Designing a Wired Life
Once upon a time, Western culture associated information technology with an old and powerful story about the future. The future, according to this story, lies in rationality, and the task of the engineer is to discover optimally rational social arrangements in a scientific manner and then impose them upon the world. This picture was already fashionable in the early 19th century through the works of Henri de Saint-Simon (Hayek 1952), and it remained vigorous until the end of the Cold War (Lilienfeld 1978). Information technology grew up in the midst of this project of social rationalization, and the main tradition of computer system design is still organized around a cycle of studying existing work ractices, rationalizing them, and either automating them altogether or using technology to impose a rational order on them.