The crisis of technology, in moving toward a "new humanism"

Technology is not merely a passive participant in human affairs. It has the power to shape everything we do, from what we eat to what we investigate to how we interact with others of our species. Heidegger’s key points about technology, written more plainly:

• Technology is not merely a means: it brings things about independently of our wishes.
  
  
• Technology requires everything to be useful, to exist as a “reserve.”
  
  
• The crisis of technology occurs when it causes humans to see ourselves as standing reserve: when we become no more than resources, we lose ourselves in technology and forget our human-ness.

The connections to the statistical sciences are plain: the field of census technologies precipitates this sort of crisis, and can justify and enact the unspeakable.

Clearly, we cannot blindly scramble to rid ourselves of technology. But how do we have to approach technology itself, if we consider it to be active, and possibly antipathetic to human beings? The census can justify much-needed economic support programs, but can also make genocide possible; the internet opens up a new mass-readership and access to information, but adds a new inequality between those with and without that access. Must a new humanism start at the level of technology? How do we keep it free from oppression? Whose job is it to recognize and resist misuse? Can technology bring us together, or does it, in its ever-increasing ability to quantify differences, continue to fracture us along new spectra (race, &c.)?