Technology and Its People
Patrick Gamsby · 2025
In the third volume of his Critique of Everyday Life , Henri Lefebvre argues that substituting postmodernity for modernity as a label for the late twentieth century misses the main issue – technological modernism’s growth in everyday life. Taking this assertion as its cue, this chapter examines how humans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are intersecting with technology both by choice and by force. Technology’s potential to end work, increase work, and create new work will also be highlighted, as will its usage in leisure activities. Lefebvre’s twentieth century analyses will be extended into the twenty-first century by looking at the explosion of screen-based technologies, social media, applications, and the ever-looming societal impact of artificial intelligence currently taking place.