The Real World of Technology

Franklin, a metallurgist and physicist, distinguishes between holistic technologies (where the worker controls the entire process) and prescriptive technologies (where the process is divided into steps and the worker controls none). Her argument is that prescriptive technologies produce compliance cultures, and that the spread of prescriptive technology into domains where it does not belong — education, healthcare, governance — is one of the defining pathologies of the modern world. For product direction the distinction is diagnostic: most product organisations run on prescriptive technology (sprints, tickets, handoffs) without examining whether the work they are organising is actually divisible. Read alongside Illich for the autonomy argument and Sennett for the craft complement. The Massey Lectures format makes it short and accessible.