Dear Pedro,

Here are my modest thoughts (I'd better say : questions) to some of your concerns.

You write :
"It has recently dawn on me that the similarities between the discourse towards technology and the discourse towards political representation found in this country (passive acceptance of the “authority” contained in the technology or in the government)are traits of a country with a very short history of democracy."
>>> as you write, it appears first of all as a "discourse" (and not necessarily as a practice or even an experience). The fact is that democracy is organically constituted by layers of institutions that split the levels of decision(s) in order to (deliberately) avoid tyranny. Parliament, Senates, assemblies of some kind, the independance of justice make the analogy of the machine / technology a tempting metaphor. Or maybe, beyond the metaphors, and worth investigating, there is a set of articulations that are worth looking at (if you are a bit of a structuralist… which I tend to be). Some people, for instance, have studied how the vocabulary used to explain the organisation of the computer is feeding back into the biotechnologies and the (re)programming of our bodies.
>>> but it is not democracy but technocracy, that I would compare to technology. Which is the contemporary way in which the social vision of a nation, as expressed through the democratic debate, cascades down into concrete actions. E.g. : managing unemployed people takes the face of forms, regulations, rights and compensations of some kind. It does not look at the societal aspects social bonds, alternative / informal economies, hidden work, black market… Or it looks at that when the (financial) limits are reached.
>>> the side effect of technocracy is that it opposes two classes : the experts, and the "users" (? / victims ? / ). Participation is beeing seen at the moment as a way to bridge some of the gap, but I am wondering if it truly can, if the question of who ultimately decides, what are the compensations,etc. are not put in the middle of the table. 
One nice case that might look a bit off-tracks is the studies that have been done about the early aids victims, and the expertise that they co-developped with the doctors, which was a major transformation in the history of the advancement of medicine. 
>>> and it remains true that the Bauhaus and Ulm where probably the only two schools that articulated so strongly the figure of the architect (bauhaus) / designer (ulm) as being the individual (in the Kantian sense, not the Nietzschean) that would bridge the gap. Hence the importance of the spiritual (bauhaus) / humanistic (ulm) educational foundation.

"I wonder if other people here also see a relation between historical duration of democracy and a concern with the end user. In other words: is the concern with the end user a characteristic of countries/cultures with a longer history of democracy?" 
>>> I don't think so. As an example, I see a major divide between the functionalist approach of the design of the mid-20th century (e.g. Max Bill), and the cognitivist approach of the late 20 century user interface design. Only (some of) the words look the same, but the "projects" are socially different. One includes beauty within the function (the reality is a bit more complex —just to prevent overreactions from colleagues), whereas I don't remember that word being part of the readings I had when working on UI (but that was long ago, it might have changed since). Of course, people will argue that Apple interfaces (as an archetypal example) mix the two. But this to me is an example of the legacy of the functionalist design culture : one might be reduce this to the fact that Ives connects to Rams, I prefer to thinks that it is simply because designers and engineers share their work reasonably well together in the company (but that's pure interpretation, I have never been there).

Best wishes,

Jean


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