What are the social and environmental impacts of carbon and low-carbon energy technologies in different places and at different times? To answer this question, we are faced with an epistemological dilemma. Before measurement takes place, we need to define where and when the phenomenon we are measuring begins and ends—to define its “system boundaries.” For instance, one liter of semi-skimmed milk, bought in a British supermarket, has an energy content of 380 kcal. However, to think of the milk in terms of energy also evokes the far-reaching social and environmental contexts that bring milk to the market.

Beyond the energy content declared on the milk carton, we can undertake a life cycle assessment (LCA)—expanding the system boundaries—to account for the energy (or the carbon, water, labor, or land) “embodied” in the milk via its production and distribution. We might include the energy content of processed cattle feed, electricity used to run milking machines, cooling tanks, water boilers, and lighting, energy inputs in alkaline and acid detergents, diesel for tractors, and a wide range of other energy technologies used in production.

We might expand the system boundaries further to account for the fuels needed to generate the electricity, run the chemical plant, fuel the milk tanker, power the dairy plant, and so on. Arguably, we should also account for the energy expended in the production of the electricity generator, the milking machine, the milk tanker and the tractor, fencing and the batteries storing energy to electrify it. But if an electricity generator and a battery are somehow embodied in a liter of milk, we have culturally come far away from what we normally understand milk to be. Where, then, should we draw the system boundaries around an object in order to gauge its social and environmental impact?

Image credit (CC). 

More than just posing epistemological problems, however, we argue that system boundaries present an ethnographic problem and that they should be exposed to cultural as well as political analysis. As cultural artefacts, system boundaries sustain different power-serving worldviews, and the way system boundaries are drawn in discussions on energy transitions calls into question how the existence of energy technologies relies on a geographical displacement of environmental load, including flows of resources, land, and emissions.

In discussions on green development and strategies for a low-carbon energy transition, there is a strong case made for technologically utopian solutions in which novel, more efficient technologies will enable a decoupling of environmental impact from economic growth. These solutions range from a complete electrification of transport to the mainstreaming of “cultured” meats, milk, and eggs to a wholesale transition to a solar economy. Depending on the exponent’s political allegiance, they often resonate with teleological imaginaries of technological progress inspired by the American “technological sublime” or the Marxist “development of the productive forces”. However, the socioenvironmental impact of green technology is contingent on the definition of system boundaries. A technologically utopian solution rests on narrowly defined system boundaries.

Read more: Cederlof, Gustav, and Alf Hornborg. “System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: Assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact.” Journal of Political Ecology 28.1 (2021): 111-123.

More papers by Alf Hornborg.

While growth is generally understood as an economic ideology to be addressed by restructuring the economy, Illich saw growth as technological. Beyond a certain tipping point, technology transcends from a tool humans use to satisfy their needs, to end in itself. This “end” is fulfilled by making humans “means” – shaping them to fit the technology. This perspective shapes Illich’s criticism of computing technologies, which contrasts those of many proponents of degrowth who consider open-source and open-access to be potential new commons.

Although there is a tendency for degrowth proponents to ignore or accept immaterial technologies (like schooling or healthcare systems) as necessary or benign, Illich centred these technologies in his critique of growth. He argued that there are technologies that are inherently destructive, regardless of who uses them and how. These “manipulating tools” replace people’s “native capacities”- to travel on foot, to learn, to care for one another, to communicate and to know. The car restructures the city in its image, restricting the (formerly free) movement of pedestrians. The school shapes students to reproduce the system as it is, and prevents students from shaping the school to meet their need to learn. Each human capacity is removed from the autonomy of the individual, professionalised and standardised.

Further, people are “disembodied” as they are integrated into systems, their self-perceptions and subjectivities manipulated to fit. The hospital defines health and disciplines bodies accordingly, and people relinquish their capacity to feel their own health within their bodies and decide what it means to be “healthy”. Cybernetics replace the diversity of face-to-face interaction with abstracted communication, with people as data within a pre-defined digital system. People outsource knowledge to computer systems, and so no longer know themselves and their surroundings directly from their senses. Computing technology does not represent the revival of the commons, but further encroachment on users’ freedom.

Limits to technological growth, then, are needed in defence of “the vernacular” – people’s existing capacity to meet their own needs. These capacities can be enhanced with tools, provided they deemed appropriate upon critical reflection, and are decided upon autonomously from the mind-altering technologies which shape people in their own image.

Read more (paywall/institutional access): Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich’s critique of technology revisited, Silja Samerski, 2018

Abstract: “Based on the works of Ivan Illich, this article reformulates growth not as the result of a certain economic imperative or ideology, but as a question of technology – namely as a historically unique relation of humans to their instruments. This sheds new light on a key question of degrowth, namely what to limit, and how and why. First, it emphasizes not the ecological, but the social harms of growth, namely the paralyzing and disembodying effects of modern technologies, be they high speed trains, smartphones or health care services… Second, it argues that degrowth, if it does not want to degenerate into an alternative strategy with which to manage scarce resources, has to seek limits to all manipulative tools, be they digital technologies or social technologies. These limits, if they are to be meaningful, cannot be defined by experts or determined by ecological indices, but have to be rooted in the common will to defend a vernacular and convivial sphere against industrial and technological encroachment. Thirdly, based on Ivan Illich’s later work on the way contemporary technologies shape bodily experience, it calls for the cultivation of a technological ascesis, that is a critical distancing from the symbolic effects of mind-boggling tools such as the computer that increasingly shape self-perception and subjectivity…”

Mathieu Maury sends us a link to a very interesting (and minimalist) website called Simplifier. From the about-page:

Why do I simplify? How did I get started? What is the goal of this website?

Before developing any other skill, I enjoyed programming. To some extent, I still do; each program is its own universe, built from scratch, and the ability to create these on a whim is fascinating. However, the more time I spent programming, the more I became aware of the fact that software depends on hardware, and hardware is constantly changing. A program is not like a book or a painting; it requires constant upkeep and adaptation to remain in existence.

Initially, this drove me to learn about hardware, so that I could develop a stable platform to build upon; but this too was futile. Components inevitably fail, and there is no guarantee that replacements will be available in the coming years or decades. Essentially, permanent work cannot be achieved on a computer, as the hardware is fundamentally out of the control of the user. No matter what world is created inside of a program, its foundation will always rest on sand.

At this point I left programming entirely, and began searching for other meaningful work to do; but the problem had followed me! No matter what skill I intended to learn, I found that its permanence had been eroded by the chaos of technology. Materials were replaced by brands, techniques replaced by accessories, and craftsmanship replaced by consumerism. Clearly, this was something that needed to be fixed. Clearly, this is what I had to do.

Fundamentally, my work here is about creating a stable foundation of technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves. As of writing this, I believe I have done this on a conceptual level, but I intend to continue this work to the highest level of technology that I can achieve on my own. I encourage readers to utilize anything here which they find practical for whatever purpose they see fit, and to consider adopting a mindset of simplification in projects of their own.

• Meghan O’Gieblyn – God in the machine [48:12]
• Brett Scott – The war on cash [14:41]
• Nicole He – Say my name, say my name [15:15]
• Darius Kazemi – Social solutions to social networking [16:20]

Next week, I’m doing a talk in Paris. Knowing the French a bit, these videos will never be uploaded, so be there.

The authors bring us closer to other ways of desiring, designing, producing and maintaining technologies. Experiences and initiatives to develop freedom, autonomy and social justice while creating autonomous mobile telephony systems, simultaneous translation networks, leaks platforms, security tools, sovereign algorithms, ethical servers and appropriate technologies among others.

From the introduction to Technological Sovereignty Vol.2,, which is available in English, French, and Spanish. The first volume is available in French and Spanish only.

Yet these systems can only be understood as the flawed extensions of human creation. They act on our biases by replicating them and distributing them into the background of everyday life, thereby reinforcing and even exacerbating existing structural inequalities… Rather than letting these systems fade into the background, a deeper engagement with the material realities of digital technologies is necessary.

Read more: Invisible algorithms, invisible politics, Laura Forland. Via SF Sutcliffe.

The French scientific magazine Techniques et Culture has published an entire volume about alternative forms of technology: “Low-tech? Wild tech!“. The 300-page issue explores the differences and conflicts between high-tech and low-tech, with a focus on all the forms of technology which are in between these extremes.

The authors argue for a more sophisticated view of technological evolution, which is now usually seen as linear progress towards ever increasing complexity and perfection. The contributions show that reality is much more complicated, and much more interesting.

The issue is the fruit of a three-day discussion in Paris in 2012, in which I participated. The volume features a translated article from Low-tech Magazine: “How to build a low-tech Internet?”. “Low tech? Wild tech!” will be presented and discussed in Paris on December 9, 2017.

A fifth of the world’s population lacks access to technologies fundamental to a basic standard of living, while unfettered use of technology by those who have it brings its own problems. Inspired by EF Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful, Trace argues that ending poverty and achieving environmental sustainability cannot be realized without radical changes to the way technology is developed, accessed, and used:

“Humanity has lost control of technology, or rather relinquished it to the vagaries of the market, assuming its ‘invisible hand’ will ensure the most efficient development and dissemination of technology that best meets people’s needs – an assumption that is wrong.”

The book is divided into three sections. Part 1 starts by looking at notions of technological progress and the relationship between technology and human development, demonstrating the need to ‘rethink’ how we use and provide access to technology. Part 2 goes on to explore the idea that we need to ‘retool’ — to re-examine our innovation processes — in order to focus on driving technology development towards, rather than away from, the twin problems of poverty and environmental sustainability. The book closes with a third section that sets out a series of radical changes required to ‘reboot’ our relationship with technology.

Picture by Hans Tak, International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2016

Technologies like driverless cars and smart heating systems could end up making cities dysfunctional according to Maarten Hajer, chief curator of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2016. Speaking at an opening event for the biennale, Hajer called for architects and designers to stop treating the advent of smart technologies as inevitable, and to question whether they will solve any problems at all.

“People with lots of media force pretend to know exactly what the future will look like, as if there is no choice,” he said. “I’m of course thinking about self-driving vehicles inevitably coming our way.” Discussions about the future of cities are at risk of being “mesmerised” by technology, he added. “We think about big data coming towards us, 3D printing demoting us, or the implication of robots in the sphere of health, as if they are inevitabilities. My call is for us to think about what we want from those technological advances.”

“I have nothing against good technology, it’s wonderful, but you always want social problems to be the priority. If it doesn’t help us get CO2 down, if it doesn’t help us make cities more socially inclusive, if it doesn’t help us make meaningful work, I’m not interested in smart technology. Sometimes I think: “if smart technology is the solution, then what was the problem again?”

Read the full interview at Dezeen. Thanks to Anne-Marie Pronk.

A complex biochar-making toilet. “It will never be deployed anywhere”.

Our society is pathologically enthralled with the new. As scientists and engineers in global development, we’re inculcated starting from very early in our training to seek “the cutting edge” of technological innovation. But if we want the best chance of making a positive difference on the future, that’s the opposite of what we should do.

The reason is that technology ages in reverse. Or put another way, the longer a given technology has been around, the more likely it is to persist into the future. So, if you want your efforts in science to matter in the future, you’d better look to the past to define relevant research questions.

According to philosopher and risk analyst Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, while perishable items (such as humans, cats and tomatoes) experience a decline in life expectancy with each passing day, nonperishable things (such as art, literature, ideas and technologies) can experience increased life expectancy the longer they are in circulation. This is known as the Lindy Effect… Taleb asserts that our modern culture trains us to think that the new is always about to overcome the old. But this is just an optical illusion because the failure rate of the new is so much higher than that of the old.

Quoted from: Forget the cutting edge embrace the old tech future, Engineering4Change.

Cargo cults appear when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes. The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world.

To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region started building giant airplanes from wood, carving headphones and radios from bamboo and awaited the messianic serviceman John Frum. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy. Their rituals included the non militant army TAU (Tanna Army USA), marching with wooden rifles.

The more naive will laugh about these imitations. But did the US soldiers truly understand their technology, their big agenda? The cult of the cargo is our world exactly: We perform meaningless routines we call work, in hope for future cargo. With a technology that could navigate us to the moon, we write LMAO. The western world itself is a giant cult of imitating things that somehow work: dressing in suits, using buzzword-vocabulary, mimicing old forms of art. The longing for godlike goodies on the horizon, the usage of things we don´t understand: it’s a big parable of desire.

Surprisingly the local performers of the Cargo Cults succeeded: By remaking western technology with bamboo, by re-enacting western rituals they attracted actual planes full of tourists and anthropologists.”

Quoted from “In John they trust” (Smithsonian Magazine) and “The supercargo manifesto” (Supercargo Tumblr). Pictures: Supercargo Tumblr. Thanks to Edwin Gardner.

“Enter the cutting edge of machine mitigation. Back in August 2012, Google announced that it had achieved 300,000 accident-free miles testing its self-driving cars. The technology remains some distance from the marketplace, but the statistical case for automated vehicles is compelling. Even when they’re not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.”

“What, though, about more local contexts? If your vehicle encounters a busload of schoolchildren skidding across the road, do you want to live in a world where it automatically swerves, at a speed you could never have managed, saving them but putting your life at risk? Or would you prefer to live in a world where it doesn’t swerve but keeps you safe?”

Quoted from: Automated Ethics, Tom Chatfield, Aeon Magazine. The image is from Ethical Autonomous Vehicles, a research project and video by Matthieu Cherubini. Three distinct algorithms have been created – each adhering to a specific ethical principle/behaviour set-up – and embedded into driverless virtual cars that are operating in a simulated environment, where they will be confronted with ethical dilemmas. Via InternetActu.

“Technology dominates our world, but many people think ‘its just a neutral tool’ or that technology = progress. Although it does bring some benefits, most technology is designed and controlled by corporate, military and technocratic elites to serve their interests and exert their power. We think it’s time for a much more systematic and joined-up approach to technology that overcomes the democratic deficit in this area. We need to develop a new approach, based on bringing together the insights of different campaigns and movements, sharing skills, and learning from each other.”

“The Breaking the Frame gathering is a step towards creating the new politics of technology. We will be bringing together campaigns on the technology politics of food, energy/climate/ environment, work/economics/austerity, the military, the internet, surveillance health and gender, as well as trade unionists, radical scientists, artists and developers of alternative technologies. The aim is to learn from each other and to build a new network, to strengthen campaigns and make issues about technology more central in radical movements. Amongst the principles of a new critical discourse on technology are:

• Opposition to technologies that are ‘hurtful to Commonality’ (i.e. to the common good, including the environment) and to ‘technofixes’ for social problems
• Support for technologies that help to satisfy real human needs and empower the powerless e.g. some renewable energy technologies.
• Technology should be developed under democratic control, rather than under the control of private interests and the military”

“Some of the issues we’ll discuss include:

• What does a critical politics of technology mean in the 21st century: democratic control or ‘low technology’?
• History of industrial society and environmental crisis; challenging the concept of progress through technology
• Experiences in different campaigns and struggles
• Alternative visions of social and technological development, and the transition to a sustainable and socially just society.”

Confirmed speakers include Simon Fairlie (editor of The Land magazine), Jerry Mander (International Forum on Globalisation), Hilary Wainwright (editor, Red Pepper), Theo Simon (Stop Hinkley), Danny Chivers (No Dash for Gas). Breaking the Frame Gathering, May 2-5 2014 Unstone Grange, Unstone Derbyshire (near Sheffield). The written reports about earlier Breaking the Frame Gatherings are very interesting.

“A growing number of people I teach, for example, are looking for an alternative to a brushcutter. A brushcutter is essentially a mechanical scythe. It is a great heavy piece of machinery that needs to be operated with both hands and requires its user to dress up like Darth Vader in order to swing it through the grass. It roars like a motorbike, belches out fumes, and requires a regular diet of fossil fuels. It hacks through the grass instead of slicing it cleanly like a scythe blade. It is more cumbersome, more dangerous, no faster, and far less pleasant to use than the tool it replaced. And yet you see it used everywhere: on motorway verges, in parks, even, for heaven’s sake, in nature reserves. It’s a horrible, clumsy, ugly, noisy, inefficient thing. So why do people use it, and why do they still laugh at the scythe?”

“To ask that question in those terms is to misunderstand what is going on. Brushcutters are not used instead of scythes because they are better; they are used because their use is conditioned by our attitudes toward technology. Performance is not really the point, and neither is efficiency. Religion is the point: the religion of complexity. The myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up.”

Read more: “Dark Ecology, searching for truth in a post-green world“, Paul Kingsnorth, Orion Magazine. Image source. Related: The motorized “solution” to harvesting wheat in Nepal.

“November 2011 – January 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprisings, in which artisan cloth workers smashed machines which were destroying their trades, undercutting wages and forcing them into unemployment and destitution. Today, the industrial system that the Luddites were rebelling against has led to climate change and huge losses of biodiversity, and its new technologies, such as information technology, genetic engineering and nanotechnology raise equally profound issues. Yet anyone who raises concern about the price and side-effects of new technologies is harshly condemned as a ‘luddite’, someone supposedly irrationally opposed to technology and progress.”

“In fact, the Luddites were not ‘luddites’ in that sense: the idea that they were opposed to all technology is a history written by the victors. In fact the Luddites opposed only technology ‘hurtful to Commonality’, ie. to the common good, rather than the narrow interests of the few. They destroyed some machines whilst leaving alone others in the same workshop. So being a luddite today means being a sceptic about the dogma of technology as progress, not about denying the real benefits of some technologies. It means insisting that the crucial decisions about which technologies are developed are made democratically, not just imposed by corporations and technocratic elites. And it means standing up for our own ideas of what progress really is.”

Help celebrate 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprising: Luddites at 200 website. See also: “Lessons of the Luddites“.

they’ve just been waiting in a mountain
for the right moment

listening to the irritating noises
of dinosaurs and people
dabbling outside

all the modern things
have always existed
they’ve just been waiting

to come out
and multiply
and take over

it’s their turn now…

“The modern things”, Björk – from the album “Post” (1995). Kevin Kelly’s book “What technology wants” in a nutshell.

“In this age, ‘judging technology’ means one of two things: reviewing a particular tool for how well it satisfies the consumer, or doing deep thinking about Technology as a whole. I don’t think there’s any such thing as ‘technology’. Every tool, every system of tools, every use of every system of tools, is a different animal. And instead of judging a clothes dryer for how well it dries your clothes compared to another clothes dryer, we should also judge it for how it affects the meaningfulness of your life, the society it is part of, and the rest of life on this planet. The goal of this page is to inspire deep thinking about particular technologies.”

For now, only the transportation section has been (partly) filled in. The “passenger dragon” (which scores the maximum of 100 points) left me a bit confused, but here are the preliminary results for the more common transport means:

• sailboat 85 – 74,
• horse 79 – 70
• bicycle 77 – 63
• private jet 58
• airliner 45
• passenger train 44 – 30
• automobile 25

Note that energy use and ecological damage are not the only criteria.

“Modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all.”

“All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals.”

Quoted from: “Small Is Beautiful“, E.F. Schumacher, 1973.

Characteristics of modern technique (2)
Characteristics of modern technique (1)