Abstract
What limitations are we willing to accept on our development of new technologies? The shared sense among a great many of the idealistic supporters of our ever-growing range of tools and abilities is that the acquisition of knowledge is always a positive gain for the entirety of humanity, and that therefore there should be no (or few) restrictions on continued technology research. This mythology, which descends from the arrival of exclusive Humanism from the Enlightenment onwards, has become one of the greatest moral and prudential threats to human existence because it removes the possibility of accurately assessing the moral implications of our technology. Against this prevailing ethos of unbounded technological incrementalism, this essay uses the pejorative term cyberfetish to mark our dependence upon, and inability to accurately assess, our technology