The problem-with techno-optimism
How Silicon Valley limits our imagination
The word ‘techno-optimism’ gets thrown around a lot. Some people use it pejoratively, others stand behind it as the only way forward. Today, we wanted to unpack what the word really means–and what it would mean to rely on it to guide our societal transformation.
Today’s version of techno-optimism in the context of climate change grew out of the sustainable development discourse of the late 20th century. It was largely a response to the discussion about planetary limits that arose in the 1970s, and the discourse that emerged from it which said that humanity was headed towards collapse if we didn’t make dramatic changes to our high-consumption lifestyles. Instead, scientists, politicians, and economists argued that we didn’t have to accept this gloomy narrative. Human beings, they argued, possess the ingenuity to come up with creative technological solutions to the problems we face.
Techno-optimism doesn’t have one standard definition, but researchers Samuel Alexander and Jonathan Rutherford have perhaps the most comprehensive one. They define it as:
“The belief that science and technology will be able to solve the major social and environmental problems of our times, without fundamentally rethinking the structure or goals of our growth-based economies or the nature of Western-style, affluent lifestyles. In other words, techno-optimism is the belief that the problems caused by economic growth can be solved by more growth (as measured by GDP), provided we learn how to produce and consume more efficiently through the application of science and technology.”
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schnellinger of the Breakthrough Institute present it even more simply:
“The solution to the unintended consequences of modernity is, and has always been, more modernity– just as the solution to the unintended consequences of our technologies has always been more technology.”
It was–and is–a tempting view. If we can just find technology that allows us to continue growing the economy without damaging the environment, we won’t have to change anything about the way we live. If scientists are finding new ways to store carbon in the ground or suck it out of the air, tech companies are coming up with new ways to monitor soil health and make economies more circular, and more economic growth will trickle down prosperity to all, then we’re in good hands. The rest of us can just do our parts by turning off the lights, buying electric cars, and recycling.
It’s true that technology and innovation have important roles to play in the solution-making process. We won’t be able to solve the problems of climate change fast enough without the use of technological innovations like renewables. They’re also right that we shouldn’t believe we’re headed for inevitable collapse and that it’s too late to change.
They’re wrong, however, in believing that technology alone will solve the most pressing problems of our time. Let’s unpack why that is.
There are many lines of critique against techno-optimism, and we won’t be able to get to all of them here. For example, it’s problematic to use technological fixes to attempt to address social problems like poverty, because that technology often interacts with our unequal world in unexpected ways that end up exacerbating the problems it was deployed to solve. Some examples of this might be things like the use of facial recognition to attempt to reduce crime rates, not taking into account the fact that these models often make mistakes when identifying BIPOC people because of how they were trained, or the use of hybrid seeds and fertilizers in agriculture to increase crop yields, while exacerbating farmer indebtedness and worsening environmental impact. These effects are real, but they vary on a case-by-case basis – all technologies have costs and benefits, so you’d have to evaluate them one by one.
Today we’ll focus on a couple of different angles – the problem of the path-dependence that techno-optimism brings, and the problem of power, control, and democratic erosion.
The Problem of Path-Dependence
Techno-optimism starts from the assumption that the world is on a trajectory from the present into the future, where we improve upon what we have now through technological innovation to make better versions of what we have now. Gas cars become electric vehicles (EVs). Regular fuels become biofuels. Regular plastic becomes bioplastic. Animal meat becomes lab-grown meat. We “disrupt” the industries we have to make them more efficient and hopefully, more sustainable.
What that approach does, however, is limit our imagination of what’s possible or allow us to fundamentally rethink how society should function.
Let’s look at the EV example more closely. Few people will argue that the development and deployment of EVs is a bad thing for society, given the urgent need to move away from fossil fuels. But by pouring money into EVs as a key pathway to sustainable transportation, we don’t consider the car-dependent infrastructural system that we’ve built and all of the other problems it causes. We don’t take the time to step back and reimagine what our cities could be like if we moved away from cars en masse and built public transport systems that worked for all people, sophisticated bike infrastructure, 15-minute cities, or a host of other options.
This is not to say that nobody is thinking about these things; many are. But under a system of techno-optimism, the bulk of the funding, attention, and effort goes towards “improving” the systems we have, rather than questioning the core assumptions that these systems are built on. It also doesn’t hurt that there’s a massive amount of money to be made through EVs–less so on a publicly-funded transport system that’s affordable and accessible to all. These are not mutually exclusive options; we could have a balanced approach of adopting EVs while also making our societies less car-oriented and more accessible to all. The problem is that it isn’t happening this way, because the push to electrify vehicles is the solution that fits better within the constraints of the existing car-dependent system.
As Murray Bookchin put it, this line of thinking “start[s] out with the idea, ‘you got a shopping mall, what do you do then?’ Well, the first question to be asked is, ‘why the hell do you have a shopping mall?’ Techno-optimism keeps our focus on these tweaks to the system, rather than what else might be possible.
That’s the crux of the first problem. When there’s a profit motive attached to progress, we get a certain type of innovation, and it’s not always the kind of innovation that will actually make society more sustainable and just. It’s the kind of innovation that makes people money, and hopefully also solves a social problem at the same time. But we can’t afford this kind of prioritization now. We need the fundamental rethinking of our systems and way of life.
The Problem of Power
Moving on to the second problem, we must examine who is developing these new technologies to address climate change or poverty. They are often mostly extremely wealthy people who call themselves philanthropists and create foundations to tackle social problems, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and other scions of Silicon Valley. They make consistent headlines for their philanthropic efforts or startup funding, garnering significant praise.
Maybe you could argue that at least these billionaires are putting their money towards solving climate change instead of just hoarding it (although they do a lot of that too). The problem is that because they are voluntarily donating the money, they also get to make the decisions about how that change happens. They get to reshape the world in their image, according to their agenda, without any public accountability.
Bill Gates’ $184 billion fortune amounts to more than the GDP of virtually all of the countries that his Gates Foundation operates in. This gives him the power to reshape whole sectors with scarce input from those most impacted by his interventions. Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t gone well in many cases. As author and researcher Linsey McGoey puts it,
“Asking Bill Gates to fix inequality is like asking an arsonist to hose down your house after he just set it on fire. Philanthropists might have the deep pockets to fund the fire engine and water hose, but the money is coming from making our houses unlivable in the first place.”
Let’s say that instead of leaving the task up to the billionaires, we enacted a small wealth tax on the wealthiest members of society–the world’s 2,755 billionaires. Enacting a 1% wealth tax on these individuals would generate $130 billion every year. Right now, the amount of aid flowing from all countries and multilateral institutions every year is $160 billion. The money from the wealth tax would be enough to solve a host of social problems, and the money would be deployed by governments that people actually had a fighting chance of electing.
When you factor in the massive tax cuts that billionaires get for their philanthropic work (such that sometimes they even profit from it) we see why they oppose wealth taxes, preferring to maintain decision-making power and gain positive publicity for their efforts. On the surface, their work looks generous. But in reality, the people who are fueling techno-optimistic solutions are robbing governments of revenues that could actually address these problems democratically. That’s the crux of the second problem. It’s simply not desirable to have a tiny group of unelected billionaires at the helm of solving what are inherently political and social questions.
At the core, technologies themselves are generally not the problem. They are tangible things that have unique benefits and drawbacks to assess individually. Techno-optimism, however, is a story–just as all ideologies are, at their core, stories. It’s a story about what moves us forward, what is valuable, and who should make the decisions shaping our collective future. As The Consilience Project writes:
“A central premise of technocapitalism is that technological innovation is the fundamental driver of history. Adherents of this ideology believe, consciously or not, that it is technology that determines the shape of social life and the fate of civilizations—rather than the actions of individual humans, coordinated groups, cultural trends, or structural forces. Furthermore, they believe that technological innovation is necessarily created by private enterprise, and in particular through the institution of the startup, funded by private venture capital funds.”
We don’t have to throw out technology or go back to some dark age, as some techno-optimists warn will be the consequence of rejecting this ideology. We can be cautiously optimistic about the role of technology in addressing some of the problems that lie ahead of us. We need renewables and other technologies badly in the process of phasing out fossil fuels, for example. But techno-optimism, as an ideology, doesn’t present technology as part of the solution–a stop-gap while we reimagine more fundamental parts of how we live. It presents it as the whole solution, sidestepping conversations about reimagining the social order. It limits our imagination and disempowers us from taking an active role in the solution-making process.
As Murray Bookchin writes in his book Toward an Ecological Society, what we need is not a wholesale rejection of technology, but rather a better process of discernment:
“There are different technologies and attitudes toward technology, some of which are indispensable to restoring the balance, others of which have contributed profoundly to its destruction. What humanity needs is not a wholesale discarding of advanced technologies, but a sifting, indeed a further development of technology along ecological principles that will contribute to a new harmonization of society and the natural world.”
The questions ahead of us are difficult ones to answer. They concern resource distribution, fairness, the value of future generations and the nonhuman world, and the way our entire society and economy are structured. Technological innovation cannot answer these questions, and relying on it ensures that these questions will continue to be sidelined. Only we can answer them–through deliberation, political processes, and a rethinking of our role from being consumers to being citizens who can (and must) actively shape the world around us.
Here are three think-pieces that further the conversation about techno-optimism, expanding on aspects we couldn’t fully cover here:
This article by Jag Bhalla and Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs is a great response to the famous “Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto” by Silicon Valley billionaire investor Marc Andreessen—the piece that sparked a lot of the recent discourse around the topic. It’s a great and worthwhile read.
The follow-up conversation to this article includes the question “if not capitalist technology, then what?” Enter the Appropriate Technology movement with a promising alternative approach. Read more about it in The Conversation here.
This article from The Guardian dives into the debate between whether technology or politics are better-suited to solve our problems. Although politics can be slow and cumbersome, while technology can solve things much more rapidly, what do we lose in the trade-off?
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