Small, Local, and Low-Tech Firms as Agents of Sustainable Change

With severe ecological degradation unfolding, the strong sustainability approach underpinned by ecological economics calls for a post-growth vision of the economy. This chapter adopts a philosophical perspective of critical realism and argues that such a vision of the economy does not arise on its own. It is the result of intentional transformation of structures by agents, the result of sustainable change. The chapter proposes small, local, and low-tech firms as agents of sustainable change. Such agency needs to be operationalized, which should be done via the development of the moral agency of individuals. The chapter warns that sustainable change is not an easy undertaking, since agents are constrained by structures which operate against it. It concludes that it is not merely concrete practices, but moral agency and the values and world views of individuals that need to receive more attention in investigating sustainable change and bringing about a post-growth world.

An Economy beyond Instrumental Rationality

Treating technology in a broad sense, including elements of social organization, this chapter discusses the role of technology as part of the dominant economic discourse and the instrumental perspective which characterizes modern exploitative human–nature relations. A key point is that values and assumptions of the conventional economy are very influential in determining what development is and should be. As such, they also determine technology and drive unsustainability. Hence, the solutions proposed build on alternative values and assumptions which can lead to a new economy beyond instrumental rationality. Here, the role of technology as respectful and fair social organization increases. Artefacts that create distance between humans and nature are given much less room, while technology as expansionist and exploitative means is dismantled.

Creative Reconstruction of the Technological Society

Contemporary society is on a clearly unsustainable path, and faces multiple disaster scenarios in the coming decades unless transformative action is taken in the very near future. Among the prime root causes of our present dilemma is modern technology. It has allowed the emergence of modern-day miracles of our technological society, but it has also brought an exploding global population and widespread assaults on the natural environment. In fact, all major social problems are ultimately technological problems. Furthermore, technology is expanding exponentially on several fronts, and threatens to exceed human control. The thesis of ‘technological determinism’ has a long history, but only in recent years has its effects become manifest. Under such conditions, one promising long-term solution is a slow but steady retraction of modern technology. Such a ‘creative reconstruction’ of society will allow us to maintain that which is truly valuable in life, while putting humanity and the planet on a path to real sustainability.

Reversing the Industrial Revolution

This chapter argues that energy technologies should be understood in terms of asymmetric global resource transfers and environmental load displacements. The fossil fuel technologies inaugurated during the Industrial Revolution and the renewable energy technologies designed to replace them are similarly entangled with such societal asymmetries. Both represent social strategies of time-space appropriation within a highly unequal world-system generated by the polarizing logic of all-purpose money. The dependence of modern technology on asymmetric flows of embodied labour time, land, matter, and energy is effectively obscured in mainstream economics by the exclusive focus on prices and market mechanisms. Given the land-saving logic of the turn to fossil energy, it is pertinent to ask whether a turn to renewables would imply a return of land constraints. To perceive modern technologies simply as politically neutral instruments for harnessing natural forces, disregarding their demands on land and other resources beyond the technological infrastructure itself, is an example of fetishism.

Part I Summary

At its simplest, the concept of technology refers to phenomenon of technology. What is the phenomenon of technology, then? In Part I, ‘technology’ was approached from a linguistic (Chapter 2) and materialist (Chapter 3) point of views. From the linguistic point of view, technology is first and foremost a linguistic phenomenon, comprising language-mediated thoughts and ideas about technology, as well as organizational and societal discourses on technology. From a materialist point of view, technology is primarily a material phenomenon. The world, including technology as human sayings and doings, is considered to be embedded in physical reality....

Conditions for Alienation

In the chapter it is argued that both capital accumulation and technological development need each other, but are also conditioned and defined by each other. In practice, this entails that technology and its development, in capitalism, are about endlessly producing and marketing new technologies involving a profit motive. In other words, in this organization, technology and its development do not have a purpose apart from the creation of monetary value. This modern-day assembly is framed in the chapter as a capital-technology alliance to highlight the intertwined relation of capital accumulation and technological development, and how they both produce conditions for alienation. This is because both of them contribute to a lack of control and freedom in personal and communal lives, albeit in somewhat different ways, and generate personal and communal detachment from fellow humans and from the rest of living nature.

Atechnological Experience Unfolding

This chapter discusses the meaningful end of the human-dominated geological epoch and examines the role of technology in relation to it. It proposes that the transition to a meaningful post-Anthropocene is supported by experiencing ‘non-technology’ or ‘without-technology’. Further technologization will only accelerate anthropogenic destruction, while the absence of technological instruments and a technological mode of being will do the reverse. The chapter conceptualizes this phenomenon of ‘atechnology’—the absence of instruments and the instrumental relation to being in nature. Atechnological experiences are used descriptively to explain how the earth can move to a post-Anthropocene epoch and employed also for normative purposes, to ignite sustainable change. The ‘technology–atechnology’ continuum the chapter introduces importantly allows sustainability scholars and policymakers to deliberate not only on the proper kind of technology or the amount of technology needed, but also to consider atechnology as a way to relate to the world, others, and oneself.

Earthing Philosophy of Technology

This chapter reviews four major strands of twentieth-century philosophy of technology and shows how all of them have predominantly thought of technology as immaterial. This suggests that modern people have widely embraced the popular image of ‘lightbulbs as bright ideas’ in relation to technology. While research on the biosphere emerged from an understanding of the world as a complex interplay of geological forces and biogeochemical cycles of matter-energy, technology was interpreted as ontologically immaterial, springing forth from human cognition, consciousness, design, or semiotic networks. It follows that the interpretation of nature that is today employed to understand the dire state of the planet is broadly absent in the conception of the most favoured (technological) solutions. To remedy this discrepancy, this chapter argues that we should understand technology as ontologically material in order to see how it is essentially a means for ecologically unequal exchange.

Competition within Technology

This chapter consist of a philosophical investigation of competition and its adverse effects on human moral growth. It considers competition as a Heideggerian technology, a mechanism, which ‘enframes’ our thoughts, feelings, and presuppositions about possible solutions to the ecocrisis. The history of competitive thought is scrutinized in terms of violent and mechanistically perceived human nature, evolutive mechanism, and the struggle for existence. Furthermore, economic ideas of scarcity, insatiable wants and needs, freedom, and merits are seen important features of defining what competition is. Competition is defined as the pursuit of scarce resources in a free society, and all of the defining concepts of competition are put under critical scrutiny. The chapter shows that competition is not only a neutral economic mechanism, but includes the human pursuit of superiority that impedes the development of empathy and willingness to help others, and limits the way we perceive the world and opportunities for ecological change.

Technology and Sustainability

On the basis of the chapters of the book, it is concluded that increasing technology use and advancement are not necessarily a desired phenomenon. In addition to the positive consequences that we often hear about, the effects of technology are at times neutral, but often also negative. For this reason, we should always consider not only the potential of technology but also its pitfalls from various points of view, including non-anthropocentric perspectives. This leads us to abandon any one-dimensionality, such as the techno-optimism prevailing particularly in the discourses of ecological modernization and green growth, and to call for an investigative attitude in the study of technology in relation to sustainability.