Technological capacities that outstrip human need turn destructive, feeding warfare.

Evidence

It is discovering that traffic speeds, like the capacity to duplicate both the spoken and the written word, have outstripped human needs. The energies that technology develops beyond their threshold are destructive. They serve primarily to foster the technology of warfare, and of the means used to prepare public opinion for war. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 222

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compressed theses-like formulation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment claim that technological mastery over nature rebounds as destructive force — dense enough to sit with and trace across the whole Frankfurt School corpus.
• XREF: Connects to your notes on the culture industry and instrumental reason: technology’s surplus beyond need is precisely what gets redirected into domination.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Energies Beyond the Threshold’ — how a society’s technical surplus auto-converts into war-making and opinion-management capacity, from radio propaganda to algorithmic feed warfare.