Technology as racial

For Heidegger, “the essence of technology lies in enframing. Its holding sway belongs within destining,” which sets man on a way of revealing that orders everything as “standing-reserve” (307). He goes on to point out that the destining of revealing is “the supreme danger” because there is no other way of thinking/seeing/revealing for him other than enframing and everything including himself becomes but standing-reserve. Thus for Heidegger, “the essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (309).

The issues discussed in the other two readings – how censuses were used to support racial discourses in the U.S. and how the machines produced by IBM enabled the Nazi to efficiently collect information about Jewish population in multiple regions and therefore to commit massive prosecution against Jew. In Shadows of Citizenship, Nobles’ detailed investigation gives us a striking picture of how in the seemingly neutral and “pure” name of science research, the obsession with race when it come to censuses actually have everything to do with racial discrimination and political and economic interests lying at the heart of continuing oppression of African Americans. Edwin Black offers an even more obvious example with the strategic alliance between IBM and Nazi Germany, demonstrating that technology is not only far from neutral but can be developed precisely for certain political purposes. In this case it is even clearer that the census-taking conducting by Nazi was not a neutral activity just for collecting facts, but rather one step leading to the wholesale slaughtering of the Jewish population. This makes me think, in which ways are technologies and scientific knowledge or mechanisms that we easily take as neutral today are in fact at work in perpetuating racial relations?