Technological change explains oppression only when human ambition projects new demands onto it

Evidence

Similarly, it is impossible to deduce woman’s oppression from private property. Here again, the shortcomings of Engels’s point of view are obvious. While he clearly understood that woman’s muscular weakness was a concrete inferiority only in relation to bronze and iron tools, he failed to see that limits to her work capacity constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only from a certain perspective. Because man is transcendence and ambition, he projects new demands with each new tool: after having invented bronze instruments, he was no longer satisfied with developing gardens and wanted instead to clear and cultivate vast fields. This will did not spring from bronze itself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the existentialist premise laid out in the introduction that man is transcendence projecting toward projects; also engages Engels’s historical materialism as the rival framework Beauvoir is systematically rejecting. — connects to: Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 620; Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 410; Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 224 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 620
• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 224
• Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically #corroborates (0.80) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 410
• Total systems change, and human agency’s effects often subvert its intentions #qualifies (0.75)