In Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology Hubert L. Dreyfus addresses a core question arising from Heidegger's work: "How can we relate ourselves to technology in a way that not only resists its devastation but also gives it a positive role in our lives?"

As we know late Heidegger's analysis of technology in modernity involved a critique of those who, still caught in the subject/object picture, thought that technology was dangerous because it embodied instrumental reason. that subjects used to the will to gain control over objects for the sake of satisfying one's desires. Modern technology, he argued , is "something completely different and therefore new."

The goal of technology Heidegger then tells us, 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; an ordered about in that he called a standing-reserve. Heidegger sensed that, when everything has become standing reserve or resources, people and things will no longer be understood as having an identity, or even the goal of satisfying their arbitrary desires.