Interesting questions. The logic of domination (as Adorno said) is complicit with the logic of technology. Both the east and west (soviets and americans) converged in their fetishizing of industry, technology, and science. The situation today is even more acute than an Adorno imagined.....and the old marxist concept of reification exists squared. WE treat our friends like machines and our machines like friends.

and gary....here is the link to Placebo Art...http://www.bestcyrano.org/voxpop/
where, a couple posts back the discussion regarding death of literature is discussed....and which, oddly (or not) leads to more recent postings about this logic of machine culture.

Just to add to John's point, I think that Heidegger's idea of technological enframing - wherein domination can be seen as the increasing hold of metaphysics (which in our era manifests itself technologically) - provides a little room for optimism. For Heidegger, it is the completion of the totalizing hold of metaphysics that allows one to view it as such and see beyond it to alternative possible horizons. In this way, I suppose there is a little of Marx to him (I am thinking of the communist manifesto, but only thematically, not analytically).