Quotes from Andrew Feenberg

An alternative modernity worthy of the name would recover the mediating power of ethics and aesthetics. This would be accomplished not by a return to blind traditionalism but through the democratization of technically mediated institutions. Power

As more actors gained access to the design process, a wider range of valuative considerations would inform technical choices. These formal changes would result in new technical designs and new ways of achieving the efficiencies that characterize modern technological activity. Whether

Keeping the future open by refraining from making irrevocable decisions that one could eventually regret, requires vigilance, reflection, and sagacity at all times. Politics, as the art of preserving the possibility of choices and debate on those choices, is therefore at the heart of technological dynamics.

To paraphrase Feenberg commenting on Heidegger, we could say that the form taken by technologies stems not only from experts' intervention but also from that of the concerned groups that have been allowed to contribute to their shaping. And just as there are good and bad sculptors who are more or less skilled in seeing what is inessential in the stone they are sculpting, so too there are good and bad ways of identifying and involving (or not involving) concerned groups. To