I may be completely off the wall, but the key to a global telecoms grid, esp wireless, is inter-operability, which requires coordination and cooperation. It's possible to string together a bunch of small, or relatively small, operators.
Nuclear power plants -- at least the fission plants -- are not only large, but require the kind of centralisation and the high security that, say, cellular phone systems, at least in principle, don't.
Anyway, I'm wondering whether there's not some talking across one another on this topic. There's technology embodied in the knowledge, and there's technology embodied in products. I think the socio-politico-economic system is what comes into play in the move from the knowledge to the products. Putting it so baldly is undoubtedly an over-simplification, because there's also the demands arising from the practice of science, etc.
I don't see how technology as embodied in knowledge can ever be stopped without massively undemocratic and, perhaps, ultimately futile, at least self-defeating, moves. But there's continual intervention in how and what products come out, some of it through regulation, some through those marketing people and their focus groups, some through demand, some through sheer inventiveness, some from the fact that there's always some degree of contestation going on, etc. Even that bane, the internal combustion engine, has undergone transformation -- at least for a while -- from gas guzzling spewers of loads of pollutants to more gas economical spewers of fewer pollutants etc. And who would argue that the use of the internal combustion engine in efficient public transport combined with a huge levy on private car ownership is an instance of undemocratic trampling of individual rights? Whatever, in all instances, the underlying technology -- the internal combustion engine -- is the same, but the realised technology product is not.
I note that much of the argument has been over technology as realised in particular products. That much of such realised technology has political and social consequences, and embody political and social structures, political and economic power, is, I would have thought, quite incontestable. But does the same apply to the technology itself as embodied in knowledge, other than in the rather trivial sense that the production of such knowledge is dependent upon social and political organisation and values, some economic mobilisation, and that some social and political organisations and values -- not so clear about economic mobilisation -- are more conducive to such production than others? In any case that trivial sense is generally to be approved in so far as it appears that some freedom of inquiry, some rejection of authoritarianism, some rejection of hierarchy is better for knowledge production than its opposite.
kj khoo