"Whatever the eventual success or failure of [the] efforts to alter the nature of technology, our understanding of how technology changes can only profit from them. For, by making contingency and choice actual rather than merely hypothetical, they throw into ever-sharper light the ways in which social relations shape technical development. Perhaps too the process can be dialectical, rather than one-way. Perhaps understanding how existing technology has been and is being socially shaped can help in reconstructing it. If that can be so, and if Marx’s account of the machine is useful to that understanding, then the shade of Marx will surely be happy. For it was of the essence of the man that he believed, not simply in understanding the world, but also in changing it."