In In search of clues to the fetishism of technology in critical geography of Milton Santos

Abstract

The technological systems and objects by which lifestyles are inundated today are essential elements both for critical analysis and for understanding the type of society that democratic participation aims to achieve. In view of this, diametrically opposed points of view are chosen: technologies are necessarily good and contribute to human development or, on the other hand, they are mechanisms of gradual dehumanization. The aim of this article is to highlight the possibility of an effective critique of technology without giving up its ontological character, when it is based on the need for technology to transform the world and build a space suitable for the realization of human life. To do this, in the philosophical content of Milton Santos’ work, for clues to understanding the concepts of commodity fetishism and technology, in order to reconstitute the subjects' more direct and active relationship with the world, the space in which they carry out their lives, a condition in which capitalism operates a mystification of objects and subjects. In conclusion, a look at geographical space becomes relevant to the analysis of technology, since it brings together not only the structure of meaning through which our actions are constituted, but also the concrete effects, in space, of the systems of actions and objects linked to a certain vectorization of power that ideologically articulates our relationship with the world. It is not technology itself that is problematic, but the way in which it acquires value in our context of life.