As Karl Marx argued in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, technology is a ‘world-fact’, a condition that defines the very plane on which society and the economy operates.142 It not only determines the mode of production, but within the mode of production it mediates social relationships among different actors, whether they be relations of domination, as the one of the feudal lord over the serf or of the capitalist over the proletarian worker, or relationships of cooperation, as those among the members of a guild or a trade union.
