Technology
Adrián Almazán
Implicitly or explicitly, technology plays a lead role in nearly every proposal calling for a compromise with ecological justice. We find this, for example, in green capitalism, which argues that technology, together with market dynamics, is an efficiency vector to economic growth capable of decoupling the latter from its ecological impacts. We also see it in ecomodernism, where market mechanisms are given lower priority and technology is promoted from instrument to almost exclusive agent in the transformation toward sustainability.
Jointly with this “capitalist accelerationism”, we also encounter left-wing accelerationism. Techno-Marxist proposals, for example, do not acknowledge that the abundance generated by technological development allows the construction of social and ecological justice provided it is not accompanied by deep economic and social transformation, in this case in Communist terms. The Green New Deal embraces a similar pattern, but in many cases abandoning growth and advocating steady-state economies.
All these proposals maintain differences in the political, economic and strategic domain, but share a similar understanding of technology based on the “paradigm of technical and technological neutrality”. Nevertheless, some proposals adopt a more critical view of technology (Almazán, 2021) such as de-growth, or certain eco-socialisms (Riechmann et al., 2018).
From this angle, technology can be interpreted as a historical and contingent form of technics, concretely as capitalist, modern and industrial societies’ array of techniques. Key to this distinction between technics and technology is society, and not complexity (technology as sophisticated technics), scale (technology as grand-scale technics) or the relationship with science (technology as science-based technics). At least three characteristics that are exclusive to technology are listed below.
1. Capitalist, industrial and fossil technologies
The first characteristic of technology is the type of economic and metabolic structure it depends on. Capitalism is structurally unequal. To function, it needs “peripheries” in which the price of labour and nature is lower that at the “centres” (Luxemburgo, 2007). According to Hornborg (2001), this unequal distribution in the world-system is embodied in technology. Technologies themselves are unequal exchanges among different segments of global society involving human labour and natural space (Hornborg 2014a, p. 12). Hence, in his view, it is impossible to gain equal access to technology within a capitalist framework of relations.
Let us consider the car. For every individual in the “centres” to avail of one, it is necessary to have sacrificial areas providing a labour force, raw materials and ecological sinks for the waste products generated during their manufacture, use and disposal. If the entire life-cycle of cars were to unfold in the territory where it is used, respecting the environmental laws, labour laws, land use laws, and so on, their price would infinitely greater than the purchasing power of their current owners. Besides, it would be impossible, no territory possessing all the resources necessary for this level of industrial production. We might say exactly the same regarding information technologies or “green” technologies such as the bicycle or the train, currently built industrially.
Another economic imperative for capitalism to function is perpetual growth, which cannot be dissociated from the unremitting competitiveness and social and military conflictivity that enables it. This growth drive has deeply influenced technology, as capitalist investment has fostered gigantism, individualism, productivity, acceleration and economic efficiency (rather than wellbeing, democracy or sustainability) as a feature of technology.
Moreover, technology is not only the object of this competitive dynamic, but also an agent. Firstly, because to reach certain technologies, many countries depend on industrial hubs where manufacturing is conducted under quasi-monopolistic conditions. Such dependence is a major competitive disadvantage relegating many territories to chronic under-development. Besides, technology has become increasingly inseparable from war and, therefore, from the political and economic hegemony it safeguards, today dependent on accessing the latest versions of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, drones, robots, et cetera.
To the above economic considerations we must add others regarding energy and materials. Technology is embedded in a metabolism without precedent. Capitalism has supported most of its economic expansion on fossil fuels. Our capitalism is fossil (Malm, 2020) and as a consequence, so are our technologies. Decoupling technology from this fossil metabolism is, contrary to the general view, much more difficult than expanding hi-tech industrial renewable energy sources or electrifying certain sectors of the economy. The price capitalism has had to pay for becoming global in scale and increasingly dispensing with human labour is its structural dependence on planet-wide logistics and a vast amount of industrial machinery. Neither of these two things is conceivable today without massive energy consumption, particularly of fossil fuels, and without the use of practically every element on the periodic table.
A change of metabolism would involve, to begin with, a sustained and global reduction in the way we use energy, something that is unprecedented (Fressoz, 2021). Secondly, we would have to design a non-fossil energy-technology matrix. In other words, to develop technics exclusively from renewable and/or abundant energy and materials, renouncing non-renewables and rare energy sources on a major scale (Almazán & del Buey, 2022).
2. Imperial technologies
The first of the above characteristics renders impossible an interpretation of technological development as a linear, continuous and positive progression. On the contrary, technology is a measure of the advance of capitalist accumulation, colonial domination, extractivism in the Global South, or ecological destructivism. Partly for this reason we can declare technology to be imperial: we cannot separate it from the constitution and expansion of imperial ways of life (Brand & Wissen, 2021).
The implementation of imperial ways of life has entailed widespread substitution of humans by technology in life-sustaining processes. Their success, therefore, depended on the disappearance of all other previously existing methods. After all, there is a deep bond between common goods and non-capitalist, non-industrial technics. Many of the latter emerged in subsistence societies (Mies & Bennholdt-Thomsen, 1999) and play a lead role in their economic, political and metabolic structure. Besides, these are, in themselves, common goods that may be appropriated and freely produced.
Technology has been key to eliminating these “peripheries”, progressively colonised by mercantile and state relations. The food sector is a clear example. Shifting from traditional to industrial farming brought the obligation to implement the set of technologies, with the economic and metabolic features described above, necessary to undermine subsistence: common goods are expropriated for use in production, traditional production techniques are eliminated while generating market dependence (purchase of machinery, chemical insumption, seed, et cetera) and State dependence (taxes, subventions, insurance, inspectors, et cetera).
In addition, technology obliges us to rely on experts for its design, but in many cases also for its use (Illich, 2012). This dependence causes a marked reduction in the potential for democratic and community-wide management. Furthermore, many technologies can be looked upon as a heavy burden in the form of negative commons (Mies & Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2001) that we shall have to deal with at some future point in time, as in the case, for instance, of nuclear energy.
3. The technology and imaginary of Modernity
A further characteristic of technology is its bearing on the inter-connections it establishes with imaginaries. Technologies, as any other technics, merely by existing and regardless of their explicit use, contribute to moulding what our society deems possible and not possible and/or desirable, our priorities, our values, etc. Technologies have played a particularly important part in the irruption and consolidation of the modern imaginary and the type of relationship with nature it has instituted. Besides, it would be impossible to understand this craving to become the lords and masters of nature, or the idea of progress, without the knowledge of how technology, since the 16th century, had become the centre of a new way of interpreting the world based on anthropocentrism, on the desire for domination and on mechanicism (Merchant, 2020).
A deep link exists between technology and the characteristic type of destructive, collective irresponsibility of our age (Anders, 2011). As the reproduction and sustenance of life at all levels (nutrition, housing, transport, clothing; but also celebrations, dreams, culture, etc.) depends on technology, we have rendered our lives unsupportable without the existence of structural social inequality and ecological destruction. One of the most substantial and tragic dimensions of such irresponsibility has been linking fossil fuels to our technologies. Having naturalised and extended a whole collection of fossil fuel dependent machines to sustain our lives, we have set in motion biospheric degradation and climate deregulation that place all life at risk, including that of future generations, whose very existence is brought into question and whose outlook for a good life is severely curtailed. This is why technology is crucial for the construction of ecological justice today, but also for the future, and for humans and non-humans alike.
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