This article takes as its starting point Christian Fuchs’s Internet and Society (2008), which deploys selected aspects of Herbert Marcuse’s work in the construction of a critical theory of techno-social systems and informational capitalism. Going beyond Fuchs’s emphasis on dialectics, I argue for a deeper engagement with Marcuse’s distinctive combination of Marxian, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological theory in order to formulate a theoretical framework that includes embodied aspects of techno-social experiences. By reinterpreting the concepts of nature and Eros in Marcuse’s critical theory in terms of complexity and self-organization, I suggest that his work can inform a renewal of critical theories of technology at a time when boundaries between the natural and social worlds are increasingly contested. At the same time, I argue that Marcuse’s critique of technological rationality has a significant gendered dimension that is relevant to understanding how the complexity of nature gets taken up within contemporary techno-social systems.
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