Some of essentially the most poignant criticisms of technology are present in what are now thought of to be dystopian literary classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Goethe’s Faust, Faust promoting his soul to the satan in return for power over the bodily world is also typically interpreted as a metaphor for the adoption of commercial technology. More lately, fashionable works of science fiction such as these by Philip K. Dick and William Gibson and films corresponding to Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell project highly ambivalent or cautionary attitudes toward technology’s impression on human society and identification.

The mechanics of their transmission have been enormously improved in recen...