Technology #3

Once technology has ceased to possess a stable ontology and the proliferation of irreconcilable contradictions has rendered every inherited conceptual boundary incapable of organising its material reality, the historical question no longer concerns interpretation but reconstruction, because no amount of theoretical refinement can transform infrastructures whose operational principles remain organised around ownership, hierarchy, extraction, territorial sovereignty, administrative command, and institutional monopoly, making every attempt to humanise existing technological systems function merely as an adjustment to mechanisms whose structural purpose remains the reproduction of domination rather than the expansion of collective autonomy.

The revolutionary problem therefore begins precisely where reform reaches its absolute limit, because reform presupposes the continued legitimacy of the institutions administering technological development, whereas revolutionary reconfiguration recognises that those institutions themselves constitute the principal technological artefacts requiring transformation, allowing corporations, states, bureaucracies, military organisations, financial systems, proprietary platforms, intellectual property regimes, regulatory monopolies, and administrative hierarchies to appear not as neutral governors of technology but as integral components of technological architecture whose material existence continuously determines the form, direction, accessibility, and political consequences of every technical system subsequently emerging from within them.

Technology consequently ceases to be understood as a collection of machines and instead appears as the total organisation of material cooperation through which society reproduces itself, making communication networks, transportation systems, agricultural infrastructures, manufacturing processes, energy production, computational capacity, housing construction, educational circulation, healthcare provision, and scientific research inseparable moments of a single technological metabolism whose fragmentation into privately owned sectors, publicly administered monopolies, legally separated jurisdictions, and economically competing organisations represents not technical necessity but the institutional expression of historically accumulated relations of domination.

The revolutionary reorganisation therefore cannot merely socialise ownership over existing infrastructures because ownership itself preserves the separation between those authorised to determine technological development and those compelled to inhabit its consequences, making the transfer of technological systems from corporate possession into state administration incapable of abolishing the elementary abstraction through which society becomes divided between administrators and administered, planners and planned, governors and governed, experts and populations, thereby reproducing hierarchy beneath altered juridical language while leaving untouched the material asymmetry constituting domination itself.

The abolition of private property consequently demands the simultaneous abolition of public property because both concepts organise technological infrastructure through exclusive authority exercised over capacities generated collectively, allowing different institutional actors to monopolise communication, energy, housing, transportation, manufacturing, computation, education, medicine, and scientific knowledge while preserving identical separations between common production and exclusive administration, making technological emancipation materially impossible wherever access to civilisation’s productive apparatus remains contingent upon permission granted by any permanent centre of authority regardless of its ideological vocabulary.

Exactly this necessity transforms infrastructure into the principal terrain of revolutionary reconstruction because every technical network simultaneously constitutes a political geometry organising movement, communication, dependency, production, ecological exchange, and collective existence, requiring the dissolution of architectures optimised for extraction and their replacement by infrastructures organised around distributed stewardship, reciprocal interdependence, local autonomy, planetary cooperation, ecological regeneration, technical transparency, and common accessibility, thereby preventing technological complexity from becoming the material foundation upon which renewed concentrations of institutional authority inevitably emerge.

The same movement necessarily abolishes intellectual property because knowledge possesses no meaningful existence independently from collective historical accumulation extending across innumerable generations whose distributed labour continuously constructs the scientific, mathematical, linguistic, artistic, philosophical, engineering, agricultural, and cultural conditions rendering every technological innovation materially possible, making patents, copyrights, licensing monopolies, proprietary standards, trade secrecy, and exclusive technological ownership appear not as rewards for creativity but as juridical mechanisms interrupting the unrestricted circulation of capacities already generated through civilisation as a whole, thereby converting common intelligence into institutional privilege through legal abstractions external to production itself.

Technology likewise becomes incompatible with wage labour because advanced technical systems continuously expand humanity’s productive capabilities while capitalist organisation subordinates those capabilities to employment as the compulsory condition of material survival, forcing automation simultaneously to increase abundance and intensify insecurity, whereas revolutionary reconstruction abolishes the distinction between productive participation and economic coercion by dissolving labour markets altogether, allowing technical development to eliminate compulsory work instead of merely redistributing it across increasingly fragmented occupations whose principal historical function consists in preserving exchange rather than satisfying collective need.

The revolutionary transformation therefore extends into the organisation of technical knowledge because expertise can no longer function as a mechanism legitimising permanent authority once technological development becomes understood as the cumulative product of distributed cooperation, requiring scientific competence, engineering skill, computational capacity, ecological understanding, medical knowledge, architectural practice, and educational activity to circulate as common social functions rather than institutional credentials authorising asymmetrical command, thereby separating knowledge from domination while preserving every possibility for intellectual excellence through unrestricted cooperation instead of bureaucratic hierarchy.

This reconstruction simultaneously abolishes technological scarcity wherever scarcity survives exclusively through institutional design rather than material limitation, because contemporary civilisation repeatedly constructs artificial shortages by enclosing energy systems, communication infrastructures, housing capacity, manufacturing technologies, pharmaceutical production, educational resources, computational architectures, agricultural knowledge, and scientific research behind legal barriers whose preservation becomes indispensable for property while remaining increasingly irrational for production, allowing technological abundance to emerge only through dismantling the institutional arrangements continuously converting collectively generated capacities into economically restricted commodities.

The same material reconfiguration transforms the relationship between communities and infrastructure because technological systems cease functioning as external environments administered by specialised organisations and instead become continuously maintained dimensions of common existence through which collective life reproduces itself without requiring permanent mediating authorities, preventing infrastructure from becoming an instrument through which states administer populations, corporations administer consumers, bureaucracies administer citizens, or financial institutions administer economic circulation, while preserving the immense productive capacities accumulated throughout technological history by reintegrating them into forms of social organisation no longer dependent upon hierarchy, monopoly, competition, or exclusive ownership.

Revolutionary technology therefore does not consist in inventing entirely new machines while preserving inherited institutions, nor in improving existing institutions while preserving inherited technological architectures, because both strategies merely relocate domination without abolishing the material relations continuously reproducing it, making technological transformation inseparable from the dissolution of every organisational abstraction separating humanity from its own productive capacities, including property, markets, money, bureaucratic administration, representative sovereignty, monopolised infrastructure, proprietary knowledge, institutional hierarchy, and every durable concentration of technical authority whose historical persistence converts cooperation into command, common intelligence into exclusive ownership, infrastructure into dependency, innovation into accumulation, and civilisation itself into an apparatus reproducing the organised fragmentation of collective existence while further material reconfigurations continue propagating through every remaining layer of technological organisation that still preserves the architecture of domination beneath the language of progress.

The revolutionary reconstruction of technology cannot therefore remain confined to questions of ownership because ownership itself merely expresses a deeper civilisational architecture through which human beings have historically accepted the separation between the collective production of material existence and the exclusive administration of that production by permanent institutions, making every technological revolution that leaves intact the distinction between administrators and participants ultimately reproduce identical relations of domination regardless of the sophistication of its machinery, computational systems, communication networks, or scientific achievements, since no technical innovation possesses the capacity to abolish a hierarchy whose material foundation continues reproducing itself through institutional concentration rather than through technical limitation.

This necessity immediately abolishes the mythology according to which complexity requires command because complexity has repeatedly functioned throughout history as the principal ideological justification for centralising technological authority within corporations, bureaucracies, military organisations, governmental agencies, planning commissions, regulatory bodies, and specialised managerial classes whose legitimacy allegedly derives from the impossibility of distributed coordination, despite contemporary technological capacities demonstrating that communication, modelling, knowledge circulation, distributed computation, collaborative engineering, resource allocation, and collective planning can operate across planetary scales without reproducing permanent centres of sovereign authority, thereby exposing hierarchy not as the unavoidable consequence of complexity but as one historically contingent strategy for organising complexity whose persistence increasingly reflects institutional inertia rather than technical necessity.

Technology consequently ceases to function as an instrument through which institutions organise society and instead becomes the medium through which society continuously organises itself, requiring every infrastructural system to remain permanently transparent, collectively intelligible, materially accessible, and structurally incapable of crystallising into autonomous centres of command whose continued existence depends upon monopolising indispensable technical capacities, because every concentration of communication, computation, manufacturing, transportation, energy production, healthcare, housing, education, or scientific infrastructure inevitably generates corresponding concentrations of political authority regardless of the ideological language through which such authority subsequently legitimises itself.

The revolutionary transformation therefore abolishes technological sovereignty itself because sovereignty always presupposes an institution capable of exercising final authority over infrastructures indispensable to collective existence, whether that institution presents itself as a nation-state, a municipal administration, a multinational corporation, an international organisation, a public utility, a strategic consortium, or any other juridical configuration claiming exclusive competence over the conditions through which technological reproduction occurs, making the dissolution of sovereignty inseparable from the dissolution of technological monopoly, since every monopoly ultimately derives its durability from controlling infrastructures upon which others remain materially dependent for their own continued existence.

The same movement necessarily reconstructs the geography of technology because contemporary infrastructures remain organised according to extractive spatial relationships separating regions of resource acquisition, regions of industrial production, regions of technological consumption, regions of financial accumulation, and regions of ecological sacrifice into hierarchically differentiated territories connected through global logistical systems designed primarily to optimise accumulation rather than collective flourishing, whereas revolutionary material organisation dissolves these asymmetries by progressively reintegrating production, maintenance, knowledge, ecological regeneration, and technological reproduction into locally autonomous yet globally cooperative networks whose interdependence no longer generates dependency because no participating community retains exclusive authority over capacities indispensable to others.

Exactly this geographical transformation abolishes the distinction between centre and periphery because technological centrality has historically depended less upon intrinsic productive superiority than upon institutional control over strategic infrastructures through which resources, information, labour, finance, and political authority circulate, allowing metropolitan regions to accumulate disproportionate influence by monopolising organisational functions rather than by generating proportionately greater contributions to civilisation’s collective metabolism, thereby revealing that decentralisation cannot remain merely administrative but must become materially embedded within the architecture of technological reproduction itself so that no territory acquires durable structural advantages through infrastructural concentration.

The revolutionary reconfiguration equally transforms maintenance because maintenance ceases to occupy the subordinate position historically assigned to it within technological ideology and instead becomes the primary expression of collective responsibility through which society continuously reproduces its own material conditions without separating prestigious innovation from supposedly ordinary reproduction, dissolving the artificial distinction between invention and care that capitalist technological culture has persistently cultivated in order to glorify exceptional entrepreneurial intervention while rendering invisible the immeasurable quantities of cooperative labour sustaining everyday technological continuity across every dimension of collective existence.

Knowledge correspondingly abandons every remaining institutional enclosure because technological understanding can no longer be mediated through credential monopolies, proprietary certification systems, exclusive professional jurisdictions, or bureaucratic authorisation without immediately recreating the asymmetries revolutionary transformation seeks to abolish, requiring educational processes to become inseparable from technological participation itself so that scientific inquiry, engineering practice, ecological understanding, computational competence, architectural experimentation, and medical knowledge circulate continuously throughout society rather than accumulating within specialised institutions capable of converting epistemic difference into political command.

The revolutionary movement therefore reconstructs the temporal organisation of technology because capitalist development continuously fragments time into accelerated production, planned obsolescence, perpetual upgrading, investment cycles, competitive innovation, and short-term profitability while subordinating ecological regeneration, community continuity, philosophical reflection, intergenerational transmission, and material durability to those accelerated rhythms, whereas technological reproduction oriented toward common existence increasingly aligns itself with the temporalities required by ecosystems, maintenance, repair, longevity, collective learning, and sustainable material circulation, preventing technological acceleration from becoming an autonomous objective detached from the qualitative expansion of human autonomy.

Technology simultaneously ceases to measure success through expansion because quantitative growth belongs to an economic civilisation whose reproduction depends upon continuous accumulation, making larger infrastructures, faster computation, greater extraction, wider markets, increased consumption, and perpetual industrial enlargement appear self-evidently desirable despite frequently intensifying dependency, ecological destruction, institutional concentration, and social fragmentation, whereas revolutionary reconstruction evaluates technological development according to entirely different material criteria concerning the degree to which infrastructures dissolve domination, eliminate dependency, decentralise authority, regenerate ecosystems, expand collective autonomy, strengthen mutual aid, and progressively abolish every organisational mechanism through which one group acquires structural power over another through control of indispensable technical capacities.

The revolutionary imposition therefore proceeds under maximum historical constraint because it inherits planetary infrastructures designed for extraction rather than cooperation, legal systems constructed to defend ownership rather than common stewardship, educational institutions reproducing expertise as hierarchy rather than shared capacity, financial architectures subordinating production to accumulation rather than collective necessity, computational systems optimised for surveillance rather than autonomy, communication networks organised around platform monopolies rather than freely associated communities, and political institutions whose continued legitimacy depends upon preserving the technological separations revolutionary reconstruction continuously dissolves, ensuring that every movement toward autonomous technological organisation simultaneously confronts the accumulated weight of centuries during which civilisation systematically transformed common intelligence into monopolised infrastructure, collective production into proprietary ownership, distributed competence into bureaucratic administration, and technological possibility into institutional domination, from which still further material transformations continue emerging wherever the remaining architectures of property, sovereignty, hierarchy, markets, public administration, private administration, and every durable concentration of technical authority encounter productive capacities increasingly incompatible with their continued historical reproduction.

The revolutionary transformation of technology consequently abolishes the historical distinction between producer and user because that distinction has always functioned as one of the indispensable abstractions through which technological authority reproduces itself, allowing a minority of institutions to define, design, modify, regulate, distribute, repair, and ultimately govern the technical environments within which the overwhelming majority merely adapts its behaviour, thereby converting collective technological competence into specialised administrative privilege while progressively reducing ordinary human beings to passive occupants of systems whose internal organisation remains permanently external to their practical autonomy, despite those very systems existing only because civilisation continuously reproduces them through immeasurably distributed cooperation extending across every dimension of material existence.

This abolition immediately transforms the meaning of participation because participation no longer signifies consultation, representation, regulated feedback, controlled contribution, stakeholder engagement, institutional inclusion, or any comparable administrative vocabulary through which pre-existing authorities selectively incorporate external perspectives while preserving their own decision-making monopoly, but instead becomes the uninterrupted material capacity of communities to shape, reconstruct, maintain, abandon, replace, and redesign the technological conditions of their own collective reproduction without requiring authorisation from permanent governing structures whose legitimacy depends precisely upon monopolising those capacities in the first place.

Technology therefore loses every remaining claim to administrative neutrality because administration itself emerges as a historically contingent technological function produced to coordinate societies already fragmented through property, hierarchy, markets, territorial sovereignty, and institutional separation, making bureaucratic complexity not the prerequisite of advanced technological civilisation but one particular consequence of organising civilisation around abstractions requiring continuous external management merely to preserve their own coherence, whereas technological organisation grounded in freely associated cooperation progressively eliminates the institutional intermediaries whose existence depends upon maintaining those fragmentations against the integrative tendencies of collective production.

The revolutionary reconfiguration equally dissolves the opposition between local knowledge and universal knowledge because this distinction merely reproduces another hierarchy separating supposedly limited experiential competence from allegedly objective technical expertise despite every universal scientific achievement emerging historically through the accumulation, comparison, correction, and integration of innumerable situated experiences distributed across different communities, ecosystems, languages, productive activities, and historical circumstances, thereby revealing that technological universality itself possesses no independent existence outside the uninterrupted circulation of particular human practices whose artificial separation has repeatedly served institutional authority more effectively than collective understanding.

Exactly this movement reconstructs scientific activity because science ceases functioning as a specialised institution positioned above society and instead becomes one dimension of society’s continuous practical metabolism, preventing research from remaining subordinate to military priorities, commercial profitability, bureaucratic planning cycles, geopolitical competition, institutional prestige, or intellectual property while preserving every capacity for rigorous investigation through radically expanded cooperation whose legitimacy derives not from credential monopolies but from the reproducibility, transparency, accessibility, and collective intelligibility of its material practices, making scientific excellence increasingly incompatible with every durable concentration of epistemic authority.

The revolutionary transformation simultaneously abolishes technological nationalism because every national technological project ultimately depends upon territorial competition, strategic secrecy, resource monopolisation, industrial rivalry, military preparedness, border enforcement, and differentiated access to scientific capacities whose cumulative effect consists in fragmenting humanity’s collective productive intelligence into competing administrative blocs, whereas technological development organised around freely associated communities possesses no material interest in preserving national exclusivity once ownership, exchange, sovereignty, and geopolitical accumulation cease determining the organisation of production, allowing technical knowledge to circulate according to collective necessity rather than strategic advantage.

The same necessity extends to the dissolution of technological militarisation because military institutions represent the most concentrated historical expression of technological hierarchy through their uninterrupted integration of scientific research, industrial production, logistical coordination, computational infrastructure, surveillance capacity, administrative command, territorial control, and coercive organisation into unified systems optimised for organised violence, making every substantial movement toward technological emancipation incompatible with preserving institutional forms whose operational logic requires secrecy, obedience, monopolised expertise, centralised decision-making, and permanent preparation for conflict between politically separated populations.

Ecological regeneration correspondingly ceases to occupy the marginal position assigned to it within industrial technological development because ecosystems no longer appear as external resources awaiting technical exploitation but as inseparable dimensions of the same material metabolism through which technological civilisation continuously reproduces itself, requiring engineering, agriculture, architecture, manufacturing, transportation, computation, and energy production to organise their own reproduction according to ecological reciprocity rather than extractive accumulation, thereby eliminating the conceptual separation between technological development and environmental preservation that capitalist industrialisation repeatedly institutionalised despite their profound material interdependence.

The revolutionary reorganisation equally reconstructs the relationship between technological innovation and historical memory because capitalist development systematically privileges novelty while rendering invisible the accumulated practical intelligence embodied within historical techniques, local production, repair traditions, cooperative experimentation, vernacular engineering, ecological adaptation, artisanal knowledge, and community maintenance whose marginalisation frequently reflects institutional profitability rather than technical inadequacy, making revolutionary technology neither a nostalgic return to pre-industrial forms nor an unconditional acceleration toward computational abstraction but the unrestricted integration of every productive capacity capable of expanding collective autonomy irrespective of its historical origin or contemporary prestige.

The abolition of hierarchy consequently transforms technological imagination itself because imagination ceases to function as the anticipation of commercially profitable inventions or administratively manageable infrastructures and instead becomes the collective exploration of organisational possibilities previously rendered inconceivable by property, markets, monopolies, bureaucratic command, representative sovereignty, institutional competition, and the fragmentation of common productive capacities into economically isolated domains, allowing technical creativity to expand beyond the narrow horizon established by accumulation until every question concerning communication, housing, energy, healthcare, mobility, education, manufacturing, agriculture, computation, and scientific inquiry becomes simultaneously a question concerning the dismantling of domination rather than the optimisation of existing institutions.

Technology therefore approaches revolutionary reconstruction not through the replacement of one governing class by another, nor through the substitution of one ownership regime for another, nor through the refinement of administrative procedures governing inherited infrastructures, but through the progressive disappearance of every institutional abstraction separating humanity from the conditions of its own material reproduction, ensuring that technical systems increasingly cease to function as instruments through which organised power administers collective existence and instead become continuously transformable expressions of freely associated cooperation whose complexity expands together with autonomy rather than together with domination, while the accumulated architectures of private property, public property, monetary exchange, bureaucratic administration, sovereign territoriality, military organisation, proprietary knowledge, corporate concentration, and every remaining institutional monopoly continue encountering technological capacities whose collective origin increasingly renders their continued existence historically contradictory, allowing further revolutionary reconfigurations to propagate through every remaining layer of civilisation that still organises common productive intelligence as though it were the exclusive possession of separate centres of power rather than the indivisible expression of humanity’s shared material existence.