So far, I’ve focused primarily on cases where technology contributes to harm in quite a direct fashion. If we stopped at these first- order relations, we would be left with tools for a micro sociology of harm. But such a micro sociology of harm has some severe limitations. It is not, for one, able to adequately account for the part technologies play in harms at the institutional level, or the ‘macro’ level of political economy. Such an approach would be silent on the harms technologies – as means of production – can wreak through changing relations of production, to use Marx's (1991) terms. The power loom's widespread adoption, for example, led to a significant restructuring of the labour market. Artisans who once thrived on their specialized skills were outcompeted by machines that devalued their work and stole their livelihoods (Frey, 2019; Mueller, 2021).

These layered impacts call for us to examine how technologies contribute to harms less directly through their ripple effects on social relations and structures (see Lepinkäinen, 2024). They require us to examine how artefacts mediate social relations and, conversely, how social relations pattern their distribution and use. Or, as Žižek (2019: 40) puts it, ‘behind the things, the relation between things, we must detect the social relations, the relations between human subjects’. What we need, then, is an approach that can ‘scale up’ and explain both harms arising from direct interactions with technologies, and ‘structural’ harms arising from relations between relations with technologies.

This chapter elaborates on how this might be achieved. As I argued in Chapter 7, we can escape the cage of direct human– technology relations through adopting an emergentist ontology.