Bureaucratic technology and the limits of solutionism at Cop26

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 various reasons Graeber offers 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 – more importantly – highlights the close relationship between our political and technological imagination.

Broadly speaking, there were two particular 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 focused innovations by ostensibly 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), and, by extension, the complexity of the crisis. 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 supposedly for the planet, there is undoubtedly also another aim: continued economic growth. As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, celebrating the investment 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 oddly 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 impulse necessary to modern capitalism. 

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 broader 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 even suggest there’s a level of bathos here, as if measuring insect activity could even begin to address the scale of what the world is facing.

Perhaps this is unfair. We shouldn’t concede the value of small scale action, after all. But we should nevertheless be attentive to the way such technologies teach or 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.

But a reason for greater concern is that this approach actually strengthens the power of capital. What’s happening with the proliferation of technologies like Brainbox AI and Agrisound is that it splits our ecology into increasingly small and discrete parts; it brings new and wildy diverse facets of it into a logic of measurement. 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 object of measurement and optimisation. While the aim might well be to help solve the climate crisis, these innovations are also creating 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, such a process also obscures the way in which ecological phenomena are necessarily shaped by political decisions – and, more broadly – ideology.

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 actively implements new ones.

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 social and 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

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.