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Heidegger
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For Heidegger, the essence of technology places us squarely within its boundaries; we can only wait for some new direction to open.
Few of those who offer totalizing criticisms of contemporary places go as far as does Heidegger in his "history of being" and his analyses of the technological essence of modernity. He claims that the conditions which give us a meaningful world also bring changes in our total background of meaning. This happens without any contribution from social or psychological processes, which are given meaning by these changes rather than controlling them. (See the essays collected in Heidegger 1971 and Heidegger1977, as well as the interview, Heidegger1981.)For evaluations of his claims, see for instance Kolb 1986 and Harries 1997. His argument is difficult to sustain in its extreme form, but some such combination of transcendental necessity and empirical diagnosis haas been a very alluring strategy for totalizing critiques.