Technology is not limited to new devices. It includes the tools people use, the machinery behind workplaces, the networks that carry information, and the infrastructure communities depend on. Some of it is obvious; some becomes so ordinary that we stop seeing it as technology at all. Yet these systems shape how needs are met, how labor is organized, and who has power over shared decisions. Technorealism is a pragmatic philosophy for judging and governing technology in this wider sense. It asks what technology does in the society around it, and who has the power to shape those effects.

Techno-utopianism is the belief that technological advance will solve social problems and produce progress by itself. In arguments about AI, it appears as uncritical pro-AI sentiment: a system’s ability to generate, predict, or automate something is treated as proof that adopting it is good. But a technical capability does not settle what its use will mean for people. Automation might reduce exhausting work; under an employer’s control, it might instead become a way to cut labor costs and monitor workers more closely. Greater efficiency does not guarantee public benefit, and a promise of future abundance can excuse unequal arrangements in the present. Techno-utopianism leaves those decisions to owners and calls the result progress.

Neo-Luddism names the belief that new technology is inherently threatening and should be rejected or rolled back. In AI debates, it appears as blanket anti-AI sentiment. Concerns about surveillance, changes to people’s jobs, dependence on private systems, and environmental costs deserve serious attention. But rejecting a technology does not answer who owns its infrastructure, whose interests guide its use, or how the people affected can challenge those decisions. A blanket refusal can leave existing power in place while asking people to withdraw from systems already woven into daily life. Anxiety can alert us to a problem, but it cannot give us the power to change the conditions producing it.

Technorealism gives us a way to examine those conditions. It does not treat technology as inherently liberating or inherently destructive; it asks how particular tools and systems affect people, communities, and the living world. That means looking at who controls a technology, what needs it serves, how its benefits and costs are distributed, and whether the people affected can govern its use. Some applications may be useful, others may need strict limits, and others may need to be rejected. Those judgments should follow from the conditions and consequences of each use. From our communalist understanding, decisions about technologies that shape common life need accountable public institutions and meaningful participation from the communities affected. A digital commons is part of that vision: shared knowledge and infrastructure governed for common use, rather than left entirely to private owners.

AI is an urgent example, but it is not the whole subject. The same questions apply to energy systems, transportation, medical technologies, communication networks, and workplace automation. AI may help with translation, accessibility, or research; it can also be used to monitor people, displace workers, or concentrate decision-making. The label alone cannot tell us which outcome we are facing. We have to examine the system, its purpose, its ownership, and the power people have to shape or refuse its use.

Techno-utopianism asks us to trust that technological progress will deliver a better society. Neo-Luddism treats retreat from technology as though it could restore people’s control. Technorealism asks us to build that control directly: to decide together what technology is for, which uses serve the common good, and who is accountable for the consequences. This is no midpoint between two camps. It is a commitment to democratic self-government and to making technology answer to human needs and the living world.