Abstract
Industrial technologies are deeply entangled with the most pressing issues of our time. The increasing digitalization of society and the massive incorporation of artificial intelligence systems into our everyday lives have contributed to the acceleration and automatization of existing trends toward increasing ecological depletion, energy consumption, and global inequality (Inclezan and Prádanos, 2023). However, blind confidence in technological fixes prevails in the public discourse. We consider that this widespread techno-optimism is a symptom of the depoliticization of technological issues during the last decades. Several ongoing developments indicate that the dominant social imaginary operates as if technology were an apolitical neutral tool to be amplified to confront any problem without any previous public discussion, political debate, or cultural reflexivity. Four recent developments serve as examples: (a) The more evident the effects of climate disruption become, the more politically appealing risky and uncontrollable geoengineering projects are; (b) the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has significantly accelerated the uncritical embrace of invasive digital technologies in all aspects of our daily activities (“the digital shock doctrine” (Almazán and Riechmann, 2020; Klein, 2020)); (c) the energy transitions articulated around Green New Deal proposals in several countries and regions (USA, European Union, etc.) tend to depend on multiplying investments in technologies that not only are ineffective and even counterproductive to reduce energy consumption overall, but their material metabolisms can certainly trigger new neocolonial and neo-extractivist conflicts and exacerbate existing ones (Almazán and Riechmann, 2023); (d) a few enterprises, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, sponsored by the super-rich are perpetuating neoliberal fantasies around colonizing space (Rushkoff, 2022).
In these examples, it is also evident that depoliticization of environmental and technological issues in the last few decades go hand-in-hand and must be considered in tandem. As such, the much-needed re-politicization of environmental problems as advocated by political ecology in general, and degrowth in particular, needs to be accompanied by the simultaneous re-politicization of technological issues. The assumption that technological fixes are the only possible response to social and ecological issues trumps the possibility for developing more emancipatory political ecologies of technology (Alexander and Rutherford, 2019).
In 2018, we (the co-editors of this special issue) met at an international environmental humanities conference in Spain. Although we came from different academic fields (philosophy of technology and environmental cultural studies, respectively), both of us arrived at a similar conclusion: the dominant growth-oriented economic culture and its techno-social system is ecologically unviable. We invited several scholars to explore a critical convergence of philosophy of technology and political ecology to dismantle the mythical roots of techno-optimism (characteristic of both accelerationism and ecomodernism) that encourage the suicidal continuation of productivism and extractivism while maintaining the illusion of the possibility for constant growth on a finite planet. This issue aims to go beyond previous ways in which environmental philosophy and the philosophy of technology have been diloguing in recent times (Thompson, 2016), but it also builds on some previous interventions related to critical studies of technology. Our work emphasizes the political dimension behind the socioecological crisis and the possibility for radical—politically effective—responses to it (González Reyes and Almazán, 2023), which requires a new way of thinking about technology, even a new ontology, beyond the hegemonic paradigm of technological neutrality and its growth-oriented economic culture.
We are convinced that Environmental Values is the most appropriate venue for this intervention given its demonstrated commitment to encourage honest and plural debates around the complex, often conflictual, ways of framing and understanding ecological issues (Greaves and Dandy, 2022). As the editors of Environmental Values recently stated, “We need assessments of the implications of various proposed technologies for climate-change mitigation […] But we also need more fundamental reflections on the legacy of technological change and its place within sustainable futures” (Greaves and Dandy, 2022: 119). This special issue takes up the latter task, aiming to develop an in-depth reflection on the nature of technological change to understand how hegemonic techno-social systems perpetuate unequal and exploitative power relations as well as exacerbate ecological overshoot.
In the journal's June 2023 editorial, Dandy rightly wonders whether the extension of digitization to different societal fields will “meaningfully reduce the burdens we place on the Earth's natural systems” or “will they simply facilitate and cloak ongoing - ever increasing and more sophisticated—exploitation and environmental degradation as they are harnessed by those with power under the banner of ‘green growth'” (Dandy, 2023). A review of some of the most recent critical literature on the social and ecological impacts of Artificial Intelligence confirms that the latter is in fact the case (Inclezan and Prádanos, 2023).
Our special issue also brings continuity to a long-standing tradition within Environmental Values that engages in the reconceptualization of the relationship between technology and nature. In this vein, Hoły-Łuczaj and Blok (Hoły-Łuczaj and Blok, 2019: 326) suggested that: Treating [technology] as a category of purely human activities which are oriented toward creating or adapting things to serve merely human purposes seems no longer possible in an era where technology does not any longer aim to destroy the environment, but on the contrary tries to serve nature and to work with nature, or at least in harmony with it […] These tendencies are in particular characteristic of the so-called third phase of the Anthropocene, in which human technology is called upon to ensure the carrying capacity of planet Earth as a life-support system for future human life on Earth.
Based on this observation, the authors, building from the idea of biomimicry—which was explored in a previous special issue (Dicks and Blok, 2019)—have proposed a framework in which there is no longer a distinction between technology and nature, both inextricably blurred in an ontology of the hybrid that they expand in recent publications (Hoły-Łuczaj and Blok, 2023). Our special issue proposes ontologies and diagnoses of current technological processes that differ profoundly from those articulated by these authors. We are more aligned with theories of degrowth, a topic that Environmental Values has also addressed (Whitehead, 2013). According to Research & Degrowth, “degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity”. However, we emphasize the importance of understanding the political implications of its technological dimensions, reaching different but complementary conclusions than previous attempts (Kerschner et al., 2018).
This special issue, in short, is an invitation to reinterpret techno-industrial developments as the result of specific power relations, energy regimes, economic cultures, and social imaginaries with a massive impact on the web of life (Hornborg, 2001). As such, existing technologies cannot be considered neutral—ahistorical and apolitical—tools that can be separated from their sociopolitical contingencies and repurposed to serve liberating and emancipatory causes (e.g. digital technology of large scale is only thinkable and feasible—although with a metabolism that cannot be sustained for much longer—in the context of industrial, extractivist, technocratic, energy-devouring growth-oriented societies). For technologies to be compatible with ecological limits and social wellbeing, they have to be envisioned, (re)designed, and implemented by communities operating under the guise of completely different political institutions and postgrowth cultural imaginaries (Prádanos, 2018).
The articles of this special issue could be divided into two groups. In the first one, an economic, political, and ontological reconceptualization of the notion of technology is proposed. The second block offers a critique of techno-optimist imaginaries, showing their conceptual roots and pointing out the dangers of maintaining them under the current socioecological context. These essays invite us to envision alternative technosocial imaginaries that could help us navigate more smoothly the most pressing social and ecological issues of our time.
The first group features two articles. In the first one, Almazán analyzes and describes the inherited conception of technics. This conception, based on the assumption of technological neutrality and autonomy from the historical and societal context, dominates the public discourse. Almazán argues that this inherited conception of technics is largely responsible for the pathologies of the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015) as well as for blocking degrowth alternatives. The second part of the essay proposes a new framework, both political and ontological, that differs from that suggested by Hoły-Łuczaj and Blok. The socio-historical ontology of technics is based on two key ideas. The first is that the most important element for understanding any technique is the society in which it emerges. The second is that the Capitalocene's techniques, which he proposes to call technologies, are radically different from the previous ones, especially in terms of their metabolism. Thus, rather than hybrids, technologies are technics intimately dependent on the metabolic and economic structures of industrial capitalist societies, and therefore hardly separable from them. Finally, Almazán explores ways to go beyond this technology and build new techniques compatible with degrowth.
In the second article in this block, Hornborg starts from the need not only to transcend techno-optimism, but also other more critical views of society, such as Marxism, which are similarly trapped inside inherited conceptions of technics. Hornborg proposes the necessity of transcending the divide between the material and the social when thinking about technology. This should again encourage us to abandon the idea of technological neutrality and to understand that the materiality of our artifacts is itself socially constituted, as the very stuff of technologies is a product 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 consequence of this description is that a transfer of an artifact from one social group to another implies a parallel transfer of the labor time as well as other resources that are embodied in that artifact. Accumulation of technology is contingent on ecologically and economically unequal exchange. The second part of the article is devoted to a critical analysis of the Marxian conception of technology. The author suggests that Marx's proposal is ingrained in the inherited conception of technology. For this reason, Hornborg points out that Marx was unable to understand that machine fetishism exists as much as commodity fetishism. The conclusion is that modern technology should never be conceived as a useful accessory of capitalist societies but as an expression of the structure of the world economy.
The second group features three contributions devoted to the critique of techno-optimist imaginaries. In the first one, Alonso and Arzoz explore the historical roots of techno-optimism, which in their view could be found in religion. Aligning with previous works on this topic (Alonso and Arzoz, 2002; Noble, 1997), they identify a long connection between technological thinking and Christianity, particularly Hermeticism. The first part of their article argues that it is appropriate to talk of a true Religion of Technology, that has Progress as its core element. An imaginary of Progress, which has been crucial in the construction of the hegemonic versions of Modernity, has undergone a deep mutation in the new Digital Era. Progress has become Digitalism. Faced with the current social and ecological crisis, Digitalism is a form of millennialist faith and, for many people, has become the only hope to save humanity from catastrophe and extinction and, at the same time, recreate a new city of God. In the second part of their article, Alonso and Arzoz define the specific Techno-Hermetic myths at the core of Digitalism: transhumanist immortality; artificial intelligence as angel or avatar; robots as Golems; nanotechnology as capable of building paradise on Earth; and computation as a way to resurrect immortal bodies in cyberspace. They also identify the main authors and journals endorsing Digitalism today. Finally, Alonso and Arzoz propose to think about this new Digitalism as contemporary to the Capitalocene. They suggest the need to overcome not only Digitalism, but also other new proposals such as Extinctionism that, again, build on religion, particularly the notion of apocalypse. The authors advocate for luddism (Alonso and Arzoz, 2021), a much more respectful approach to human and nonhuman communities. This luddism may be capable of promoting convivial tools, as Illich (1980) would put it, to avoid ecological collapse.
The second article of this block, by Stephens, reviews the dangers of technological optimism in climate policy by exploring its links to patriarchal systems. In the first part of the article, the author stresses that mainstream responses to climate change are trapped in a problematic reductionism. Even though we urgently need societal transformations based on cooperative and collective efforts, investments in technology (not in communities) remain the priority in most climate policy. According to Stephens, this form of techno-optimism is the result of a dominant approach to conceptualizing the climate crisis as an isolated, discrete, scientific problem in need of individualistic and technological solutions. To refer to this dominant prejudice, the author proposes the term Climate isolationism, the roots of which lie in a patriarchal technological optimism. In the second part of the article, Stephens explores the intersection of gender, climate change and energy. This exploration suggests that understanding the link between greater gender diversity and transformative social change approaches to climate action is critical. Finally, Stephens addresses the issue of Climate isolationism and shows that when climate crisis is framed as a scientific problem with a possible technological fix, the most pressing systemic societal and economic problems (including the concentration of wealth and power among those profiting from maintaining fossil fuel reliance), are all-too-often ignored. Stephens closes her contribution stressing that if the prevalence of climate isolationism can be attributed to a male-dominated climate and energy leadership, we must promote a more diverse antiracist and antisexist leadership in order to articulate inclusive and effective responses to the climate crisis.
The last contribution, by Paulson, uses a political ecology lens to illuminate some ways in which the generation and application of technology have been historically entangled with colonial, racial and gender systems. As such, the author strongly advocates for re-politicizing the technological debate and challenging the neutrality paradigm. In line with Stephens’ proposal, Paulson shows that refusal to recognize the entanglement of practical worldmaking technologies with the societal values that give them meaning and purpose sustains the popular fantasy that societies can successfully navigate environmental crises by mobilizing technology, without addressing underlying social systems and power relations. In contrast, what is most urgently needed is to “upgrade” the sociocultural systems in which technologies are embedded. Paulson compares the different sociocultural transformations proposed by Ecomodernism and Degrowth, which are derived from their contrasting ways of understanding technology. The essay defines three relevant terms (technology, environment and sociocultural systems) to show that all three have been historically linked with the project of control developed by industrial capitalism. This obvious non-neutrality of technology, derived from its entanglement with power and unequal exchange, is not recognized by Ecomodernism, a clearly depoliticized and techno-optimist perspective. In contrast, Degrowth studies tend to understand technology in its material and social context. Degrowth thinkers have invigorated studies of technology and environment by bringing together ideas from thermodynamics, ecological economics, anti-colonialism, and social-environmental justice. Paulson concludes that Ecomodernist approaches sustain privileged interests by promoting technological innovation designed to obscure the need for sociocultural and political-economic change. Degrowth advocates, on the contrary, argue that, to successfully address the current ecosocial crisis, technological innovation must work in tandem with radical social and political-economic transformations.
We hope that this special issue stimulates the development of a robust political ecology of technology able to displace and overcome the politically toothless and historically shallow non-neutrality approach that still dominates most public discourses.