Its not the results of technological innovation that are paradoxical (though of course they might be) in the example you cite. It is the perverse use to which they are put. There is nothing about nuclear fission that demands it become a weapon of war.
There is indeed a simple-minded utopianism about new technologies, which is the mirror image of the simple-minded dystopianism about new technologies. Technique in itself has no necessary social consequences, bad or good.
The absence of technique, by contrast, represents a barrier to human emancipation. Big is not necessarily better, but small is necessarily worse.
-- James Heartfield
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