When it comes to technological development, we often hear the words: what can be done will be done \u2013\u00a0sooner or later. Many people think that technological development follows a path directed by quasi-natural laws that head into one and only one direction \u2013 called \u201cprogress\u201d \u2013 which is: to use more technology, more complex technology, more expensive technology, more powerful technology. Now, if this were true, if everything that is technologically possible will be done one day, humankind and the planet are finished. The detonation of thousands of nuclear warheads and the unleashing of artificial killer creatures manufactured by synthetic biology would wipe out life on earth. Sooner or later.<\/p>\n
Technology as mythology<\/strong><\/p>\n However, this narrative of quasi-automatic, unstoppable, mono-directional development of technology belongs to the realm of mythology. Which technology is developed and which is not, which is used and which is not, all of this is based on decisions made by people, decisions that could look quite different. Let\u2019s take the automobile system as an example. It is perfectly feasible to organize efficient mobility in cities without cars. The technologies for this have existed for more than a hundred years. But it is not done. And there are reasons for this. It is also perfectly doable to feed the whole world with organic peasant agriculture, and in so doing, to save 30 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and dramatically reduce fresh water use. The technologies for this have existed for a long time as well. But it is not done. And there are also reasons for that. It is also easily doable to communicate over large distances without buying every two years a new pocket computer that consumes huge amounts of resources. The reasons why this is not done are the same as in the other two examples.<\/p>\n Now the forces that decide which technologies are developed and implemented are not rooted in technology itself, in a mysterious drive within technology to \u201cprogress\u201d. No, they are rooted in the way our society functions. The global system, of which we are parts, has been called by different names, for example, the modern world-system in world-system analysis, modernity (in more vague terms), or simply, capitalism. I use the word Megamachine as a metaphor, a term coined by Lewis Mumford fifty years ago in his famous book Myth of the Machine<\/em>. This system evolved in Europe around 500 years ago, it has very violently spread around the earth since then, and it is based on two key dynamics: Number one is the principle of endless accumulation of capital, or simply put: to make more money from money, in an endless circle of profit and reinvestment. Number two is the hunger for territorial expansion and control by the militarized modern state, an institution that has developed in a co-evolutionary manner with the institutions of capital accumulation since the 15th<\/sup> century. It is now hardly surprising to find that the most important technological choices that have been made in the past several centuries, and that have helped to create the mess we are in, were shaped by these two forces.<\/p>\n The automobile system<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s take again the example of the automobile system. If people had been asked a hundred years ago whether they would like to spend hours each day in traffic jams, to keep their children from playing in the streets because it is too dangerous, to suffer from acute hearing loss because of permanent traffic noise, to die later of lung disease and to leave a planet devastated by climate change to their kids \u2013 or, as the alternative, if they would like to move around quickly in emission-free public transport systems that go to and fro every minute\u2014what would they have chosen?<\/p>\n The choice was made for them. And it was made by certain people in the industries and the state. In the US, companies like GM and Standard Oil bought up fairly developed public transportation systems in cities like LA, New York or Chicago in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, only to do what? To decommission and destroy them, and to build instead, on the former railway and streetcar tracks, highways on which GM cars would drive with Standard Oil fuel. Now do the reasons for this development lie in technology itself? Of course not. Have people yearned for this development? No. The reason that people from Mumbai to Mexico City, from Paris to Cape Town are trapped in the nightmare of that irrational system of individual motor car traffic is very simple. When your economic system is based on the necessity to sell more and more stuff to people in order to keep accumulating capital, then meeting certain needs\u2014like transport\u2014reasonably and efficiently becomes a problem for industry. Once an efficient public transport system is in place, you cannot sell more stuff anymore, apart from renewing infrastructures once in a while. So you have to come up with something new. For example, selling each and every citizen his own power engine, so he can consume more fuel, more metals, more stuff. Later, when everyone had a car, they invented the system of planned obsolescence, which means that people are encouraged, by a brain-washing system called public relations, to buy less and less durable cars for more and more money more and more often.<\/p>\n In the Matrix<\/strong><\/p>\n Mobile communications technology is another perfect example of how the powers of capital accumulation and state control converge to shape decisions on technology. When I was small, almost all citizens had telephones, and they used them their whole life long. There was no reason to change them. While that was good for citizens, it was bad for telephone companies. The market was dead. So they came up with touch-tone telephones, then with wireless phones, then with mobile phones and finally with smartphones, which are becoming more and more powerful and demanding and are consuming more and more resources, not only for the phones but for the transmitters and computer infrastructures. Today, almost everyone has several phones, much more expensive phones, and what is most important, gets a new phone every couple of years.<\/p>\n All this development did not start because telephone customers in the 1980s were lamenting their stone-age phones and screaming to God Almighty to get them out of this analog hell, but simply because companies needed to find ways to profitably reinvest the money they has once accumulated. They have succeeded in transforming a simple human need \u2013\u00a0to communicate \u2013 into an endlessly growing industry, urging people to throw away their devices in ever shorter intervals, and to replace them with new ones. The biggest coup of all this is that users retrospectively think they have been following their own deep wishes, while in reality they were just serving the wheelworks of the Great Machine.<\/p>\n Smart self-surveillance<\/strong><\/p>\n Now, I am not saying that smartphones aren\u2019t smart. They are great toys. And for some people they are more than toys, for example for many people in Africa who do not have fixed line networks and who can now talk to their friends and relatives, and to their kids who have fled to Europe. But for all of the positive things that you can say about this technology, the problem is that the huge dark sides of it are systematically pushed aside or ignored in public debates. One example is the extreme environmental destruction through mining in order to get the metals and rare earths used in these devices. Or the wars that are fought for these resources. Or the huge piles of trash on the other side of the chain.<\/p>\n Additionally, this technology is not only used by consumers but also by states. An example is implementing surveillance<\/u> measures which the totalitarian rulers of the 20th<\/sup> century could not even dream of. Your position in space, your contacts, emails, telephone calls, messages, shopping habits, and, if needed, the life sound of your built-in microphone and the image of your built-in video camera \u2013\u00a0all this allows for almost complete surveillance of almost every person on Earth. And since the Snowden revelations, we know that states do use these possibilities extensively and without any public control, while the private IT companies are helping them \u2013 despite their denial \u2013 by building in loopholes in their systems. Whatever restrictions were still in place, they are removed with every new terror attack or every new pandemic. The marvelous thing about all this is that citizens buy the technologies that surveil them voluntarily and with their own money, while enjoying the feeling that they have gained more freedom. You cannot imagine a more perfect convergence of the interests of capital accumulation and state control. As Julian Assange pointed out rightfully, IT companies and intelligence agencies have created a \u201cturnkey state\u201d, ready for totalitarian and even fascist use. Already under Erdogan in Turkey and Al-Sisi in Egypt, IT-technology and social media such as Facebook were extremely useful for the crackdowns on dissidents and the following mass incarcerations. Digital technologies are not only used by states but also by employers for surveillance and enforced exploitation at the workplace. In a recent a study by the German Trade Union Federation (DGB), the majority of employees stated that workload as well as surveillance on the job has significantly increased by digitalization.<\/p>\n Impacts on health and environment<\/strong><\/p>\n There is also growing scientific evidence for massive health risks due to overdoses of digital media, ranging from cognitive disorders among children to tissue damage caused by pulsed microwave radiation, including cancer. It\u2019s not only the industry that is denying or playing down these risks, but also many users who do not want to face these inconvenient truths. Whoever raises concerns, be it just citizens or scientists or doctors, is often labeled as an enemy of technology, progress and even civilization itself. There is quite a remarkable and effective propaganda machine around all this.<\/p>\n Politicians and representatives of the IT business keep on telling us that we are just at the beginning of the digital revolution. Not joining in to be part of \u201cindustry 4.0\u201d, the \u201cinternet of things\u201d, driverless cars and so on means, so they say, missing out on the future and being left behind by global competition. There it is again: the narrative of an unstoppable, mono-directional development called \u201cprogress\u201d. According to industry\u2019s plans, autonomous cars will use a new 5G mobile communication technology, transmitting for each car 50 Gigabytes of data per hour<\/em> \u2013 about the amount that today an average internet user transmits per month<\/em>. For this purpose, the whole country and the whole continent must be equipped with a completely new, extremely resource- and energy-intensive infrastructure of transmitters and computing nodes. There is absolutely no public debate about the enormous environmental hazards and possible health impacts. Or about the costs\u2014for example in relation to 800 billion people starving on the planet. Or about the massive new opportunities for surveillance as well as for dangerous hacker attacks. The most absurd phenomenon, however, is, that one simple question is never asked: What for? What sense does all this make? Absurd, because there is a much simpler, cheaper and environmentally sound alternative, which is to go for a user-friendly public transport system instead of the outdated and irrational individual motor car traffic. But this is not even mentioned. The example shows that all of this is not about meeting needs but about keeping the machine of accumulation running, a machine that will finally run the whole planet into the ground, if we do not stop it before.<\/p>\n If you are taking all this into account, it becomes evident that with the boundless<\/em> digitalization promoted by governments and industries\u2014again: I\u2019m not talking about using digital tools but about boundless<\/em> digitalization\u2014we put at risk some of the most precious values of life, namely our freedom, a sound environment and our health, while on the other side we are getting hardly more than a few gimmicks. Think about it: is watching 4K-movies on a screen the size of your palm, or standing with a driverless car in a traffic jam, really worth all the destructive drawbacks? Again: digital technologies have created brilliant inventions. But if someone offers you nice, shiny glass beads for all your land and belongings, the question is not if the glass beads are beautiful. Sure they are. The question is what you give away on the other hand and what relation there is between giving and taking. But this weighing up is not happening. We are all staring at the glass beads, screaming \u201cHow nice! How wonderful!\u201d, while they are taking away our land, our health and our freedom.<\/p>\n Immersion or: The abolition or reality<\/strong><\/p>\n While the Megamachine is running the planet into the ground, it also provides the technological means for diverting people from this unpleasant reality. In his science fiction novel The Futurological Congress<\/em>, the Polish author Stanislav Lem described a world in which people are trapped in a perfect pseudo-reality created by chemical drugs in the air, in the water and in the food, whereas they really live in a post-apocalyptical landscape of ruins. When the protagonist takes a counter-drug, the delusion is stripped away. Where he saw posh people in luxurious, shiny elevators a minute ago, he now sees human wrecks pulling themselves up with their naked hands on rotten cables.<\/p>\n The digital replacements of reality today have a similar function. The more our world is paved with screens, the more reality is faded out. Virtual reality headsets are symbolic of that. In the industry the complete loss of reality is called immersion. You become completely part of the artificial world that the company has created for you. If you think this through, it is again a perfect win-win-situation for big business and the authoritarian state: Citizens are turned into consumers, who voluntarily buy the technologies that keep them from looking at their real situation and from starting to change it.<\/p>\n Discarding the bodily world<\/strong><\/p>\n For some of the leading figures of Silicon Valley, however, this is not enough. Ray Kurzweil, for example, the head of the development department of Google, has been dreaming for decades of getting rid of human beings as physical creatures and turning them into networks of data highways. This \u201ctrans-humanism\u201d is very wide-spread among the developers of Artificial Intelligence (which, by the way, is a gross misnomer, because intelligence needs understanding, but machines do not understand, they compute.) Many of these people\u2014unsurprisingly almost all of them are men \u2013 are waiting yearningly for the so-called \u201csingularity\u201d: the moment when the computing powers of machines will transcend\u2014as they imagine it \u2013 the thinking capabilities of human beings, making bodily creatures redundant. In this vision, the business interests of Silicon Valley converge with a radical mechanist ideology that leads us to the very roots of the Megamachine: the idea that humans, animals, plants and the whole universe are nothing but machines. Famously, the French philosopher Ren\u00e9 Descartes claimed as early as in the 17th<\/sup> century that animals could be easily copied by \u201creverse engineering\u201d once you have understood how they are constructed. And this line of thought became mainstream in modern science\u2014although it has been significantly challenged by many scientists from the beginning.<\/p>\n The yearning for the moment when human beings as bodily and emotional creatures can be finally discarded is symptomatic of a technocratic world of men, who are so deeply alienated from their inner world that they cannot discern thought, feeling and perception from computing \u2013\u00a0which is the only thing computers can do. It is the endpoint of the submission of human beings under the logic of the machine, the blind mechanics of endless capital accumulation and the disciplinary apparatuses. The digitalized human only exists as a set of data. Consequently, all that makes up life\u2014spontaneity, emotional experience and creativity\u2014have vanished. Of course this is not what Google is saying, quite the contrary, but it is what happens, if you follow their ideas.<\/p>\n Now, the question is: Do we want to entrust our future to people with visions of that kind? Do we want to feed them with our data, see the world through their Google glasses and move around in cars that are steered by their algorithms? Or are we going to free ourselves from the Matrix they have created, in order to regain our bodies and our minds and reality itself?<\/p>\n The illusions of progressive technological optimism<\/strong><\/p>\n In spite of these developments, techno-optimism is still quite wide-spread among liberals and leftists. The US sociologist Jeremy Rifkin, for example, believes that capitalism will abolish itself more or less automatically by technological progress. Open source software and hardware, 3D printers, the \u201cinternet of things\u201d and peer-to-peer production will, according to Rifkin, eventually replace capitalist forms of labor and value production. When marginal costs are near zero, we shall enter a world of abundance, breaking the rule of scarcity. This concept reminds one of the Marxist notion that the technological development of the productive force will one day create the foundations for a communist paradise. While this idea was somewhat plausible 150 years ago, when industrial production indeed seemed to have the potential of providing a certain amount of common wealth, today, given a dystopian technological development on an overstrained planet, this concept looks somewhat bizarre. Progressive techno-optimism forgets or extremely underestimates the enormous environmental costs of digitalization. 3D printers need the exact same dirty resources that industries consume and are already seamlessly integrated in capitalist accumulation. To expect a quasi-automatic world revolution from machines like 3D printers is symptomatic for a technocratic society that is losing its sense of reality and taking refuge in magical thinking in the face of the chaos created by a Megamachine overrunning.<\/p>\n Towards a new evaluation of technology<\/strong><\/p>\n To free ourselves from the Matrix of disempowering, delusional and dehumanizing technologies does not mean abolishing computers or returning to a romanticized pre-industrial world. Discussions about technology are often conducted along the lines between pro and contra technology. But this does not make any sense, as people have been using technology since the species of Homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago. So the only question is: which<\/em> technology. What are desirable technologies for a humane, just and truly sustainable world? How can we stop focusing on the glass beads that are presented to us, and start looking at the larger context in which technology is always embedded? How can we talk and decide<\/em> about technology in a rational, realistic manner? And above all: Who<\/em> decides? Because the myth of unstoppable technological progress, with a predetermined direction, conceals the fact that in every development there are decisions that can be changed, and that behind every decision there are real people with names, addresses, interests and above all: bank accounts.<\/p>\n Searching for socially and ecologically beneficial technologies means to step out of the logic of capital accumulation and the militarized state. While IT companies, car manufacturers and the like want to design our future\u2014with massive state subsidies\u2014trying to sell us the idea that what is good for them<\/em> is inevitable for us<\/em>, we<\/u> should stand up and say: Nothing is inevitable. Designing hope in this context means to ask: How can we make sure that needs such as transportation and communication are met in the least harmful way? And this eventually means for people in the industrialized world: How can we live better with fewer goods? How can we distribute wealth more equally?<\/p>\n So concretely, what can be done? Well, the transformation has two sides: it\u2019s about getting rid of the wrong stuff and building up alternatives at the same time. On the defense line against destructive technologies I can mention a few things:<\/p>\n There are a lot of hopeful initiatives in building alternatives going on all over the world, involving millions of people. We need reasonable mixtures of Low and High Tech, according to what fits best for social and ecological purposes in different circumstances. There is no one-technology-fits-all solution. In the 1970s the term \u201cadequate technology\u201d was coined, meaning that technologies should fit particular social and ecological contexts in terms of size and complexity.<\/p>\n Now, all of these transformations within the realm of technology are not possible without changing the larger context in which technologies are embedded. Living better with less production and less harmful technology means: leaving the crazy rat race of overproduction and overconsumption. The challenge is to get out of the destructive logic of endless capital accumulation. Now to some this might sound too big or too bold. But in the crisis of civilization that we are in, being bold is the only way out. It is up to us: will we leave the future of the planet to transhumanists, billionaires and the surveillance state, or will we take it back into our own hands?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Andrea Vetter, The Matrix of Convivial Technology. Assessing Technologies for Degrowth<\/em>, in:<\/p>\n \u201cJournal of Cleaner Production\u201c, Special Issues \u201cDegrowth & Technology\u201c, Amsterdam 2017.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This article is based on a chapter of the book<\/em> \u201cChaos. Das neue Zeitalter der Revolutionen\u201d<\/a> (Vienna 2017). It was published in German in the Bl\u00e4tter f\u00fcr deutsche und internationale Politik<\/a>, 12\/2017.<\/em><\/p>\n The English version\u00a0 has been published on the blog degrowth.info and on resilience.org: Breaking the chains of delusion -Technological progress mythologies and the pitfalls of digitalization<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Photo: \n
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