Abstract
Technologies developed since the late eighteenth century differ from earlier forms of technology by being as dependent on world market prices of labour, land and other biophysical resources as on human inventiveness. Yet, whether their outlook is mainstream or heterodox, modern people tend to view technology simply as ingenuity applied to nature, while oblivious of the extent to which it is contingent on the asymmetric exchange of resources in global society. Although inextricably entwined in the real world, the phenomena studied by economics and engineering are kept conceptually separate. This is achieved by disregarding the materiality of world trade. Modern technologies are not just instruments for solving problems but social strategies for redistributing time and space in world society, displacing work and environmental loads to sectors of the world system where wages are lower and environmental legislation less rigorous. Technology should not remain extraneous to social theory. A sociometabolic reconceptualisation of technology is particularly essential for critics of global capitalism.
Introduction
In his article, The New Prometheans: Technological Optimism in Climate Change Mitigation Modelling, Keary (2016: 8) suggests that technological optimism ‘was born from the belief that economic growth must be maintained and that some way must be found to reconcile it with environmental sustainability’. After having demonstrated that mainstream models of technological change tend to be unreliable, he concludes that ‘the sustainable development framework is ultimately a depoliticising framework, which is only possible due to technological optimism’ (ibid., 23). Without this faith, he continues, ‘[g]lobal justice questions would re-emerge with a vengeance’. In this article, I want to underscore Keary's observation that the modern perception of technology is inextricably connected to the trust in economic growth, and that both serve to ideologically neutralise questions of global justice. By examining the modern inclination to conceptually separate the social and the material (such as in nature and physical artifacts), I hope to help illuminate why, against the recurrent evidence of ecological failure, the ‘inexhaustible promise of science and faith in technological solutions has remained firmly in place’ (Dandy, 2021: 142). Because our global predicament is intrinsically difficult to reveal through an investigation of local conditions, I shall proceed primarily through analytical argument, rather than an empirical case study.
Given the voluminous literature on climate change and the many other problematic trajectories of the Anthropocene, it today seems redundant to point out that global capitalism represents a socioecological dilemma of apocalyptic proportions. I am assuming that most readers will share this concern. My focus in this article is instead on the conceptual constraints of the many critics of capitalism who, from Marx until today, imagine technological progress to be a crucial part of solutions to the problems generated by capitalism. Although Marxist discourse on the ills of capitalism continues to flourish, its predictions for a post-capitalist society seem increasingly utopian and detached from what appears to be politically feasible. For those of us concerned about the environment, it is also difficult to subscribe to classical Marxian value theory, which proposes that commodities have objective values deriving exclusively from the quantities of socially necessary labour time that they represent (cf. Kallis and Swyngedouw, 2018; Spash, 2020: 391). 1 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that something essential is missing in the classic Marxist analysis. I believe that a central omission, which helps to explain the impasse, is a critical analysis of the role of technology. My aim in this article is to elaborate the argument that modern technology is undertheorised – because incorrectly categorised as extra-social – and to illustrate this omission with how even radical critics of global capitalism fail to see technological artifacts as expressions of exploitative social relations. In being absolved from intrinsic implications of exploitation, our understanding of the material substance of ‘technology’ is finally exempt from critique. To challenge this absolution or immunisation of technology, I argue for a global, sociometabolic rethinking of the Industrial Revolution and its historical repercussions. I conclude by briefly reflecting on some consequences of such a reconceptualisation of technology for current deliberations on a transition to sustainable, post-carbon technologies.
Transcending the divide between the material and the social
It is getting increasingly difficult for modern people to take a step back and think about what technology really is. Most people alive today have lived their whole lives surrounded by gadgets and technological systems of various kinds – or at least they have been aware of their existence. Although access to technology is proportional to one's affluence, even the poorest people take as self-evident the existence of cars, television sets, telephones and airplanes. Regardless of where we are in the world, we tend to share the common-sense view that such technical contraptions are the results of human inventions and signs of human progress. Different levels of ‘development’ in different nations appear to suggest that some countries are ahead and others lagging. We tend to think of machines (my shorthand for modern technological devices) as smart ways of making use of possibilities inherent in nature – and we see the list of historical inventions as evidence that we (or some) are getting better and better at it. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution around 250 years ago, this has been the mainstream understanding of technological progress. Most historians of technology would no doubt agree with Landes’ (1969: 555) assessment that the ‘Industrial Revolution and the subsequent marriage of science and technology are the climax of millennia of intellectual advance’. In this view, the essence of modern technology is advanced knowledge about how features of physical nature can be manipulated and harnessed by humans. Technology is understood as neutral with regard to social context.
The pervasive understanding of technological progress as a matter of improvements in design, expertise and skill has absolved technology from critiques referring to unequal access to it. Critique has instead focused on how new technologies may threaten democratic, socio-cultural, aesthetic or environmental values (e.g., Winner, 1988; Postman, 1992; Sale, 1995; Fox, 2002; Jones, 2006; Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011). Although we all know that modern technology is very unevenly distributed in world society, such observations appear not to compromise the phenomenon of technology as such. This is clearly evident in Karl Marx's celebration of the advancing ‘productive forces’ of nineteenth-century British capitalism and the continued trust in technological advance in Marxist thought. 2 However, a more consistently materialist perspective on capital accumulation – demonstrating that economic cores of the world system are net importers of vast volumes of resources such as embodied materials, energy, labour and land (Dorninger et al., 2021) – suggests that technological progress is an inherently distributed phenomenon. Given its central concern with justice, it should be an unsettling conundrum for Marxism to understand the local augmentation of productivity in industrialising areas as a sociometabolic process occurring at the expense of their non-industrial peripheries.
Although many historians, sociologists and philosophers have long observed that the designs of technologies are intertwined with the specific social contexts in which they are created and applied (e.g., Bijker et al., 1987), modern technology as a material phenomenon is not understood as inherently social in the sense of necessarily being unevenly distributed. The standard view is that technologies ‘in themselves’ are neutral and only their use can raise moral concerns. Given our customary classification of things as either material or social, it is undoubtedly the objective materiality of technology that in our worldview automatically excises it from the contingency of social relations. To fully understand the general phenomenon of modern technology as simultaneously material and social, we must abandon such conceptual partition of society versus physical nature, as if they could be isolated – and insulated – from each other. We need to see that social relations of exchange and distribution are inseparable from physical flows of energy and matter. Even the objective materiality of our physical environment is socially produced. This appears to be the most central lesson of the Anthropocene.
Conventional accounts of the relation between technology and social theory tend to oppose social constructivism and neomaterialism, understanding the latter's focus on materiality as a way to grant agency to objects such as artifacts (Matthewman, 2011: 19). For Bruno Latour and other Actor-Network Theorists (ANT), the modern conceptual boundary between matter and society has defined the division of labour between the natural and the social sciences (ibid., 109). In other words, matter has been equated with nature, as distinct from society. To fundamentally challenge this conventional distinction between the material and the social, however, we must recognise that the materiality of our artifacts is itself socially constituted. Rather than simply follow ANT in upgrading the role of materiality in society, as if it implied an ‘agency’ on a par with purposive action, we must understand the very stuff of technologies as products of social exchange. Artifacts do not just have social consequences stemming from their material properties – they owe their existence and material properties to social processes. The phenomenon of modern technology thus dissolves the boundary between the material and the social in a more profound way than generally imagined by proponents of the new material turn. To conceptually transcend that boundary, we must be prepared not just to admit technical objects into society, but to acknowledge that their very material essence is social.
Technologies as materialised social relations
The harnessing of fossil energy for mechanical work was an unprecedented watershed in human history. Up until the advent of the steam engine, most work had been conducted by the muscular power of human and animal bodies, marginally supplemented with the power of wind and flowing water. Beginning with the first watermills used in the eastern Mediterranean towards the end of the Roman Empire, the very idea of the machine signified a substitution for human or animal labour. The engineer's fundamental challenge, in other words, was to design an artificial organism. From the first watermills until the Industrial Revolution, machines were propelled by wind or flowing water. The steam engine more closely approximated an organism in that it was propelled by the combustion and dissipation of solar energy. Like organisms, the steam engine required inputs of energy ultimately deriving from the sun. Both converted solar energy into work and heat. Since then, increasingly advanced technologies such as cybernetics, robotics and artificial intelligence have explicitly aimed to replicate properties of living things, including humans.
The steam engine was the first point at which the accumulated solar energy stored in geological sediments became connected to the metabolism of human societies. The products of billions of years of photosynthesis thus became available for the organisation of the world economy. Fossil fuels are what continue to integrate global human society, currently covering around 90% of its energy use (Smil, quoted in Voosen, 2018). This means that even the most sophisticated and seemingly ‘dematerialised’ modern technologies ultimately depend substantially on fossil energy. Even if a rising share of electricity consumption is renewable, the extraction of minerals and the myriad transports of the components of ‘green’ technologies – including those for harnessing renewable energy – more than ever remain dependent on fossil fuels.
The material conditions of the existence of both biological and technological systems require net inputs of high-order energy, but the implications of this requirement are very different for the two kinds of structure. For an organism, the net inputs are simply a feature of its regular metabolism. It appropriates high-order energy by eating and discharges low-order energy as waste and heat. For a machine or more extensive technological system, however, the continuation of net inputs hinges on social relations of exchange between humans. Regardless of how these relations are represented, they must entail a net appropriation of high-order energy and other resources that are essential for the operation of the technology. In physical terms, the flows of inputs and outputs to a technological infrastructure must be as asymmetric as the flows of energy into and out of an organism. This is a material condition of the existence of technology that can be deduced from thermodynamics but that requires some mode of social organisation that achieves such physically asymmetric flows, regardless of whether this material aspect is a conscious consideration.
It is this sociometabolic and necessarily distributive aspect that is missing in mainstream understandings of the phenomenon of modern technology. The history of technology is generally presented as a matter of inventive breakthroughs and progressively more efficacious schemes for harnessing nature's potential. A paradigmatic case is Landes’ (1969) classic history of European industrialisation; the general approach to technology presented in that study is representative of the hegemonic modern view. This cognitivist narrative of the development of technology detaches the operation of technological systems from their sociometabolic requirements and the increasingly global societal contexts which make them feasible. Machines are conceptually excised, as it were, from the material relations of exchange through which they are reproduced.
This is not to downplay the historical significance of technical inventions. I am not suggesting that ‘Promethean’ accounts of technological history, emphasising the role of innovative ingenuity, should be replaced with purely political narratives, emphasising that of unequal exchange. My point is that, although the former highlights the necessary condition for a given technology, it is rarely a sufficient condition. The latter – that is, asymmetric resource flows – may often be a crucial requisite. An illustrative example is the net imports of embodied labour and land to keep the steam-powered cotton textile factories running in early industrial Britain. Those factories were dependent on the appropriation of embodied American land and African labour through the cotton trade (cf. Beckert, 2014), a massive import of Baltic land and labour embodied in bar iron, 3 and various other resources from Britain's global periphery.
At issue is our propensity to fetishise material objects in the sense of not acknowledging the wider field of exchange relations that define the true boundaries of the system that has made them possible. The steam-powered textile mills in nineteenth-century Britain are a simple example, but similar observations can be made on the myriad artifacts of modern life with which humans have been entangled since the Industrial Revolution. These artifacts owe their existence to largely fossil-fueled production processes and transport technologies that maintain the complex global commodity chains from which they derive. The global webs of resource flows clearly indicate that the system boundaries of most modern artifacts are not easily traced and that such artifacts cannot be exhaustively comprehended by analysing the design of the artifacts themselves. Marx's concept of commodity fetishism reminds us that most artifacts are embodiments of numerous people's labour in extraction, manufacture, transports and so on, but that the operation of our market economy relies on – and is conducive to – our ignorance or indifference to the social context of the goods we consume. The same fundamental idea is evident in approaches such as life cycle analysis and ecological footprint analysis: the transfer of an artifact from one social group to another implies a transfer of the labour time and other resources that are embodied in that artifact.
Let us consider another conspicuous example of how misleading it is to conceptually separate material artifacts from the social exchange relations through which they are engendered. Bronze metallurgy is a form of technology that requires (a) knowledge and skills for the forging of bronze from copper and tin as well as (b) social organisation providing access to distant sources of copper and tin, and at feasible exchange rates. 4 Whereas the former is a necessary condition for the existence of bronze metallurgy, it is not a sufficient condition. The analytical distinction between cognitive and societal conditions is equally applicable to the steam technology developed in late eighteenth-century Britain. This means that the engineering science that is understood as having propelled the expansion of steam-powered cotton textile mills in Britain does not represent the full story. Steam technology was also contingent on capital accumulation stemming from long-distance exchange relations such as the triangular trade in textiles, slaves and plantation produce across the Atlantic.
Through history, complex technologies such as bronze metallurgy or steam power have been celebrated as products of esoteric knowledge or even magic, but have been just as dependent on specific exchange relations. Technologically advanced centers are not advanced because they have progressed further than their hinterlands in historical time, or because they possess a particular knowledge or skills that would not be available in their hinterlands. They are technologically advanced because they – like Bronze Age monarchs and Victorian capitalists – have capitalised on asymmetric transfers of strategic resources such as tin, copper, cotton and coal.
This is not how we generally think of technology. To study engineering obviously does not usually require taking courses in global political economy. Technologies are generally perceived as inventions that harness natural forces, made feasible by engineering knowledge applied to nature. The question of whether their material infrastructure is a product of asymmetric resource transfers does not enter the agenda of mainstream social theory. Although technologies are often referred to as means of enforcing social power and inequality, they are in themselves understood as just as politically neutral as the natural forces that they harness. In other words, the mainstream view is that the material manifestations of technology belong to nature and are external to the concerns of social theory. As I argued in the previous section, this conceptual neutralisation of technology is pervasive not only in mainstream economics and engineering but also in ostensibly heterodox approaches such as Marxism.
Most mainstream thought about technology sees no decisive difference between Paleolithic stone axes and steam engines. In both cases, we tend to think, humans apply their knowledge and skills to resources derived from nature. As we have seen, however, there is a fundamental discontinuity between the two senses of technology. Contrary to stone axes, steam engines are founded on social rates of exchange. While it is possible, in principle, for an individual human to manufacture a stone axe, a steam engine necessarily requires a vast social network of exchanges. The resources and components that are assembled into an engine have been derived from a range of social groups and at specific prices. The machine thus embodies a global system of socially negotiated resource flows. Unlike a stone axe, it could not exist without those flows.
Over the past half century, critical social scientists and historians have deconstructed fundamental concepts of nineteenth-century economics and examined the cultural context of nineteenth-century thermodynamics (Mirowski, 1989; Rabinbach, 1990), but the machine has escaped such scrutiny. It has instead served as a master metaphor for the human body, nature and the universe. Its own essence has been unassailable. Landes (1969: 40) called it ‘the heart of the new economic civilisation’. It has served as the bedrock on which modern ontology is founded, providing the template for understanding natural as well as social processes. But precisely this aura of unquestionable common sense should prompt us to unpack the concept of the machine. It appeared at a certain historical time, in a particular place, and in a specific societal context. It was imagined by its earliest beneficiaries to be a phenomenon based exclusively on the application of technical knowledge to nature. It is easy to understand why such material objects were unlikely to be perceived as embodiments of unequal global social relations and yet it is possible to show that they were indeed contingent on the ratios (i.e., market prices) at which biophysical resources were asymmetrically exchanged in the world-system. But this global, social derivation of the machine was not recognised as constitutive of its local, material form. To this day, machines are understood simply as devices for locally harnessing natural forces, rather than as strategies for appropriating human time and natural space from other sectors of world society.
The role of technology in Marxian accounts of capitalism
The replacement of human labour with machinery in the nineteenth century posed unprecedented challenges to economics and social thought in general. Given that the machine in itself is a commodity, it is as susceptible to fetishism as other artifacts exchanged on the market. Its capacity to work may give the impression of autonomous productivity, but this capacity is ultimately the transmutation of largely invisible inputs of labour and other resources expended in the process of its production and operation. Nevertheless, Marx did not pursue the ultimate implications of his insights on commodity fetishism for his approach to the machine.
Since the Industrial Revolution, machines have mystified the flows of labour time between centers of production and their hinterlands. In contrast to the Indian cotton industry which they supplanted, the British textile factories exported less invested labour time than had been embodied in extracting its raw materials. In 1850, for example, the exchange of £1000 worth of British cotton cloth for £1000 worth of American cotton fibre on the world market amounted to the exchange of 14,233 h of British labour for 20,874 h of American plantation labour. 5 The ‘workshop of the world’ in effect displaced work and environmental loads to its peripheries precisely by exporting its industrial products. To this day, most industrially advanced nations such as the United States, Europe and Japan are net importers of embodied labour and other resources. 6 Industrialisation can thus be viewed as a transformation of the systems of tribute that sustained the ancient agricultural empires (Hornborg, 2021).
To investigate how our contemporary conceptualisation of technology emerged historically, useful sources include nineteenth-century writers like Babbage (1832) and Ure (1835). Their books clearly represent the kind of thinking about machines that was prevalent in early industrial Britain. From this local perspective, machines are understood simply as inventions for making industrial production quicker, cheaper, more efficient, more standardised and more reliable. They are thought of as local improvements that augment the global competitiveness of an industry or nation. Babbage's deliberations are not only representative of mainstream views of technological progress over the past two centuries but also became foundational to Marx's approach to what he perceived as the progressive development of society's productive forces. Marx's reading of Babbage is key to understanding the historical roots, even in Marxist critiques of capitalist imperialism, of the modern perception of technology as exclusively a matter of harnessing physical nature. It is symptomatic, for instance, that MacKenzie's (1984) close reading of Marx's understanding of technology does not once mention the global context of British industrialisation beyond the class relations of the factory. This understanding of technology is founded on a rigid dualism dividing the world into two distinct and mutually insulated domains: the material and inexorable causality of the physical universe, on the one hand, versus the repercussions of constructed and negotiable social relations, on the other hand. This way of compartmentalising reality is a well-known feature of the history of European ideas. Although it has been subjected to extensive critique, nature/society dualism maintains its hegemonic grip on our way of perceiving technology. Both mainstream and Marxist concepts of technology are constrained by such dualism. It is what prevents us from recognising the global, sociometabolic dimension of the Industrial Revolution.
Propelled by indignant concerns with its injustices, generations of critics have written incisive and empirically rich histories of global capitalism. Ever since Marx and Engels celebrated the use of steam power in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, however, advanced technologies have ‘in themselves’ been absolved from critique. The standard Marxist narrative has focused on how new technologies are used by capitalist nations to subordinate – through competitive production processes, efficient means of transport and military superiority – populations in the periphery. The conditions for technological efficacy are understood to derive from capitalist competition, advanced engineering science and political stratagem, neither of which necessarily implies that technologies in themselves are contingent on global exploitation.
To think of technologies as constituted by material flows, rather than merely flows of money and innovative ideas, is arguably to shift from the perspective of neoclassical to that of ecological economics. It is to acknowledge the materiality of world trade and of the very process of development. From this perspective, modern technological infrastructures are accumulated – indeed, made feasible – through global metabolic flows. A genuinely materialist perspective on development must acknowledge that technological infrastructures can only be maintained through net inputs of physical resources. In a nutshell, we must conclude that the accumulation of technology is contingent on ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) (Dorninger et al., 2021).
Why is this perspective on technology difficult to reconcile with the standard Marxist narrative? Because it means that machine technology is not exclusively or even primarily a matter of the relation between capitalists and workers in industrial factories, but a manifestation of physically asymmetric relations of exchange between industrial and extractive sectors of the world economy. The augmented productivity of factory workers in late eighteenth-century Britain was largely accomplished through a net import of embodied labour and other resources from its global peripheries in North America, the Baltic region and elsewhere. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the expansion of productive infrastructure in Britain was continuously subsidised through the massive appropriation of labour and land in its colonies. To celebrate this development of the productive forces under capitalism is to ignore its demands on the human time and natural space of other sectors of the world system. Adherents of a labour theory of value must hesitate about praising technologies that raise the productivity of local labour but are themselves products of lower-paid labour invested elsewhere in extraction, transports and manufacture. From a truly materialist, EUE perspective, the advances in productivity celebrated by Marx largely occurred at the expense of such labour and other resources in the periphery. This insight should fundamentally transform Marxist approaches to capital accumulation and technological progress.
Machine fetishism as an extension of commodity fetishism
To extend the concept of commodity fetishism to machines is to realise that the illusory nature of the attribution of autonomous powers to machines has nothing to do with whether they ‘work’ or not: in this context, their capacity to locally perform their expected functions is not analytically distinguishable from the ability of more inert commodities to satisfy whatever material or semiotic ‘use-values’ consumers are coveting. The essential issue is that physical artifacts are conceptually detached from the social relations of exchange through which they are engendered. A Marxism that aspires to unravel mechanisms of exploitation at the global scale will need to acknowledge that the notion of a technology ‘in itself’ that does not implicate asymmetric transfers of embodied labour time and other resources but can be excised from its social context, is an illusion. Machine fetishism is no less of a mystification than the commodity fetishism of which it is an instantiation.
To trace the historical origins of machine fetishism, we must turn to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. As Berg (1980) has shown, the nineteenth-century discourse on political economy emerged as a way of dealing with the ‘machinery question’ raised by industrialisation: It was no mere coincidence that political economy established itself as an academic discipline and popular doctrine at the same time as the industrial revolution in cotton and iron (p. 35). If cheap foreign goods lowered the costs of labourers’ subsistence, thus reducing the wage share and bringing about a rise in profits, then so also did the extension of machinery (Berg, 1980: 49).
From the very start, the ‘machinery question’ was a domestic concern, detached from the global material entanglements of British industrialisation. Steam-propelled factory production in Britain was perceived as a sign of national progress that could be conceptually dissociated from African slavery, American plantations and the collapse of the traditional textile industry in India. To couch the sociometabolic processes of the British Empire in the abstract terminology of money was an effective way to disavow or at least neutralise such global connections, but so were the expanding sciences of physics and engineering: After 1848 the issue with machinery died away, as political economists and their public submitted to the all-powerful discipline of the physical forces apparent in steam and other forms of power (Berg, 1980: 130).
Mirowski (1989) has demonstrated that the new disciplines of physics and economics emerged in tandem, reciprocally emulating each other, as in their interpretations of ‘energy’ as nature's ‘work’ and labour value as the social equivalent of energy. Yet, they became mirror images of each other, one preoccupied with social relations of exchange while the other focused on the physical world. This was the dualistic worldview which Marx wanted to transcend, but his understanding of machines as fundamentally physical phenomena, representing neutral scientific revelations of nature without inherent socio-political implications, indicates that he was not completely successful. Berg (1980: 340–341) points out that Marx's optimistic conception of technology was created by and adopted from ‘his major antagonist, English political economy’.
The classical Marxist position is reiterated by Robert Brenner (Ashton and Philpin, 1985), who appears to be in fundamental agreement with mainstream historians such as Landes (1969) that industrialisation should be attributed to endogenous European processes rather than global trade. Diametrically opposite perspectives have been presented by a long line of historians and development theorists emphasising that industrial capitalism emerged in Europe because of Europe's privileged position in the world economy. Although they may seem to contradict Marx's emphasis on local class struggle, their perspectives all have a Marxian genealogy. In this tradition of thought, we should mention the insights of Braudel (1992), Wallerstein (2004), Frank (1998) and Pomeranz (2000). Nevertheless, even these convincing emphases on the world-systemic derivation of industrialisation tend to maintain an ontological distance to technology by treating it as consistently external to social theory. Whether understood as a privileged investment financed by imperialism, an innovative idea, or an efficient tool of conquest, modern technology is approached merely as a useful accessory that is conceptually excised from the structure of the world economy of which it is an expression. Most world historians focus on the cognitive component of technology, discussing the diffusion of ideas, expertise and skills (Blaut, 2000; Headrick, 1988; Adas, 1989; Marsden and Smith, 2005). Some theorists have explicitly aimed to transcend the society/nature divide by taking account of the social significance of specific material properties of technological systems (Burkett, [1999]2014; Foster, 2000; Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005; Mitchell, 2011; Huber, 2013; Malm, 2016). Given how economy and technology are conventionally conceived as distinct phenomena, however, such efforts have generally not led to acknowledgements of the materiality – and material asymmetries – of world trade. Even when the professed focus has been on global relations of material exploitation (Bunker, 1985; Moore, 2015; Ross, 2017), it has not modified the conventional image of the machine as an extra-social artifact. Approaches inspired by Marxism have thus generally failed to theorise technology as a sociometabolic strategy for redistributing labour time and other resources in world society. This is not to denigrate the Marxian tradition of unraveling the global asymmetries underlying the Industrial Revolution (e.g., Wolf, 1982), but to propose that its perspective be extended to a post-dualist theorisation of technology itself.
Conclusion: General implications for our trust in technological salvation
The shift of perspective I have advocated in this article should prompt us to reconsider the implications of current proposals to replace technological infrastructures fueled by fossil energy with ‘fossil-free’ alternatives. For both mainstream and Marxist ‘Prometheans’, the transition to a post-carbon society appears to be a rather straightforward matter of adopting new technologies, without necessarily entailing significant changes in the social distribution of resources. Again we recognise the pervasive conceptual excision of technology from social structures of exchange. It is becoming increasingly evident, however, that the new ‘green’ technologies are as dependent on global price relations as the ones they are supposed to replace. Critics have highlighted, for instance, that cars propelled by sugarcane ethanol are likely to rely on the low prices of Brazilian land and labour, while the batteries for electric cars may require cobalt mined by low-cost child labour in Congo. Similarly, technologies for harnessing photovoltaic energy are affordable in Europe because the solar panels are manufactured with Asian labour, inexpensive coal and negligible environmental concerns. The extraction of rare-earth minerals for digital electronics and renewable energy technologies reproduces conventional structures of EUE, polarising high-tech cores versus their exploited peripheries (Bonds and Downey, 2012). The list of case studies highlighting such polarities, generated by concerns with sustainability, is multiplying rapidly. Deliberations on political ecology and environmental justice will need to deal with this seemingly paradoxical turn of events, in which the champions of sustainability find themselves promoting solutions that appear to be neither sustainable nor fair. Underscoring the argument in this paper, what this paradox exposes is the conventional inability to theorise modern technology as a sociometabolic strategy of exploitation.
Although beyond the scope of this article, I must add that there are alternatives to the technological solutions offered by Promethean approaches to sustainability. Rather than fetishising technological salvation, the Anthropocene prompts us to critically examine – and finally redesign – the artifact of all-purpose money 7 that made the eighteenth-century world system, the Industrial Revolution and the harnessing of fossil energy possible. As we lift the veil from machine fetishism, we must simultaneously demystify the fetishism of money.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.