So you get electric chairs to kill people and assembly lines to constrain them, but you also get warm clothes for people to wear, and penicillin to enhance their longevity. Zerzan says technologies are contextual, and of course they are. They arise in some social setting. They are produced in it, or perhaps another. They are used in it, or perhaps a third.
Technologies don t spring spontaneously from nothing with no lineage and imprint.
Nor are technologies utilized in social vacuums. Zerzan is correct that each technology, whether a pencil or a shoe lace much less a guided missile or an assembly line, bears a social inscription carrying into it diverse imprints of the motives of its conception, production, and utilization part of which generally reflect the defense of social elites, but another part of which often reflect the accomplishing of needed functions. We should therefore expect technologies conceived, produced, and utilized in feudal times to be different than those in prehistoric times, or than those in capitalist times. So it is elementary. Zerzan moves on, however, to a point that is not at all elementary.