In The Utopia of Rules the late David Graeber argues that we have moved from poetic to bureaucratic technologies (2016). The former, he explains, are technologies “in service to a fantastic end,” while the latter are those that simply expand and entrench the need for “paperwork” (Graeber, 2016, p.142). I won’t get into the reasons Graeber provides to explain this change, but his distinction came to mind when considering technology’s prominence at Cop26 in Glasgow. It provides a useful way of thinking about how technology is deployed in conversations around climate change and highlights the close relationship between our political and technological imagination.
Broadly speaking, there were two ways in which technology made an appearance at Cop26: on the one hand as an opportunity that can be enabled by the market – like global leaders’ commitment to invest in ‘cleantech’ – and, on the other, as a set of specific innovations by well-meaning startups. As I’ll discuss, both are examples of how technology is implicated in the bureaucratic logic of the political and economic domains. They are also, moreover, reflections of one another.
Green investment and the limits of the political imagination
The discussion around investment is replete with techno optimism (Kirby and O’Mahony, 2018). But this optimism obscures the specifics of given technologies (think of how rarely we hear world leaders discussing particular innovations and inventions). By extension this also obscures the complexity of the crisis – it can be solved with effective investment! For many at Cop26 it seems technology is an asset class, not an imaginative human activity.
Like any asset class, it is as much a vague horizon of hope as it is something tangible. But we should also note that while the hope on display at Cop26 is ostensibly environmental, there is also another aim: continued economic growth. As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said said of the agreement made at Cop26, it will ensure that “by 2030 clean technologies can be enjoyed everywhere, not only reducing emissions but also creating more jobs and greater prosperity.” The implication is far from subtle; ‘clean’ technology is an instrument of economic expansion.
One way to think about this is to see technology here as a kind of spectre from the future that will animate the bureaucratic machinery of global finance. In turn, this will ensure the resilience of capital. In an age of worsening economic growth, there’s a strange logic to this; ‘green’ or ‘clean’ technology could be viewed in a similar way to how Aaron Benanav sees automation discourse: as an alibi for the challenges facing the global economy (Benanav, 2020). Equally, though, it could be evidence of the idea that crisis is integral to capitalism, not a challenge to it. (Harvey, 2010.)
This talk of spectres might seem poetic, but maybe that’s the point. While poetic technologies use “rational, technical, and bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life” (Graeber, 2016, p.141), in this instance technology is functioning as a kind of fantasy that sustains the bureaucratic impulses on which modern capitalism depends.
Innovation and the limits of the technological imagination
If we look at a micro level, the technologies that appear in and around Cop26 reflect this bureaucratic impulse. A couple of examples, drawn from an initiative called Tech For Our Planet (itself part of a broader Cop26 adjacent initiative by the UK government called Together For Our Planet), illustrate this point extremely well. One is Agrisound, who are “on a mission to create the world’s largest database on insect biodiversity through the deployment of a network of low cost sensors listening to the sounds of insects,” and another is Brainbox AI, which is “offering artificial intelligence (AI) to combat climate change by making commercial buildings smarter and more efficient.” Both offer technologies that are specifically designed to measure and monitor.
I don’t wish to judge these specific startups. I’m simply highlighting them as examples of precisely what Graeber is talking about. Whatever the benefits of mapping insects, there’s no doubt that Agrisound is implementing new bureaucratic procedures. Similarly, while it may make sense to attempt to use AI to make energy consumption more efficient, Brainbox AI is ultimately providing a bureaucratic solution to the challenge of the climate crisis.
A cynic might suggest there’s a level of bathos to all this, as if measuring insect activity could even begin to address the scale of what the world is facing. But that might be unfair. We shouldn’t concede the value of small scale action, after all. However, we should nevertheless be attentive to the way such technologies encourage a bureaucratic approach to problem solving that sees recording, measuring, and optimising as the only possible approach. Doing so will only foreclose the alternatives that the planet might require.
Of even greater concern is the possibility that this approach strengthens the power of capital. Just as Fourcade and Healey (2013) highlight how modern systems of credit seemingly extend access to people only to then classify and stratify them, in this instance ecological phenomena – from insects to architecture – become objects of measurement and optimisation. By breaking up ecological reality into discrete parts, new sites of potential value emerge within the market. In turn, this creates new opportunities for capital.
Moreover, while this has an economic dimension, there are also political parallels with Fourcade and Healey’s argument. Just as the inclusion and stratification of humans in systems of credit atomises humans and thus obscures the antagonisms that are part and parcel of every individual’s social situation, here a similar obscures the connections and antagonisms within our ecology. It elides politics.
Breaking bureaucracy through a sociology of associations
To bring these two framings together, it would seem that Cop26 celebrates technology not as something poetic – with transformative potential – but rather as something deeply bureaucratic. It is either a shapeless fantasy for organising accounting decisions or a machinery that demands more of them.
This might all sound pessimistic. However, while breaking through the ideological impasse will be difficult, one approach could be to think through the multiplicity of connections – or associations – between technologies, ideas, and other socio-ecological phenomena in the way put forward by Latour (2005) and Actor Network Theory. We might not find anything poetic, but it’s at least a start.
References
Benanav, A. (2020). Automation and the Future of Work. London: Verso
Fourcade, M. & Healy, K. (2013). Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal era. Accounting, Organizations and Society. 38. 10.1016/j.aos.2013.11.002.
Graeber, D. (2015). The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. London: Verso
Harvey, D (2010). The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Independent Digital News and Media. (2021, November 2). 40 nations back COP26 technology plan to help developing world hit net zero. The Independent. Retrieved December 8, 2021, from https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/cop26-net-zero-technology-johnson-b1949802.html.
Kirby, P, and O’Mahony, T. (2018). The Political Economy of the Low-Carbon Transition: Pathways Beyond Techno-Optimism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling The Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Together for our planet. Together For Our Planet. (2021, November 22). Retrieved December 8, 2021, from https://together-for-our-planet.ukcop26.org/.