Philosophy, Critique, and Implications for Human Organization
Edited by Pasi Heikkurinen and Toni Ruuska
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Sustainability beyond Technology offers a new philosophical perspective within the quickly growing field of philosophy of sustainable development. While philosophers of technology traditionally do not take environmental issues into account, such an uncritical stance is no longer possible in the age of global warming. The authors of this volume open a new and critical perspective on the great acceleration accompanying technological progress and fill a major gap in our understanding of sustainable technology and innovation. The book is a must read for philosophers of technology who are interested in the opportunities and limitations of ‘Earthing Technology’ in the Anthropocene.
Vincent Blok, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Technology and Responsible Innovation, Wageningen University
Humanity is facing a range of sustainability challenges, from climate change to biodiversity loss, health pandemics to food insecurity. New technology is often portrayed as the silver bullet solution to these challenges: geoengineering, gene editing, vaccines, lab-grown food, etc.; the list of technological innovations that promise to save the planet and humanity is long. Sustainability Beyond Technology critically engages with these debates, putting today’s technological hopes into their philosophical and historical contexts. The contributors offer essays that approach the relationship between technology and sustainability from a variety of scholarly traditions, giving the reader a unique and one-stop insight into contemporary debates on this topic. Crucially, the authors are able to unpack the blinding optimism that is often connected with technology without being luddites. It puts forward a critical evaluation of technological progress, offering its readers alternative pathways to the sustainability transition.
Steffen Böhm, Professor in Organisation and Sustainability, University of Exeter
When Prometheus gifted humanity fire stolen from the forge of a god, he was making up for an oversight: humans had been created without a defining quality. The fire, and the tools it wrought, was being offered by way of compensation. Instead of having an innate, interior quality, humans might begin to define themselves by controlling what was exterior: nature. It is to understand this grounding relational condition between humanity, technology, and nature that this timely collection of essays is dedicated. In varied
ways, the authors attune the reader to how technology organizes and mediates human action and thought, often in ways that continue to belittle and degrade the wider environments upon which they have been dependent for continued life. Whether framed as parasitical, ignorant, or arrogant, the essays tease out the paradoxical and problematic nature of this long-sedimented, one-way relationship, and they do so in provocative ways. As a species without qualities, humanity has been augmented through technology, to a point of indistinction. As the effects of this technological mediation have spread, the question these essays then ask is whether there is anything like an ‘exterior’ left to colonize. At the moment of its domination, does the technologicalindustrial complex by which all human activity and thought is now governed find itself at a point of collapse, given there is now very little ‘out there’ to which it might relate?
Robin Holt, Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School
This timely volume brings together the latest work by an international group of experts on the role of technology in sustainability. It critically examines the connections between technology and sustainability from the viewpoint of different scholarly traditions to offer a synthesis on to what extent technology can alleviate adverse environmental and social impacts in the Anthropocene. It challenges the conventional understanding of technology as a mere set of tools, instruments and systems, and that it is ‘the solution’ to prevailing problems, suggesting that technology must also be examined as undesired and biased. It will be a definitive source on technology and sustainability in the new decade.
Jouni Paavola, Professor of Environmental Social Science, University of Leeds
To those in limbo
Acknowledgements
This book is a product of transdisciplinary collaboration which extends far beyond the contribution of the editors and authors of the volume. We are grateful to everyone involved in the process, not least to the organizers of and participants in the many workshops, seminars, and conferences around the thematic nexus of technology and sustainability. The chapters of the book have been presented and developed in the following scholarly events, among others: Ecology and Technology Seminar Series in Leeds, UK (30 November 2017), Annual Symposium of Science and Technology Studies in Tampere, Finland (14 June 2018), International Degrowth Conference in Malmö, Sweden (22 August 2018), Sustainable Change Research Network’s Annual Meeting in Helsinki, Finland (17 January 2019), and Culture and Crisis Seminar Series in Helsinki, Finland (4 November 2019 and 3 February 2020). We acknowledge the utmost importance of the lively discussions on these occasions—many thanks for the interaction.
We were extremely lucky to receive contributions from colleagues whose knowledge and expertise we truly value and respect. It goes without saying that without your excellent effort—Alf, Andreas, David, Jani, Karl Johan, Niklas, Iana, Renee, Tere, Thomas, Veli-Matti—this book would have never seen the light. Our deepest gratitude goes to you. We also wish to thank the publisher and reviewers of the proposal for supporting our project. Particularly, we are indebted to Adam Swallow for an open and unprejudiced stance towards our book proposal. A big thankyou goes to Jenny King and Thomas Deva for their careful editing of the book. For the cover image, we acknowledge Risto Musta. We also wish to thank the funders1 of our research, as well as our new academic home, the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Helsinki.
We wish to thank Eeva-Stiina and Paula Lönnemo, as well as Maria Dorff and Lasse Nordlund, for sharing your passion and vision concerning sustainability (beyond technology). For scholarly support and friendship, we want to express our special gratitude to Steffen Böhm, Tuula Helne, Tuuli
1 Regarding the work of Pasi Heikkurinen, this project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 707652. Regarding the work of Toni Ruuska, this project has received funding from the Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation.
x Acknowledgements
Hirvilammi, Eeva Houtbeckers, Tommi Kauppinen, Jessica-Jungell Michelsson, Tina Nyfors, Timo Järvensivu, Jarkko Pyysiäinen, Outi Rantala, Marko Ulvila, Anu Valtonen, Maxim Vlasov, and Kristoffer Wilén. Lastly, we would like to thank our families—we love you.
Pasi Heikkurinen and Toni Ruuska Hujansalo, Heinola and Nuuksio, Espoo
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
1.1 Perspectives on the relationship between technology and sustainability
9.1 Development stages influencing the role of the economy and technology
3.1 The continuum of technology representing an exchange of embodied matter-energy from the left end to the right end
9.1 The need of measures at the root of unsustainability
List of Contributors
Editors
Pasi Heikkurinen is Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Helsinki, Visiting Lecturer in Business and Sustainable Change at the University of Leeds, Adjunct Professor in Sustainability and Organizations at Aalto University School of Business, and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Sustainable Change Research Network. He is the coeditor of Strongly Sustainable Societies: Organising Human Activities on a Hot and Full Earth (Routledge, 2019) (together with Professor Karl Johan Bonnedahl) and editor of Sustainability and Peaceful Coexistence for the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2017).
Toni Ruuska is Postdoctoral Researcher and University Teacher at the University of Helsinki. He is the co-editor of MayFly Books and author of Reproduction Revisited: Capitalism, Higher Education and Ecological Crisis (MayFly, 2018). In his postdoctoral research, he is studying the skills of technology in self-sufficient food production. His research has been published in leading journals in the field of sustainability, including Ecological Economics; Philosophy of Management; Ephemera: Journal of Cleaner Production; and Sustainability.
Contributors
Karl Johan Bonnedahl, is a researcher and lecturer focusing on the sustainability-related need for change, both in various parts of the economic system and in its underlying values and assumptions. He applies a system perspective and is interested in ethics and in conflicts between conventional economic approaches and issues of global justice and ecological sustainability. Apart from research, he also committed to sustainability-oriented activity outside academia.
Alf Hornborg, is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University. His research has addressed a diversity of approaches to human-environmental relations in past and present societies, including environmental anthropology, environmental history, political ecology, and ecological economics. A central contribution is the concept of ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ as fundamental to the existence of modern technology, as theorized in The Power of the Machine (2001), Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange (2011), Global Magic (2016), and Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene (2019).
Renee Kordie, is a postgraduate researcher from the University of Michigan, Dearborn, where she earned a BSME with an emphasis on philosophy, especially philosophies of technology and the environment. Her research interests include technology, sustainability, and the effects of transportation systems in modern society.
Iana Nesterova, PhD, is an independent researcher based in the UK. She holds undergraduate degrees in commerce and marketing and an MSc in international business and finance. Her PhD focused on small business transition towards degrowth. Her research interests include the philosophy underpinning sustainable change and what sustainable change means and entails. She currently teaches health economics from a heterodox economics perspective.
Jani Pulkki, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in educational philosophy. He defended his virtue-ethical dissertation on the educational problems of competition in 2017. Since then he has been working on his project on the ecosocial philosophy of education in ecolologizing the human-centered ideas in educational philosophy. His research consists of contemplative pedagogy, ethics, social matters, and environmental philosophy. He works at Tampere University, Faculty of Education and Culture, and in the research group POISED.
Andreas Roos, is a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary field of Human Ecology at Lund University. His PhD project focuses on the relation between technology and ecology, with an emphasis on understanding the pending shift to renewable energy. His previous work include research on technologies such as biofuels and information and communication technologies. Apart from this, he is also engaged in science communication and activism outside academia.
David Skrbina, PhD, is a former senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. He has also taught at Michigan State University, the University of Ghent (Belgium), and has an appointment to teach a topics course in Technology and Sustainability at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind, environmental ethics, and social/political philosophy. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Metaphysics of Technology (Routledge, 2015) and Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2nd ed., 2017).
Niklas Toivakainen, PhD, is a philosopher based in Helsinki. His research interests span from and interconnects issues such as philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, the history of philosophy, theology, and technology. He is the co-editor of Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind (Palgrave, 2019).
Tere Vadén, is a philosopher working in the multidisciplinary research unit BIOS.fi that focuses on the anticipation of deep socioecological transformations. He has published articles on the philosophy of mind and language, and co-authored the books Wikiworld (2010), Heidegger, Zizek and Revolution (2014), and Artistic Research Methods (2014). Recently he has been working on the question of energy, especially fossil fuels and their impact on the experience of modernity, publishing with Antti Salminen the book Energy and Experience. An Essay in Nafthology (2015). He is also a long-time editor of the Finnish philosophical journal niin & näin.
Thomas Wallgren, is professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki and the director of the von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives. He is the author of Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy (Lexington, MD, 2006), and co-editor of Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind (Palgrave, 2019).
He is interested in the theory and practice of radical enlightenment and co-editor of the recent special issue of Globalizations on the Future of the World Social Forum in the Age of Authoritarian Capitalism.
Veli-Matti Värri, PhD, is a professor of education whose expertise consists of central issues of educational philosophy and theory, teacher education, ethics of education, and philosophy of dialogue. His monograph, Hyvä kasvatus—kasvatus hyvään, 1997 (Good Education—Education for Good), reached its fifth edition in 2004. In his latest monograph, Kasvatus ekokriisin aikakaudella (2019) (Education in the Age of Ecological Crisis), he reconceptualized the ontological, sociocultural, and ethical reference points for constituting ecological education in the sphere of global capitalism.
1 Technology and Sustainability
An Introduction
Toni Ruuska and Pasi Heikkurinen
The twenty-first century seems to be an age of extremely severe and complex crises. Most worryingly, humanity has reached a point where the diverse life on earth is at stake (Barnosky et al. 2012; Steffen et al. 2015; Waters et al. 2016; IPCC 2018). The human organization, i.e. human beings and their activities, currently faces and causes a multitude of economic, social, and environmental problems. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and melting ice caps are examples of the many negative environmental impacts of the human organization. Parallel to these problems, economic and social inequality has increased steeply during recent decades (Piketty 2014; Chancel and Piketty 2015; Alvaredo et al. 2018; Oxfam 2018). These problems and crises are intensified, but also caused by the global growth-based capitalist organization of the economy, which has produced an unforeseen amount of material wealth, but at the same time global ecological havoc and unprecedented inequality in the distribution of benefits among humans (Hornborg 2001; Foster et al. 2010; Moore 2015).
The capitalist organization is destined to suffer from economic downturns due to its many systemic contradictions (Harvey 2014). At the moment the world economy is in the middle of one of the steepest economic recessions ever faced, which was ultimately produced by the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic. Regardless of the heavy economic stimulus of governments and central banks, the future of the global capitalist economy remains uncertain. The same holds true for industrial civilization more generally, as the environmental destruction is made worse by the rising standard of living, the growth of the human population, and the increasing quantity of resource-intensive technology (Chertow 2001; Kallis 2018; Parrique 2019; UN 2019).
A common denominator for all of these problems and crises is that they are human-induced and human-caused, although it is clear that some human cultures, societies, and communities are more responsible than others for causing them (Malm and Hornborg 2014; Chancel and Piketty 2015; Heikkurinen et al. 2019). Notwithstanding the historical disproportion in culpability and responsibility, one of most widely shared ideas among the humans, in the twenty-first century is an agreement to change the course of development from environmental destruction and socio-economic inequality to one of ‘sustainability’ (UN 2015). Sustainability is a contested concept with various meanings and interpretations, at least since the 1980s (see, e.g., Banerjee 2008; Bonnedahl and Heikkurinen 2019). In this book, we follow, build on, and advance the commonly accepted definition of sustainability as a state of earthbound affairs on the basis of which the conditions of diverse life are sustained.
One of the most heated sustainability topics, for some decades now, in various political and academic debates concerns technology. Especially in mainstream discussions, if not also in academia, technology is considered to be a key—if not the—issue which is expected to lead humanity to sustainability. For instance, when policymakers and business practitioners are asked about the most effective and realistic strategies for solving the prevailing unsustainability problems, such as climate change or biodiversity loss, emphasis is often placed on technological solutions. This type reasoning is due, we would argue, to today’s magic-like perception of technology (e.g. Hornborg 2016). More elaborately, technology (in its modern conception) appears to promise solutions to all wicked environmental, social, and economic problems. The climax in this imaginary is a notion that technology will do all this in such a way that nothing or, alternatively, very little has to change in production and consumption patterns, or in geopolitics and global power relations.
Historically and empirically this kind silver bullet conception of technology is, of course, misleading. Technology has often been used to dominate and oppress fellow humans and non-humans alike (see, e.g., Mumford 1970; Heidegger 1977; Hornborg 2001, 2011; Suarez-Villa 2013). Moreover, when technology is perceived from the point of view of progress and development, the problems of industrialism are not located in industrialism as such, but mainly in the quality of technology, which suggests that existing technologies should always be replaced with cleaner and more sophisticated ones. Technology is thus like a promised miracle drug, but, from the point of view of this book, this promise only holds because it has a very strong placebo effect, which is mainly serving the wealthiest part of humanity and those in power.
A way to question these hegemonic conceptions of technology would be to claim that technology is also a social construction and a social relation (Hornborg 2001). This way we gain access to thinking about technology as a social mirage, to guide the analysis of the technological era or a mode of Being (Ellul 1964; Heidegger 1977). That is, technology is and does what people say it does and is. If technology is considered to be also a social construct, this understanding helps us to fathom the many faces of technology and technological phenomena, which are among the main topics of this book.
The main aim of this volume is to critically review and analyse the connection between technology and sustainability from different scholarly traditions. By doing so, the book offers a transdisciplinary take on technology that sheds light on the question to what extent (if any) technology can alleviate the negative environmental and social impacts of the prevalent human organization. As one of its key insights, the conventional understanding of technology as a mere set of tools, instruments, machines, and systems is challenged. As a result, technology will not be considered as ‘the solution’ to the prevailing sustainability crises. This task is of great importance, as the implications for sustainability practice and theory are largely contingent on how technology is defined and understood.
This chapter introduces four different ways to perceive technology and technological development in relation to sustainability. These are (1) optimism, (2) pessimism, (3) neutralism, and (4) holism. While somewhat simplified, these perspectives on technology can be found, as empirically shown by Kerschner and Ehlers (2016). Nevertheless, caution is considered worthwhile with typologies such as ours, which are first and foremost intended to guide the reader in the jungle of viewpoints on technology and sustainability. It is only fair to confess beforehand that most of the chapters in this book subscribe to technological pessimism or holism. That is, they share a rather critical stance towards technology and its penetrative power within the human organization. Since technological optimism and neutralism can be found in almost any other book on technology, it is time to hear other voices and viewpoints on the issue too. With this said, we also want to confess that many important viewpoints on technology and sustainability are missing from this volume.1
In addition to and alongside introducing the four perspectives on technology and sustainability, four contemporary fallacies surrounding technology
1 In particular, we regret not having a chapter on feminism and postcolonial studies, and hope to gain contact with the missing voices so that the following volumes will not have this shortcoming.
Ruuska and Pasi Heikkurinen
are presented. These fallacies are (1) technological development reduces environmental impacts (the decoupling fallacy); (2) technological development benefits everyone (the equity fallacy); (3) technological systems and technological development are autonomous (the autonomy fallacy); and (4) the phenomenon of technology and technological development can be rationalized entirely (the intellect fallacy). After a summary of the perspectives, the final section of this chapter presents the outline of the book and its subsequent chapters for the reader.
Technological Optimism and the Decoupling Fallacy
For technological optimists, technology is the solution. Environmental degradation, social inequality, overconsumption, and overproduction are all sustainability problems to be solved by means of technology (Grunwald 2018; Kerschner and Ehlers 2016). For the optimists, technology is not necessarily considered neutral (see the section ‘Tehnological Neutralism and the Equity Fallacy’), but rather it has a positive value or development connected to it. From such a progressive or linear point of view, technology is assumed to get (or is likely to get) better, cleaner, and healthier (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015; Kerschner and Ehlers 2016; Strand et al. 2018). The voice of technological optimists usually belongs to technology developers, tech corporations, and lobbyists who try to convince investors and public officials to fund them and guide development towards increasing technologization, such as digitalization and faster wireless networks.
Even if the empirical or historical evidence is not really on the side of the optimists, for instance considering the amounting pollution, waste, and war surrounding the phenomenon of technology, they nevertheless maintain that technology is going to result in sustainability, and criticize governments, and public officials for standing in the way of technological progress (Pollex and Lenschow 2018). This also means that technological development is often used to legitimize the ongoing destruction of non-human species’ habitats, as the techno-fix seems to require ever more built environments and wealth (Muraca and Neuber 2018). Tensions and problems of existing technologies and technological development are usually discarded or belittled by the optimists. This is because the main problem is not considered to be technology or the unexpected consequences resulting from its development, but rather that there is not enough technological development or sufficient funds or resources available for technology to develop properly. From the point of view of the optimists, there is a constant pressure to accelerate
technological development in order to reach a point where technology finally becomes (or starts to become) better, cleaner, and healthier. Therefore, and quite paradoxically, sustainability is to be reached by increasing the amount of resource-intensive technologies, such as nuclear power plants, electric cars, and wind turbines.
One could argue that it is technological optimism that dominates contemporary conceptions of technology (Kerschner et al. 2018), as many current debates on sustainability largely build on the assumption that increasing technology use and development are desired and create positive changes in human societies and their surroundings. This kind of techno-optimism prevails particularly in the discourses of ecological modernization and green growth (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015; Pollex and Lenschow 2018, Strand et al. 2018), as well as in the attempts to design sustainable modes of production and consumption within growth-driven capitalism (see Hawken et al. 2000), but is also a characteristic of sustainability sciences in its ‘weak’ variant (see Bonnedahl and Heikkurinen 2019).
The dominance of the optimists’ point of view on technology is understandable, because technology represents at the same time the foundation and the final straw for modern times. Modern industrial civilization has been built with technology development, fossil fuels, economics of wealth, and war and conquest (Hornborg 2001; Moore 2015; Malm 2016). The atom bomb, nuclear power, aircraft carriers, oil rigs, coal mines, and electric cars are part of the same modern development which has made certain humans, societies, and organizations very affluent, but at the expense of the rest of the human population and diverse life.
Technological optimists argue that the negative consequences regarding the development of technology can be alleviated in such a fashion that it would ultimately benefit everyone, including non-human beings (AsafuAdjaye et al. 2015; Grunwald 2018). Technology would, thus, rescue humankind from the looming collapse of industrial civilization or even from the edge of extinction due to the ecological crisis. And while assisting in this miraculous recovery, technology and its development, conducted in a proper way, are expected to also make sure that no big economic or social changes in the capitalist business as usual or in the consumerist lifestyles of affluent Westerners, have to be impugned. If this sounds familiar, it is here that we get to the first of the four fallacies of technology, which is ‘the decoupling fallacy’.
According to the claim put forward by many technological optimists, the ecological impacts resulting from manufacturing, developing, and replacing technologies will decrease as technology develops (Pollex and Lenschow
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2018; Hickel and Kallis 2019; Parrique at al. 2019). This fallacy is closely linked to the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, which states that after reaching a certain point of development and affluence in the human organization, environmental impacts begin to recede (e.g. Malm 2016). Most clearly, this fallacy manifests in the decoupling argument (see, e.g., Ward et al. 2016; Hickel and Kallis 2019). Both of these ideas have little or no theoretical or empirical support.
Already a half a century ago, Georgescu-Roegen (1971) and The Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 1972; see also Meadows et al. 2002) debunked the hypothesis of continuous economic growth. The former showed theoretically (with thermodynamics) that infinite growth on a finite planet is an impossibility, while the latter did the same with empirically grounded modelling. Nevertheless, variants of the same problematic logic are put forward in one way or another claiming that there are no limits to the environmental carrying capacity, and thus the human organization can expand forever (and to outer space if needed). One particular line of argument is that, due to the development of technology, resource use will get more efficient and economic processes more and more immaterial, which ultimately leads to detaching the matter-energetic world from the world of ideas and money. While this kind of radical optimism in human ingenuity can be found in science fiction, in the scholarly debate it is called absolute decoupling (e.g. Jackson 2009).
The fallacy of decoupling economic growth from resource use and negative ecological impacts in absolute terms is critically discussed by ecological economists (e.g. Georgescu-Roegen 1971, 1975; Daly 1991, 1996; Daly and Farley 2010; Spash 2018). It goes without saying that technologies are not created out of thin air, but are material objects with a material footprint, conditioned by the physical realities of the planet, such as the second law of thermodynamics (see Chapter 3 of this book). The entropic nature of human organization indicates that nothing is created or destroyed in the economy, but everything is transformed, and the entropy law in particular signifies that energy tends to always degrade to poorer qualities (Kallis 2018; Gerber 2020).
At its simplest, this means that every production process produces waste and residues on top of the energy that is lost in the process as heat to the atmosphere. Recycling and more efficient production processes can certainly reduce pollution and the amount of resources used, but one hundred per cent recycling is practically impossible, as some energy and matter will always be lost along the way (Kallis 2018). Besides, the manufacturing and the development of technology, especially in its current form, requires a vast
infrastructure of mines, refineries, factories, and distribution networks around the world, all adding to the environmental footprint of modern complex and resource-intensive technologies and technological systems (Arboleda 2020). Moreover, sustainability (only) by means of technology is practically impossible, since technology always entails the increasing utilization of resources and the transformation of objects (Heikkurinen 2018). This means that technology and its development do not (and cannot) let things be, but constantly transform them, and therefore add to the cumulating throughput over time (ibid.).
Another repercussion of technological development, from which the optimists tend to shy away, is the so-called rebound effect or Jevons paradox, which is linked especially to the particularities of the capitalist growth economy (see, e.g., Foster et al. 2010; Wiedmann et al. 2015; Ward et al. 2016). In short, the rebound effect as a concept describes a situation where, for instance, monetary or resource use savings of a particular production process are used elsewhere to generate profits and growth, which means that the ecological footprint does not reduce, but rather tends to increase. A mundane example of the rebound effect is linked to the development, manufacturing, and use of private cars. Over the years, car engines have become more efficient, which means that one is able drive farther with one litre or gallon of petrol, or with 1 kW. However, this has not meant that the total environmental footprint of cars has decreased. In fact, the contrary is true. On the one hand, more cars have been manufactured, containing ever more complicated technological appliances. These new high-tech cars are manufactured from rare-earth minerals entailing vast networks of mines and a global distribution infrastructure (Arboleda 2020). On the other hand, and from the perspective of private car users, people tend to drive more, and to change their vehicle more often to newer car models that consume less and emit less CO2 per kilometre or mile. As a result then, humans have more cars that are more efficient but technologically more complex, which indicates that their manufacturing is more resource-intensive and consuming than before. In contrast to this situation, the environmental footprint of the car industry and private car use would reduce only when there are fewer cars that are less resourceintensive and move around less than before.
From the point of view of sustainability, more technological artefacts, appliances, and systems, especially of the complex and resource-intensive kind, mean more matter-energy throughput and inevitably undesired environmental impacts (Ward et al. 2016; Hickel and Kallis 2019). Moreover, when this basic problem between technology and sustainability is contrasted with the capitalist growth economy, where economic actors maximize profits
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and growth in their operations, it means that economic actors are constantly redistributing the efficiency savings elsewhere to produce ever more profits and growth (cf. the treadmill of production and accumulation, Schnaiberg 1980; Foster et al. 2010).
As for the technological optimists, the key point here regarding sustainability is not to say that technology cannot get better, cleaner, or healthier. Rather it has to be insisted that technology always has a material footprint— a notion, which should condition and define every sustainability-related question surrounding technology. More importantly, it is fundamentally problematic to argue that there can be growth in the production of complex and resource-intensive technologies while negative environmental impacts decrease.
Technological Neutralism and the Equity Fallacy
While it seems that many people today feel optimistic about technology and its development, some are more cautious. One way to discard the unpleasant threats and problems of technology is to assume that technology is something neutral, a means to an end. We call this perspective ‘neutralism’. It refers to a middle-of-the-road take on technology (see Chapter 2 for a more conceptual discussion), where technology is neither good nor bad. Its quality and normative valuation is instead assumed to depend on how technology is used and to what purpose.
A common example of neutralism is to claim that guns do not kill people, but people kill people with guns. It is correct that technology does not do anything by itself, but this does not make it necessarily neutral (see, e.g., Severino 2016, 17–18). For instance, one could ask ‘Are atom bombs good or bad?’, and one could respond, by following the path of neutralism, that it really depends on the situation. This informs us that there are qualitative differences in technologies, but also that technology is context-dependent. It may be that certain technologies are such that their normative valuation may depend on the situation, but other technologies, like guns and toxic chemicals, do not easily fall into this category.
Moreover, by claiming that technology is neutral and its normative valuation really depends on how it used, the user becomes the bearer of responsibility. That is, by doing so, the developers (including funding bodies) of technology outsource their responsibility for the destructive potential the technology at issue is capable of. With this rationale, the tech companies can continue introducing potentially harmful technologies if the use of technology is the only thing that people are concerned about, not the things that are
being invented. One could argue that oil companies have used this communicative strategy for some time now. In a time of abrupt climate change, oil companies claim that they are indeed very concerned about climate change, but cannot control the use of their products or restrict their buyers from buying them, or what their customers will do with their products. Thus, oil is considered neutral, and the oil company just responds to a market demand, and the private car user ends up carrying the responsibility (one could make the same argument easily from a car manufacturer’s end), which they are obviously quite poor at.
Therefore, neutralism seems to be an aversion strategy, and the main benefit of this strategy is the possibility of ignoring or averting all the importunate and difficult issues concerning the undesirable and unexpected consequences of technology development and its manufacturing and use. Even in the field of science and technology studies, technology is often treated descriptively, as something neutral and inherent to human organization, and hence beyond any profound critique (see, e.g., Latour 1993). Many philosophers of technology and environmental sociologists have notably, however, impugned the idea that technology is neutral, or that it benefits everyone, or that the consequences which follow from its development would be in total human control (Ellul 1964; Mumford 1970; Heidegger 1977; Hornborg 2001).
The second fallacy of technology connects to questions of social justice and equality in distributing the benefits of the supposedly neutral technology and its development. If technology is assumed to be neutral, it is understandable that technological solutions are thought (if used properly) to alleviate socioeconomic inequalities too. However, often the result is the opposite as Alf Hornborg (1998, 2001, 2011; see also Chapter 8 of this book) convincingly argues. The equity fallacy surrounding technology is indeed the claim that by developing technologies one can alleviate the problems concerning poverty and socio-economic inequality. Or, in other words, that technology benefits everyone. The counterargument to this, which has much more persuasive empirical and theoretical evidence behind it, is to claim that the uneven distribution of wealth and power is the foundational condition of modern industrial fossil-fuelled technology (Hornborg 2001, 2011). This signifies that technology development most often ends up exacerbating socio-economic inequalities, especially because of the intense competition for market shares and the ethos competition more generally (see also Chapter 5 of this book). At its simplest, (new) technology is where affluence and geopolitical power are, which its further development most often favours.
The global capitalist economy and the underlying division of labour rely on the polarization of affluence—profits are made because the price of labour and natural resources is kept cheap (Patel and Moore 2017). The distribution
of technologies depends on fossil fuels and coincides with individual, organizational, and societal purchasing power, which means that the wealthy and powerful have better access to technology and more resources for its development. Furthermore, technological development is conditioned by capital flows and the displacement of natural resources and labour from peripheral regions to the core regions of the global capitalist organization (Malm and Hornborg 2014; see also Chapter 6 of this book). This process has been conceptualized as ‘unequal exchange’ (Hornborg 1998, 2011). In short, it denotes that modern technology involves a ‘zero-sum game’ of uneven resource flows, which allows wealthier parts of society to save time and space at the expense of negative ecological impacts and the oppression of humans in the poorer parts of the planet (Hornborg 2011).
The development or the functioning of machines is not detached from social relations, which indicates that technology and its development are often the result of unevenly distributed resource use and transfers, and the exploitation of underpaid workers. The manufacturing of technology and its use have historically involved complex and often unresolved social conflicts between humans and their surrounding environments, which are also culturally conditioned (ibid.). This indicates that questions of technology cannot be kept separate from human-to-human power relations and global geopolitics, as technological instruments and systems generally cause and represent unequal labour conditions and the destruction of natural habitats (Malm and Hornborg 2014).
To be sure, the neutralists could claim that technology as such is not responsible for human poverty or natural destruction, and that these are the doings of capitalism or the corrupt elite—a notion which characterizes for instance Marx’s and Marxist discussions of technology (Wendling 2009; see also Chapters 6 and 8 of this book). But this would suggest that technologies somehow self-materialize beyond the existing relations of power and geopolitical conflicts, a notion that we find quite ridiculous. The development and manufacturing of technology, like any human actions, are always valueladen, involving historical baggage, negotiation, and compromise with possible uneven distribution of benefits.
Technological Pessimism and the Autonomy Fallacy
In contrast to neutralists and optimists, the proponents of technological pessimism consider technology an irreconcilable Faustian error in the human organization. This perspective draws its inspirations from the critiques of the
