O retorno de Ananke

The article compares and situates, in their respective contexts, the thinking of four intellectuals from different areas and schools regarding the same phenomenon: the false necessities produced by technology. Our aim is to draw some partial and preliminary conclusions from the history of philosophy for the philosophy of technology, a field that is still in its infancy in Brazil. We start with Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, and the influence it had on the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, especially in One-Dimensional Man (1964). In the same decade, another important Marxist thinker, the French Guy Debord, developed the famous critique of The Society of the Spectacle. Finally, in our days, we have shown that the popular book by Israeli historian Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, can be considered a legacy of the theses developed and deepened in the previous century.