Trevor,
as you've guessed I'm putting Heidegger into play against your Australianised Marxism (historical materialism).

As I understand this tradition presupposes an understanding of modernity in which everything is organized to stand over against and to satisfy the desires of autonomous and stable utilitarian subjects. This also presupposed a technological understanding of being in which these utilitarian subjects dominated nature, exploited all beings for their own satisfaction and were a subject in control.

What late Heidegger does is argue that the nature of technology in late modernity does not depend on subjects understanding and using objects. Exploitation and control are not the subject's doing, since the mode of being in which human beings become the subject and the world the object is a consequence of technology's nature establishing itself, and not the other way around.

Secondly, Heidegger was critical of those like Adorno who was still caught in the subject/object picture and thought that technology was dangerous because it embodied instrumental reason. Modern technology Heidegger argued is the more and more flexible and efficient ordering of resources, not as objects to satisfy our desires, but simply for the sake of ordering. Subjects are seen as a standing reserve or resources.