Full Description
This book examines our understanding of technology and suggests that machines are counterfeit organisms that seem to replace human bodies but are ultimately means of displacing workloads and environmental loads beyond our horizon. It emphasises that technology is not the politically neutral revelation of natural principles that we tend to think, but largely a means of accumulating, through physically asymmetric exchange, the material means of harnessing natural forces to reinforce social relations of power. Alf Hornborg reflects on how our cultural illusions about technology appeared in history and how they continue to stand in the way of visions for an equal and sustainable world. He argues for a critical reconceptualisation of modern technology as an institution for redistributing human time, resources, and risks in world society. The book highlights a need to think of world trade in other terms than money and raises fundamental questions about the role of human-artifact relations in organising human societies. It will be of interest to a range of scholars working in anthropology, sociology, economics, development studies, and the philosophy of technology.
*CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2023*
Contents
Introduction: The Secret Rationale of the Industrial Revolution Part I: The Social Constitution of Machines 1 Productive Forces as Social Relations: Technology as an Object for Social Theory 2 The Shadow of Progress: Acknowledging Ecologically Unequal Exchange 3 References to Technology in Critical Development Theory 4 Stealing Time and Space: The Elusive Magic of Technology Part II: Ideas About Machines, Energy and Value 5 Energy and Labour-power: When All People and All Things Became Instruments 6 Money and Market Valuation as the Root of our Afflictions 7 Beyond Objective Values: Human Ideas in a Material World 8 Solar Power for Whom? The Fantasies of Leftist Ecomodernism Part III. Machines, Culture, and History 9 Mistaking Machines for Humans: Delusions of the Material Turn 10 The Power of Signs: The Invisibility of Social Metabolism before the Machine 11 Progress or Parasitism? Money and Technology in the World History of Inequality 12 Dismantling the Machine: Problems in Naming the Evil; Afterword: Beyond the machine
