Low-mid-high-tech

These thoughts are reactions to some sentiments presented in these two texts:

Ursula K. Leguin, Rant about technology: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology

Donna Harraway, A cyborg manifesto: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_----_a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_....pdf

In the rant about technology, Ursula K. Leguin wants to challenge how main-stream discourses understands technology. She makes a point that in these discourses (related to hard/non-hard sci-fi) seem to neglect the fact that technology not only entails the high-tech, but also the non-high-tech like clothes, paper or language. A point made in the text is that "technology is how a society copes with physical reality", and this coping may entail the clothes that you wear in order to fit in at the new school, or the phone you use to call your loved ones in another country. In other words technology permeates every aspect of life in a (modern) society to some extent.

This blurring between the lines of what is our material world and what is not (in the western late capitalist techno-scientific paradigm), resonates with Donna Harraways articulation of the cyborg in the "a cyborgs manifesto". The myth of the cyborg is used to challenge boundaries between human-animal human(/animal)-machine and ultimately physical-and non physical, which is propelled by (cybernetic) technologies. Again there is this sentiment that expanding our understanding of what technology is, and can be, and how it mediates our material, social and political reality is fundamental in a feminist approach to the cultural understanding of technology.