Joanna Russ, "SF and Technology as Mystification," in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction pages 35-36 (note page 40)

What is technology?

My own definition is on the modest side. I mean by "technology" a rational, systematic, taught, learned, and replicable way of materially controlling the material world, or parts of it...

In this modest definition, every known human society has a technology; there's the digging-stick technology, the animal-domestication technology, basket-weaving, pottery, and so on.

Most people who talk about technology don't talk this way.

First of all, they mean something modern; the Xerox copier or the railroad is technology; the hand loom or the potter's wheel is not. Modernity appears to be located during or after the Industrial Revolution.

Second, they mean something ubiquitous. Technology is all around us. One statement I can find about "technology" says "technology is in our time almost indistinguishable from the urban environment of Western countries."⁸ In my definition of the word, such a statement would be absurd, since it would imply that the urban or village environment of non-Western countries is non-technological, i.e., something that arose spontaneously from nature. The use of "technology" here is clearly not mine.

Third, technology is not only everywhere; it's autonomous. It acts... It influences. It transforms.

Fourth, technology is often spoken of as uncontrollable. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." It controls us and is dangerous; it can threaten change or destruction.

What is this entity that began during the Industrial Revolution and continued thereafter, that is uncontrollable, autonomous, all around us, both threatening and promising?

Hiding greyly behind that sexy rock star, technology, is a much more sinister and powerful figure. It is the entire social system that surrounds us; hence the sense of being at the mercy of an all-encompassing autonomous process that we cannot control. If you add the monster's location in time (during and after the Industrial Revolution), I think you can see what is being discussed when most people say "technology." They are politically mystifying a much bigger monster: capitalism in its advanced, industrial phase.

8. Prospectus for the MLA forum on "Technology and the Literary Mind," April 25, 1977. The forum was held in December 1977. This paper, in altered form, was presented there.