The problem of technology as valuation errors: The paradox of the means in Simmel and Scheler

•Simmel and Scheler provide a framework for analyzing and evaluating technology.•The appropriate role of technology in society is to help attain ends.•Modern societies tend to value technology as an end for sociological reasons.•This valuation error is an irrational reversal of the means-ends relationship.•This valuation error impairs the cultivation of “subjective culture” and harms life.

Georg Simmel and Max Scheler provide a framework for making judgements about the desirability of technological development and use, an evaluation absent from a largely relativistic contemporary sociology of technology. The appropriate role of technology in society is to aid in the attainment of ultimate values (ends). Both Simmel and Scheler framed the problem of technology as the elevation of technology to an ultimate value. The modern valuation of technology as an end is irrational because it is a reversal of the means-ends relationship and values the general development of technology instead of the potential benefits of particular technical developments. This inverted valuation is also detrimental to the cultivation of “subjective culture” and harmful to life. The importance of Simmel and Scheler for the contemporary sociology of technology is an illustration of what an evaluation of technology presupposes: claims about the general nature of modern technology as well as its essence. Although insightful, the cultural and phenomenological sociologies of technology found in Simmel and Scheler could be strengthened with structural analysis.