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Neil Postman
"How bad is it, on a scale of one to ten?" Every time a doctor asks that, I have a hard time convincing them that it's a strange question. What's a ten correspond to? Does a single dimension for this make sense? Are these numbers supposed to be comparable between people? I don't think they always used to ask that years ago, but they always do now.
In Technopoly, Neil Postman argues that situations like this are part of a larger pattern: our unquestioning acceptance of any ideological bias new technologies bring with them. From medicine to education to politics he finds a common theme for how things seem to have gone off the rails. Postman isn't anti-technology. Instead he argues for a clear-eyed view of the benefits and costs of adopting new tools and their associated ways of thinking, whether those are the invention of writing or the telegraph or MRI scans or anything else.
If Neil Postman's focus is on technologies with subtle and insidious effects on our habits and ways of thinking, Ed Regis gives a complementary perspective: technologies so grand and awe-inspiring that their proponents evangelize and pursue them no matter the risk or the cost. Regis offers the hydrogen airship as the quintessential pathological technology, and a springboard to more recent examples.
Monsters: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Birth of Pathological Technology