
participate in something that is going to take several years to happen
when you don’t have any sketch in between that you can play with. This
way, each phase of the development produces a usable product that
does at least part of what the client wants, and the programmers can get
a lot of feedback. That’s an interesting case of a company that decided
to create a client-centered development system. But you know you
can’t really say there is one formula because there are an awful lot of
different ways in which people can get involved. Many different kinds
of misunderstandings and mistakes are corrected in different ways. Par-
ticipatory design is one interesting idea, but the way in which people in
the United States have used the courts to affect design is also interest-
ing. Public hearings play an important role in North America. And
those draw in people who are directly affected by things like the site of
a toxic waste disposal plant. There are many other ways, too: protests,
demonstrations, boycotts. I think we need an inventory of all these dif-
ferent processes because they are the technical public sphere. They
constitute a new dimension of democracy that has become so impor-
tant.
464 ZACHRY

SOCIAL DESIGN

TCQ: In “The Written World,” (www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/Writworl.htm) you

criticized the idea of designing for unattainable social neutrality. Do
you think that sort of ideal dominates thinking in the culture of engi-
neering?
Feenberg: Yes, human factors. Of course there are some fundamental ergonomic
issues that you have to address if you want people to use what you are
creating. But there are also social issues, and it is not so easy to figure
out how to address them. In “The Written World,” we are talking about
the creation of social spaces for online communication. That discussion
was based on our observation that the early designs for computer
conferencing were empty spaces, basically. Just a blank upon which
anything could be written. The designs showed very little awareness
of the fact that different social purposes would be served by differ-
ent configurations of the communication space. So we wrote about
that quite early in the mid-1980s, calling for social factors in design.
Soon after that, other people who are better remembered than we were
got involved, and fields like Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
emerged. In these emerging fields people were very aware that what
they were doing was designing communication spaces around a spe-
cific task. Now I guess it’s a familiar concept, but at the time it was an
innovative idea that there were socially specific communication spaces
rather than some universal neutral space.
TCQ: The sort of intellectual work that is now being done in CSCW and re-
lated fields is something you would applaud?
Feenberg: Sure. I think of it as a kind of virtual interior design. You could give a
class on a basketball court, and you could probably play basketball in a
classroom, but you’d be a lot happier doing those things where they be-
long.

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

TCQ: Technical communicators, as a profession, are integrally involved in the

creation of user interfaces both online and in print. What advice do you
have, if any, for people who occupy such positions in organizations?
Feenberg: You’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a lot of technical com-
munication about communicating with the public, in other words,
across the boundary lines between technical specialists and primary us-
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 465

ers? So it might really be better to call it nontechnical communication.

You have to get the technology into a language that the nontechnical
public can understand, and that’s quite difficult. One of the big prob-
lems is that the way in which technical people think about the problems
they are solving is quite different from the way in which users think.
Ideally, the designer knows how to cross that gap so well that a manual
isn’t even necessary. But in reality that’s unusual. Even something like
a photocopier machine can quickly become too difficult to use. Or a
digital camera. Then you have the unhappy designer who says, well I
put 10,000 commands in there and people are only using 20. It might be
that they are only using 20 because they can’t figure out the other 9,980.
This is a translation problem, isn’t it? It’s not so much about language
translation as culture translation. The way we act in everyday life, the
way we carry on conversations, find our way across the street, all
these forms of ordinary action are really quite different from the
thinking that goes into making things in an engineering environment.
And you have to cross that gap in your technical writing in order to
give people access to the marvels of the device you are trying to docu-
ment. It would be good if that could feed back to the designers so that
they would modify the design in accordance with what they can learn
from the technical writer about how users think and what they need.
Technical writing could be made into more than a writing profession.
It could become a point of translation between professional and lay
mentalities, cultures. Then I think it could become a much more effec-
tive profession.

WORKPLACE CULTURE

TCQ: You have worked in both corporate contexts and in academic settings.
How has this varied background been helpful in your thinking about
technology?
Feenberg: The work I did for corporations was essentially research for the Digital
Equipment Corporation. So it didn’t really take me out of the academic
environment too much. I did a lot of consulting for Western Behavioral
Sciences Institute as well. And I did another large project, a computer
conference, at the Herman Miller Corporation. They had a famous fur-
niture designer named George Nelson who was retiring, and they
wanted to get some of the people in the company to talk to him about
what he could tell them. We helped them to use an online forum to doc-
ument the wisdom of George Nelson and to see what kind of questions
466 ZACHRY

the younger people in the firm had to ask him. It was a very interesting
experiment. And we also did a several-months-long online program for
50 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies for the Department of Commerce
to enable them to communicate about problems of productivity in the
American economy. Although we did several things like this, I didn’t
really experience life inside a corporation. Through my consulting
work, however, I met a lot of corporate people, including some very im-
portant ones. Probably the single thing that made the biggest impres-
sion on me was one of the top Digital Equipment Corporation people
taking me out to lunch and asking me what I thought the future of com-
puting was. This is 1983. And I had this realization, gee, if he’s asking
me, then nobody knows because I sure don’t. So of the two big impacts
on me from hanging out with corporate people, one was the realization
that the world of technology is much more contingent then we had
imagined, or than is suggested in Heidegger and Marcuse and critical
theory. There is much less logic to it and much more randomness and
unpredictability than we imagined. And that is confirmed by contem-
porary technology studies. Through detailed sociological and historical
investigations you can establish what I learned at that lunch: No one re-
ally knows. Technology is not a strictly logical, deterministic kind of
thing even though it looks that way when it is all finished and packaged
and sent out into the world. The other thing that I learned was the exis-
tence of something I call “management nihilism.” This is what can hap-
pen in a corporate environment when people with power in the organi-
zation are bombarded with lots of conflicting ideas and they themselves
are not really competent to decide between them. They may be good at
manipulating the organization; that’s how they get where they are, but
that’s about it. But when they are faced with technical disagreements,
what sometimes happens is that they ignore it all. The manager decides
I’m just going to, well, since everybody disagrees, I’m just going to do
what I want. And then you get the Challenger blowing up, you get all
kinds of problems. Through my contacts with these managers I got a
sense of the rather low level of competence characteristic of some—of
course not all—of the leaders of technical organizations. The world of
technology is not to be understood on the model of a pure rational form
of life; it’s awfully chaotic and unpredictable, sometimes in ways that
are just a normal part of any human process and other times because of
difficulty with communication and management.
TCQ: This corporate nihilism happens because the rational system is struc-
tured to require this person, this individual, to make a decision, but
there is no way for that person to use this system to make a decision that
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 467

is smart, and so the manager just defers to her or his own judgment? So
it is a result of how we structure our corporations?
Feenberg: Yes. And the time pressures and also the fact that rising to the top of the
bureaucracy does not necessarily involve the same skills as running that
bureaucracy in the best and most effective way. We had an executive ed-
ucation program at WBSI through which I met lots of executives. Every
once in awhile someone would say something that tipped me off. I re-
member one guy who was a vice president of a big insurance company
explaining that when he was a lowly beginner in the executive hierar-
chy, they would get 13 objectives to fulfill and the people who rose in
the hierarchy were the ones who knew how to find out which was the re-
ally important objective. Little Machiavellis!

ONLINE COMMUNITIES AND EDUCATION

TCQ: You have been involved in your career in some notable government-
funded research in computer-mediated communication—a project for
NSF, a Department of Education project. What was the origin of this
work and how did it shape your thinking as a philosopher of technol-
ogy?
Feenberg: NSF has a program to support humanities and social sciences research
on value issues in technology. I obtained several grants from that pro-
gram to study online communication on which I worked partly by my-
self and partly with a sociologist. We studied online community and
tried to understand better how people interact online and whether there
actually is such a thing as online community. I don’t know what larger
significance this had for the US government, but it was very interesting
for us and for people who read the research. We later published a book
called Community in the Digital Age as a culmination of that research.
So what the NSF grants did was give us the opportunity to learn more
about this new phenomenon—new at the time we started researching—
of online communities.
TCQ: What about your research that was supported by the Department of Ed-
ucation?
Feenberg: The Department of Education research is a bit different. I actually had
two different kinds of grants from the Department of Education. One
was a fellowship to allow me to take some time off to study online edu-
cation. Through that I managed to do quite a bit of writing. The other
468 ZACHRY

grant was much larger, and it was to create software for online educa-
tion.
TCQ: Creating software? How do you come to be interested in creating soft-
ware?
Feenberg: What I had observed while working with the Western Behavioral Sci-
ences Institute was the poor adaptation of computer-conferencing soft-
ware to education. For 10 years we operated this school, and during that
time a number of universities also created small experiments in online
education. The idea spread in those early years, but it never really took
off because it never got significant support from administrations in US
universities. Then my interest in it kind of diminished. I left WBSI after
about 10 years. I just didn’t see that much promise in it. And then, some
years later, suddenly online education was in the news all the time. Ev-
eryone was talking about online education as the next big thing. Many
of the faculty, however, were really opposed. The state college and uni-
versity system in California, which is one of the biggest higher educa-
tional systems in the United States, had a president who was kind of a
rough-edged guy. One day he announced that we were going to form a
consortium with Fujitsu and IBM to establish online education for our
system, and it was going to be a public–private partnership, a business
collaboration with the university. This raised all kinds of questions: le-
gal issues about whether the university could do this, but also much
more important to me, a lot of paranoia among students and faculty
about being taken over by the corporate world. Some people blamed me
for this. I have a colleague named David Noble, who is a famous histo-
rian of technology, and he became the leader of a huge move to block
online education on the campuses, what he called “Digital Diploma
Mills.” After a while, I felt a little like Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of
the television, who lost control of it to RCA and watched it turn into a
monster. In his old age, he could be heard grumbling to his grandchil-
dren, don’t watch that thing, there’s nothing good to see. So somehow I
was part of some process that had led to this catastrophe. It really was
strange. I remember the president of our system came to our campus to
answer questions, and I couldn’t get my question in. But finally as he
was leaving I buttonholed him, and I said, you know, I understand
you’re going to wire up all our campuses and classrooms. Has any
thought been given to how we are going to teach on these systems? And
he said, we’re putting in the equipment; it is up to you guys to figure out
what to do with it. It is as though these college administrators thought
they were buying refrigerators. It’s not up to them to stock it with bacon
and eggs; it’s up to the cook. But at that time—it was in the late 1990s—
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 469

no one really knew what online education was. There was all this talk
about automating education on the Internet, but nobody had actually
demonstrated you could do this and there were many disagreements
about whether to do it even if you could. David Noble said, it’s all about
deskilling the professoriate—doing to professors what was done to
shoemakers a hundred years earlier. No one is sitting on a bench cutting
leather forms any more; a machine does it now. To hell with these pro-
fessors: They are expensive, they’re ornery; let’s get rid of them too.
You can actually find texts back in the 1830s writing about deskilling
and how important it is to get craftsmen out of the system because they
are difficult to deal with and expensive. Professors would just be the
last ones to go. That was the critics’ take on online education that hap-
pened to correlate neatly with the take of a lot of these college adminis-
trators and computer company people who thought that the time had
come to replace professors with machines.
TCQ: How did your thinking differ from that perspective?
Feenberg: In the early 1980s we took an existing idea of distance learning, which
involved sending materials to students, and we added human interac-
tion to it. For us, online education was all about human interaction. It
was about people talking to each other on the network by sending mes-
sages. We used an asynchronous computer conferencing system, so
people could think seriously about what they had to say, write it up
carefully, send it, get responses back from the teacher and other stu-
dents. We created something really new and interesting in that way. But
in the late 1990s, other actors, much more influential than we were, got
into the game with the intent of reestablishing the old distance learning
system. Only instead of delivering the materials by the post, they
wanted to deliver them on the computer network. So it was back to the
old correspondence school model without the human interaction that
we had added to it in the early 1980s. It was called the same thing, but it
was radically different than what we had invented. Noble and I went
around and gave talks, and I gave some on my own. And in those talks
he would say, kill it, and I would say, no, no, do it the right way, but
don’t do it the way people are talking about it now. There was consider-
able interest in this phenomenon for a few years. I spoke to the Ameri-
can Association of University Professors, the American Federation of
Teachers, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, all these
big organizations, trying to get people to see the difference between the
automated approach and one that involved human communication.
TCQ: And these experiences culminated in the creation of software to support
online education?
470 ZACHRY

Feenberg: What eventually happened was that I thought, okay, I’m doing all this
talking about online education but that’s not enough. I should write
software for it. I’d learned something from technology studies: Tech-
nology influences people’s behavior. They learn to use it to do the
things that it’s designed for. And if we design good technology for on-
line education, that will influence the field. So I went to the US Depart-
ment of Education for a grant and obtained one, and we designed some
software called TextWeaver embodying our ideas. It has not had the im-
pact that I hoped, but the newest version, called Marginalia, is Web-
based and is getting more attention. Marginalia allows users to annotate
as they read; just as you can write in the margin of a book to find things
later or record your inspirations, so with this software you can write in
the margins as you read online (http://www.geof.net/code/annotation/).
The pedagogical idea is to make it easier to summarize discussions
because that is essential to the learning process in an online educa-
tional context. Otherwise, people tend to drift off into monologue. The
teacher, or someone who is well informed, must create the summaries
to pull it all together and get out the important concepts. I want to facili-
tate that pedagogy. Now, of course, online education has evolved in
many contradictory ways. We still use the same word for many differ-
ent things, and no one knows exactly what it is yet. But this software is
out there, and at least it is a prototype of a better way to use online com-
munication in education.

MULTICULTURALISM AND TECHNOLOGICAL

DEVELOPMENT

TCQ: You have discussed the importance of multiculturalism for thinking

about the rational order associated with contemporary technologies.
What trends do you see in this area with the ongoing sweep of global-
ization?
Feenberg: The single biggest thing that is happening is simply the export of all
those deskilled jobs we were talking about to poor countries. This is an
enormous phenomenon. When people talk about postindustrial society,
the information age, they are naïve because there is just as much manu-
facturing; it just isn’t in Detroit anymore. In fact, there is more of it. I
don’t know the statistics, but it would be interesting to know how many
hundreds of millions of people work in factories today in the third
world. The total global system is still an industrial system with enor-
mous productive capacity. The 19th century lives on. That phenomenon
 INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FEENBERG 471

has all kinds of effects, essentially homogenizing effects. It makes the

world more similar. Young women are hired in Vietnam or someplace
like that to work in factories. They are valued employees because they
are good willed and respectful of authority. What is happening here is
that Confucian virtues inculcated in the traditional Asian family are ex-
ploited by corporations. Of course, the families derive some benefits
from this—it is not slavery, at least not usually. But on the other hand,
how long will those virtues survive the transition from the small-scale
farming and craft activities of the older generation in a world where
huge masses of people are managed by corporations? You can imagine
those Confucian virtues being weakened by this process, so that those
young women become more like Western women. So there is a certain
homogenizing potential in this globalization of industry. At the same
time, the older view of modernization as a kind of convergence on the
American way of life in which the whole world will end up living in the
suburbs, seems less and less plausible. I did some writing for a Chinese
business magazine. Over the course of it, I discovered a document
called the China Modernization Report 2006, prepared by the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. This report predicted that China would be a lot
like the US in the year 2045. Three quarters of the population living in
cities, half of them living in suburbs, everyone operating an automo-
bile. You could just see the fantasy, and you have to believe that the peo-
ple who prepared the report watched a lot of American TV. They saw
the future there. This is a standard way of thinking about modernization
since the 19th century. In the preface to Capital, Marx (who wrote in
German about England) addresses his German readers. He writes, “De
te fabula narrator,” which is Latin for “Of You the Tale is Told.” In other
words, you Germans who are backward today can see your future in the
England I describe in this book. And now, of course, the Chinese think
they can see their future in America. But it is unreal. The pressure on re-
sources, oil prices, and so on, the environmental consequences. I mean,
already, you never see blue sky in China, the air is so dirty. When Presi-
dent Chirac came to Beijing with 100 French executives to negotiate
business deals a few years ago, the scheduled air show had to be can-
celed because no one could see the airplanes. So how real is this idea of
convergence on some American idea of prosperity?
TCQ: So if globalization is not going to translate into a singular culture, what
is more likely to happen?
Feenberg: Something else is going to happen in the world. It is going to involve
adaptation of technology to other cultures and other conceptions of
prosperity than the one we are familiar with. To some extent you can
472 ZACHRY

see this kind of adaptation already in Japan, which in some ways is very
much like a Western country and in some ways very different. Those
differences affect technical systems as well as things like, obviously,
food. Adaptation of technology to different cultural environments is
something that theoretically ought to be possible, if technology is really
contingent and not determined by a scientific logic. In fact, I think we
are going to see more and more of that. Of course at the same time you
have to recognize that there is a pool of ideas that are universal, and
there are capital goods markets on which there are cheap shortcuts to
making things. Economies of scale. So there is a lot that is shared by all
technological societies, but I think there is going to be much more vari-
ety in the future rather than homogenization because of the fact that cul-
tural differences really do matter. They don’t just disappear.
TCQ: So then is the upshot of what you are saying that there is hope for the
different viewpoints to play roles in questioning the rational order of
modern society?
Feenberg: Yes, and different outcomes to develop it, with much that is shared and
much that is distinct.

FUTURE PROJECTS

TCQ: What projects do you have planned now?

Feenberg: Mostly I’m writing on philosophical issues. I just published a book on
Heidegger and Marcuse. Heidegger is a famous German philosopher
who was Marcuse’s teacher, and Marcuse was my teacher, so it is kind
of an interesting experience to go back into that history and think about
the influences. And I’m continuing to work on those philosophical is-
sues.