Technology, Culture, & The Living World
I’ll admit it: I used to think Teslas were cool. I mean, by most standards of automobile aesthetics, it’s arguably fair to consider them cooler than my Camry, but I thought they were an even better kind of cool. They were save-the-world cool. It’s popular now to bash Teslas, and I imagine that same bashing was popular back when I liked Teslas, but I easily ignored the criticisms—if I even let myself genuinely consider them, which I didn’t—because, well, hey, Teslas were save-the-world cool.
Why do I bring Teslas up now, and imply that I too am going to bash them? I’m not here to condemn the people who use or simply like Teslas, nor am I here to hop on a popular bash train–I’d just as happily bash Camries or real trains. But Tesla is one of many (supposedly) wonderful (purported) technological solutions to our global predicament: climate change, ecosystem and species loss, environmental pollution, massive inequality, you know the list. But can shiny new technologies ever provide the solution to our polycrisis? To understand the extent to which technology – particularly emerging technologies – can help, we must first reckon with the knotty relationship between technology and dominant culture.
Before we get any further, I need to define my scope (that is, define for you, bound for me, because otherwise who knows how far I’d ramble): This essay addresses the relationship between technology, culture, and the living world. For now, I won’t get into how technology informs our humanity–our behaviors, politics, identities, etc.–just as our humanity informs technology. I’ll also resist my frequent impulse to call out the material and energy costs of technology. I’m not going to wade into arguments about whether or not technology has made our lives better, nor whether we should totally abandon it (which aren’t really reasonable arguments to make, but I’ve sure given it a shot before). Those are all fascinating, tantalizing subjects equally worthy of their own future blog posts. But I’ve got to set them aside in favor of drawing our shared attention to the often ignored dynamic between human technology, the human cultures that encompass technology, and the living world that encompasses them all (otherwise known as global ecosystems or the biosphere; you know, all those exquisitely interdependent communities of beings who have as much a right to live here as we do). I’m taking on this topic first and in rotund detail because without this broader consideration, we end up with delusional and dangerous ideas about the scope of technological “solutions.”
“The distinction boils down to this: problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes. A solution to a problem fixes it, returning all to its original condition. Once a suitable solution can be found and made to work, a problem can be solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people can develop responses, but not solutions. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but no response can erase a predicament. Predicaments have outcomes that can be managed, but circumstances cannot be returned to their original state.”
Techno-cultural Feedback Loops
Depending on who you ask, technology ranges from material and pretty evident—GMO seeds, solar panels, or spear throwers—to abstract and more debatable—myths, economies, or language. Whatever the classification, I guarantee you, like me, take most technologies as given parts of life, be they T-shirts, toothbrushes, or timekeeping. But technology is not a given; it all came into existence—and then spread—at some point. Before that point, however far back it was, we didn’t have the PFAs, or the eroded hillsides, or the genocidal empires that might have accompanied that innovation.
Depending again on who you ask, you may be told that a particular stage of technology was what allowed us to arrive at this civilizational polycrisis: fossil fuels supercharged industrial overshoot; before that, monotheistic religions encouraged our separation from nature and granted us predictably destructive dominion over the living world; earlier, literacy severed us from richer communication and fragmented knowledge, facilitating hierarchy within literate cultures and colonization over non-literate cultures; earlier still, sedentary agriculture cleaved human cycles from those of the biosphere and induced inevitable cycles of overshoot; verbal language allowed humans to create myths we used (and still use) to start organizing in large numbers; fire massively increased our access to energy and should be considered the genesis of the sixth mass extinction and the Anthropocene.
Typically, what’s implied in these manhunts for historical culprits is that before any given technological transgression, humans lived sustainably: that is to say, humans could have lived forever at their prior level of technology and not caused deforestation, desertification, extinctions, climate change, and all the other accoutrements of collapse. But once humans adopted a certain technology, it led them irreversibly down a slippery slope to ecological or societal devastation.
Retracing steps and examining historical technologies certainly yields interesting questions, though attempted answers are mangled by the disputable premises and counterfactuals inherent to deep history. Could, for example, North American megafauna have been hunted to extinction if humans didn’t have the then-cutting-edge technology of spear tips and arrowheads? Perhaps the extinction can be read as evidence that spears and arrowheads are inherently dangerous technologies that inevitably tends toward overshoot. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that newcomer humans did not yet know how to live sustainably in a North American context and thus caused megafauna extinctions, that contention is far from settled. And even if that line of causation is true, was the problem inherent to the technology itself? Or did it arise in the interface between the technology and the culture that designed and deployed it?
From one perspective, technological fatalism can ignore the fact that many, many cultures have learned to live sustainably (if not forever, then for tens of thousands of years, which is pretty damn close) in a given place with different levels of technology. If we lack evidence of people living non-destructively for tens of thousands of years with a technology—be it agriculture or cell phones—that does not necessarily mean it’s impossible for a particular culture. Perhaps there were hundreds or thousands of armed North American cultures that lived alongside mammoths just fine, and only a few scattered, maybe larger cultures were to blame for gradually over-hunting over thousands of years.
Unfortunately, those few (theoretical) unrestrained mammoth hunting cultures would be exactly the problem. With technology, we can’t just consider one single culture. Some technologies, especially when applied in a particular way by the right (or wrong) culture, might spread virulently to others. If, for example, dozens of cultures exist in a sustainable steady state on a continent of old growth forests, and each culture has axes to dig holes, skin game, and fell select trees, all it takes is one culture (what becomes an overshoot culture) to begin an inexorable race to the bottom. Once that single culture decides to devote their axes to clearcutting forests, they achieve an immense short-term advantage (perhaps on the order of decades) over all their neighbors. They can use all that extra space—previously occupied happily by millions of other-than-human beings—to grow crops to feed more people, and all that extra wood to make weapons. The entire ecosystem suffers profoundly, but now this culture can use their newfound advantage to conquer neighboring cultures that chose not to deforest or increase their population. Plus, the clearcutting culture has to conquer now, for their destroyed ecosystem can no longer support their larger numbers: they’ve become an overshoot culture. If they don’t go out and conquer they will collapse, and since cultures generally try to avoid collapse, overshoot becomes a self-perpetuating expansion of conquest.
Neighboring cultures either lose to their overpowering invaders and have overshoot culture forced upon them–and the conqueror gets more land to exploit, thereby extending their short-term advantage, allowing for more population growth and weapons production and thus more conquering and culture spreading–or begin exploiting their land themselves–thus adopting the overshoot culture they’re resisting–in order to have a better shot at survival. Either way, the overshoot culture and the clearcutting it enables enter a lethal feedback loop, while the living world and non-overshoot cultures suffer.
This is the natural course of overshoot cultures–oftentimes called “civilizations” or “empires.” The cultures that innovate ways to exploit, either through new or existing technologies, create power disparities that are extremely difficult to overcome. All it takes is a single culture to misappropriate a potentially sustainable technology, to decide they value production or expansion or domination over life, and it becomes nearly impossible to stop the metastasis of that culture as it converts life into resources for empire.
Tools of Empire
Today, even if technology is used in benign, non-destructive ways by most people, the current dominant culture is of the overshoot (expansionist, extraction-based empire) variety. Concentrated wealth and hierarchical power preferentially select for that which increases wealth and power concentration. That means dominant culture actively encourages perversions of technology that perpetuate inequality, hierarchy, violence, addiction, invasion, conquest, extraction, and the like–in other words, that perpetuate dominant culture.
There have been and still are many efforts to understand and implement human-scale appropriate technology. Many regional cultures offer us insight on how to regulate culture and technology to prevent runaway feedback loops of ruin. Some examples include the Ju/‘hoansi in southern Africa (and many other indigenous groups worldwide) who engage in “demand sharing,” which prevents private property and therefore wealth accumulation; the Hadza of Tanzania who, when billionaire Paul Tudor Jones brought them a compound bow, refused the technology because it would give them too much of a hunting advantage; and many Amish and Mennonites throughout America who resist car and internet culture.
There are also plenty of historical and contemporary examples of cultures applying technology in ways that improve and empower the living world, including American Indians who used agriculture and fire to build incredibly abundant and diverse ecosystems; conservationists nowadays who use chainsaws to remove introduced trees to restore water cycles and landscapes; and the Indigenous Ka’apor in Brazil who use GPS and camera traps (tools of the conquerors) to fight illegal loggers (the conquerors) while still consciously striving to maintain “the Ka’apor way” (the non-conqueror way).
On individual or community scales, it is absolutely possible to adopt and regulate appropriate technologies, just as it is possible to have axes without necessarily deforesting an entire continent. But individual and community scales sit beneath the large-scale dominant culture of modernity, and that dominant culture picks deforestation every time. Though it has not always been so techno-fabulistic, the dominant culture of late modernity now proudly eschews any and all checks on technological proliferation, and bulldozes cultures with relationships to technology less reckless than ours. We see this even more clearly since the dawn of the internet age, when many legislative bodies–ostensibly meant to regulate technological takeover for the people’s sake–seem to enable its spread more than anything else.
Consider any of the following technologies, whose stories I relay in only the most cursory fashion. Each has plenty of undeniable benefits—but benefits only within certain contexts and below certain scales. Each of these innovations becomes weaponized when appropriated into and gigantified by systems that prioritize production and expansion:
Hand plows: When used in small, traditional contexts—peasant farmers in India or Mexico, or your mom’s backyard garden, for example—hand plows can be an important part of managing diverse agroecological systems. Plowing, and whatever tool facilitates it, was invented thousand of years ago to make planting and growing crops a little easier—nothing particularly dangerous. However, technology went from sticks to scrape the ground to iron hand plows, then to draft plows, and finally to plows on tractors with steam or internal combustion engines. Then petroleum-fueled plowing underwent further intensification. Hand and draft plows contributed to continent-changing ecological ruin (the Mediterranean and Middle East were once green and plush with forests and topsoil until they was farmed—plowed—continuously for thousands of years). This is causally associated with the decline of most major historical civilizations. Tractor drawn plows caused the Dust Bowl (one of the worst ecological disasters in American history) and continue to cause profound soil degradation and erosion. In earlier American history, the plow was a major tool of colonial expansion. Pursuant to the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery,” unplowed lands stewarded by American Indians throughout the country were considered “unused,” and were awarded to settlers (i.e., violently stolen from Indians) on the condition they be plowed for agricultural production, even if the soil conditions were entirely inappropriate for plowing (such inappropriate conditions exist in the Texas panhandle and neighboring states, which were prone to losing more than ten tons of soil per acre in a single year during that whole Dust Bowl thing).
Currency: What could otherwise exist as a local medium of exchange, the current dominant currency, money, now runs our dominant economic system that turns real things necessary for all beings to live into abstract financial devices. Food, clean watersheds, and intact forests get converted into commodities futures, ecosystem services, carbon credits; bodies, and the time and space to use those bodies, into labor to sell for a salary; wild places and beings existing for their own sake into property and resources.
Religion: Christianity offers a solid example – though it is certainly not the only religion that could be given this treatment. Christianity started as a regional Jewish cult – a small group of people who followed a healer and preacher of love (John 15:12). Early Christians by no means intended for their practices to serve as the foundation for genocide. But the Crusaders, Portuguese, Spanish, Portuguese again, British, Americans, Canadians, Spanish again, Belgians, French, and countless others found the perfect tool for empire expansion in distorted forms of Christianity.
Ceramics: The first ceramics – pots and mugs – were hand-formed more than 25,000 years ago. How can what is essentially hard cooked earth perpetuate destruction? Alas, ceramics were and are still used in “tiling,” an agricultural practice that for the past 2,000 years has drained temporary or permanent wetlands with underground ceramic tiles that tunnel water away. The American states of Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa had significant (we’re talking a quarter of the state for Indiana) and richly diverse swamplands drained for production agriculture. Tiling continues globally today, but mostly with plastic pipes instead of ceramic. Ceramics are also used in armor for military vehicles (including those used against civilian protesters) and in engines and as nosecones for missiles.
Corn: Yes, even corn has been drafted into the service of empire. The plant who heroically nourished millions of American Indians and continues to nourish billions of people today has been conscripted into the arsenal of industrial agriculture, multinational food mega-corporations, and agri-colonial expansion. Indeed, in 1976, US Secretary of Ag Earl Butz proclaimed “food is a weapon”. Human exploitation of modern corn is a significant contributor to an impressively comprehensive list of ills: soil loss, air pollution, water pollution, pesticide poisoning, feedlots and their associated abuses, chronic disease, food deserts, corporate food monopolies, loss of seed sovereignty, land theft, Brazilian deforestation, Bornean deforestation, prairie loss, species loss, and climate change. There are typically around 90 million acres of chemically saturated GMO corn monocultures planted in the US each year, and more than 500 million acres of corn monocultures planted globally. Who really benefits from this much corn? Multi-billion dollar companies guilty of driving countless human rights abuses, horrendous ecological ruin, and climate change.
Really, it’s probably safe to assume the worst about any technology in the dominant culture of late modernity. No matter how good our intentions are, no matter how promising a given technology sounds, it will be used by some – most often by those who already hold disproportionate influence – to further accelerate accumulation and ultimately perpetuate the predicaments we already face. Do we really think better drones, advanced robotics, AI, lab grown meat, deep sea mining, spaceships, or nuclear fusion reactors will only be used for the betterment of human communities and Earth’s ecosystems? Or will they accrue more wealth and power to those who already have plenty of both?
When empire and technology mix, life gets flattened. The historical trends and current examples do not inspire confidence in new technological “solutions.”
Hidden Questions, Real Questions
The search for specific technologies to save humanity is the impulsive inversion of the search for historical culprits of our predicament, but as with historical investigations, hidden premises abound. When people say we need nuclear energy, electric vehicles, or “cellular agriculture” (lab grown meat or bacterially derived food-like substances produced via “precision fermentation”), they’re responding to the wrong questions, probably without even realizing they’re begging a question at all. Pro-nuclear arguments really ask then respond to the question, “How can we get more energy to continue powering industrial economic growth?” For Tesla advocates, my past-self included, it’s “How can we make one aspect of our existing transportation infrastructure less directly fossil fuel dependent?” Fake meat and cellular agriculture proponents ask and answer, “Taking for granted our millions of acres of petroleum- and pesticide-dependent corn and soybean monocultures, how can we make more products out of these abundant commodities that replace existing foods?”
These are not the right questions, because we don’t need more of the same. We actually need fewer uranium mines that pollute Indigenous communities, fewer tires and miles of pavement that poison salmon, fewer large-scale monocultures and industrial food supply chains that decimate birds, bees, and human microbiomes. We should ask whether we need this much energy in the first place, whether we should continue developing car and truck based infrastructure, and whether crops should be grown, distributed, and processed in such resource and energy intensive systems. We should ask how we can live well with less energy, drive and transport less, grow food in more local and agroecological ways, and just take less from Earth systems in general.
But technology isn’t going anywhere (for the time being, at least). So when we introduce or advocate for a new technology, or continue investing in or advancing existing ones, we have to ask ourselves different kinds of questions:
Will this technology help us defend life systems or consume them?
What is the likelihood this technology could be turned into an ecologically or culturally destructive force, an asset for empire?
Do we have the cultural self-governance that can prevent this technology from getting appropriated into a tool of destruction? (Spoiler on that one: we don’t).
We’ve reached the point in the essay where you’re probably ready for some alternatives to the problem of empire and technology (and where the author, so I guess that means me, is supposed to present a tidy set of recommendations that you can readily implement in your own life). To properly do that, however, I’d have to also address the relationship between technology and humanity, the material and energy costs of technology, and to what extent technology makes our lives better, which I pointedly did not do in this particular post. In other words, there’s a whole lot more (un)learning and (re)consideration needed before you should take such advice from anyone, whether it’s me or techno-optimists.
What I can offer is this: We have to stop taking our technologies for granted, and we’d better start asking a whole lot more of them. If a technology does not tend to make life more sustainable on the order of tens of thousands of years, we must realize the importance of regulating or limiting its usage.
Although most of us don’t have the option to eat without industrial agriculture, get around without cars, or exist without money, we can take small steps to engage less with these systems. We can grow some of our own food, or buy more of it at local or small scales; we can reduce driving if any of us live amongst infrastructure that allows for that; we can engage in cashless gift economies with our communities. None of this will fix Big Ag, or deforestation, dominant culture, or our overshoot predicament. But until we recognize—and then scrutinize—the relationship between dominant culture and technology, until we begin practicing alternative, non-empire-dependent ways of being (however small they may be), we will not be able to work towards genuine responses to our predicament. This is no trivial thing: to understand what responses are feasible, we have to practice resisting the technologies of overshoot culture by trying them in our own lives however we can.
The genuine responses we need are those that increase human health and wellbeing, communal resilience, regional interdependence, ecosystem abundance and regeneration, and biosphere integrity. The genuine responses we need are those based in regional, living systems—not corporate marketing departments or the minds of billionaires.