Interrogating the Machine

If technology is the answer, what is the question?

If technology is the answer, what is the question? This is a riddle which today’s green movement would do well to ponder. Across the political and cultural spectrum of the postmodern West — and not just the West — “more technology” has become the answer to just about every contemporary problem, including the many problems which were caused by applying this answer in the first place.

This special issue of Earth Island Journal interrogates the use, philosophy, and — let us be frank — the eschatology of technological progress, and the obsession with techno-solutionism that has now overwhelmed our culture. It is not a new observation to say that if progress is the religion of the increasingly secular West, then technology is its liturgy and creed. As climate change spirals beyond our control — if that control were ever anything more than an illusion — as the extinction crisis deepens, and as both population and consumption levels hit new records every year, we have banked everything on our machines. Technology will save us. We will seed the clouds to cool the planet. We will extract the carbon from the atmosphere again. We will mine asteroids. We will build domes on Mars and live under them instead of on the Earth we have despoiled. Progress will continue. It must continue. What else do we have?

There are plenty of answers to that question, all of which involve a deep and honest examination of our values, and a radical reconnection to the web of life, of which we are one part and one part only. These are the issues the greens should be raising now, and many continue to do so. But many more have been suckered by the drug of technological hubris. Rather than questioning the very notion of “progress” or the values that underpin techno-urban civilization, they have bought into the narrative that the world can only be “saved” by accelerating deeper into the Panopticon. When they say “the world,” of course, they actually mean contemporary progressive capitalism.

This issue of the Journal takes another tack, reopening the necessary and urgent questions about where technological “advancement” is taking us, and examining the unspoken assumptions at the heart of the Machine. It builds on the work of such green pioneers as Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Vandana Shiva, and many others who for the past several decades have offered up sharp and detailed criticism of the direction of techno-industrial society. Those critics, in turn, sit within a much older tradition, which can be traced through political, cultural, and religious traditions across the world, and which worries above all about the impact on our humanity of our deepening worship of machines, and our consequent estrangement from the rest of life on Earth.

This is the question that echoes down the ages. Now that few, if any, of us can exist, or interact with our fellows, without advanced technologies created and controlled by profiteering corporations, it only grows more urgent. I hope that the writing within this issue will help bring it into sharper focus.

Paul Kingsnorth, Guest Editor