Introduction: Technology, Society and Education

This introductory chapter presents the ambition inspiring this collection and the idea that the causes of digital discontent do not reside in digital technology, but in the capitalist appropriation of it. I argue that this appropriation has its origins in the crisis of capitalist democracy that started towards the end of the 1960s, and involved at least three dimensions: epistemic, economic and political. The appropriation of new and developing technologies was inspired by the effort to address these dimensions of crisis. The second part of this chapter offers the reader a preliminary reference list of critical contributions voicing discontent from the 1960s until the late 2010s. The last section contains a short description of the essays contained in this collection.