Based on the two texts, it seems like the overall development and upkeep of technology are based on the alliance of two powers : state power and the power of capitalists. States, as the structures composed of state actors, are under the pressure of being outclassed by their counterparts, which would means a political and military disadvantage forcing the concerned state to silence on its own interests in international debates. To avoid that, they rely on security superiority, and from a theoretical realist point of view, I would argue that technology and security are one and the same. In fact, the gaps between powers seem to increase with technology, I am thinking here about how much for example an efficient anti-missile defense system can weaken the arguments even of a nuclear force.
In a similar fashion, capitalists actors use the means of production to remain competitive under the pressure of being evicted from the market. This leads to the following process : the State develops technologies and allow capitalists to spread it on the mainstream (internet, radar technology used for microwaves ...) by protecting them through legal means, because the economical power of the latter compliments the political power of the former, while both of them maintain their own power. This may actually be one of the core stakes behind the concerns of today about intellectual property.
The whole idea seems quite solid to me as I think about the historical relation through the ages of mutual interest between the prince and the merchant, and how it relates to technology, as we can see in History with the european discovery and exploitation of the Americas.

While emphasizing on the importance of historical context to understand the bigger picture, notably that the actors with a grounding technological advantage are most likely to maintain it, the second text also encourages to take into account the « sociospatial » dimension of the internet (Marshall McLuhan), on top of the geospatial dimension of state and market powers. The « sociospatial » dimension is another sphere of human activity which revolves around the individual’s personnal use of technological communication.
This new perspective in human life can make us imagine technologies that would no longer be developed at first for security and domination purposes but rather directly designed to fit and support the user. Yet, if they would then loose their state and market related political nature it wouldn’t be enough for them to lose their gendered nature. The marxist concept of commodity fetishism can be applied to technology as we use it as something natural without seeing it is shaped by ideologies and social constructs.

In fact, one of the current stakes in the growing artifical intelligence sector is to learn how not to make the AI reproduce cultural, racial and gender biases. Also, from now on, the internet has been mostly dominated by masculinist principles and thus mainly used by men, which can act as gate-keepers. But it has been showed that women can use male-driven technologies of communication to their own use, specifically to take control of their own time. The internet is a good example of the overall « biased but ambivalent » (first text) nature of technology. It is a medium for contestation of structural norms, but it also can go in all directions and be used by any side, as seen with Trump supporters’ war on memes. For that reason, I would

say that technology can only support the emancipation of the dominant class. One class would only be able to use technology as a tool for its emancipation once it would become dominant.

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