Joanna Russ, "A Boy and His Dog: The Final Solution" in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, pages 71-72

It is nonsense to insist that the real danger in a tyrannical, self-hating, hypocritical, piously horrible society is pretty, scheming, little girls. The Nice Girl looks like the most sacred and the most privileged citizen of this ghastly community, but in reality her rights (as opposed to the rights of her owners) are nonexistent. In D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, for example, to lay a finger on Lillian Gish looks like a desecration, but she is far from being society or even a citizen of it; she has been invented, constructed, meant, put there in the film either to be raped or saved-from-rape--what other purpose can there possibly be for her unhuman helplessness and childishness? The Victorian gentlemen who so assiduously protected their daughters' maiden purity were not hypocrites when they visited whorehouses stocked with twelve-year-old girls; they were simply acting on the identical assumption about the high value of maiden purity. In such a setup, pretty girls are about as much privileged citizens as a diamond ring is a privileged citizen. Like money or jewels, women are counters for use in business or warfare between men. Punk loners (who are much more part of "society"...) can go on terrifying or killing waitresses or cheerleaders forever under the impression that they're heroically attacking society...

Confusing Nelson Rockefeller with his car is a useful delusion to inculcate in punks; this way they attack the car instead of the man. After all, if the punks ever found out the car was only a possession, there might be real trouble. But as long as movies assume that the use of women to bind men to respectability is an instinct or a scheme by women (who must act through men in order to attain any power or safety), and not a circumstance set up by powerful men, rebels can expend their emotion on reincarnations of the Bitch Goddess forever.

The war between fathers and sons is as chronic a conflict in patriarchy as the war between classes (that is, between upper-class and lower-class men), though not nearly as revolutionary in its potential. In both conflicts women are useful scapegoats, blamable and punishable for everything. After all, Son will eventually make it to the state of Father and will have his own Daughter/Wife he can own ("protect") from other Fathers, a Daughter he can give to another Son as payment for continuing the status quo. Son can even be counted on to punish Daughter if Daughter gets out of hand. Thus a real alliance between Daughter and Son is made eternally impossible, and luckily so, for such an alliance would be almost as dangerous for patriarchy as one between Daughter and Mother. Between classes, scapegoats are even more useful: Lower-class Man is not going to make it at all, i.e., he will never replace Upper-class Man; so using Lower/Upper-class Woman as scapegoat both distracts him from the real situation and bribes him to endure it.

The evils of female sexuality and the obligatory punishment of its carriers is the grand, eternally useful scapegoat of Western patriarchy. It is the one topic on which Fathers and Sons, Upper-class Men and Lower-class Men can heartily agree. And they can agree (and collude) while enjoying the comforting illusion that they are engaged in dangerous, revolutionary activities.

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.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 6

You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow page 521

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms--it was only staged to look that way--but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . .

Yes but Technology only responds..."All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible--but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are--"