(Roughly) Daily

Regular readers will have deduced that I am something of a techno-optimist. While I worry that human misapplication (exploitation) of new technologies could create new dangers and/or further concentrate wealth and power in too few hands, I believe that emerging tech could– should– help humanity deal with many of its gravest challenges, certainly including climate change. At the same time, I am disposed to thinking about large issues/problems systemically.

Rianne Riemens shares neither of my enthusiasms; she sounds a critical note on techno-optimism, systems thinking– and more specifically, on the application of the latter to the former…

Today, American tech actors express optimistic ideas about how to fix the Earth and halt climate change. Such “green” initiatives have in common that they capture the world in systems and propose large systemic, and mostly technological, solutions. Because of their reliance on techno-fixes, representatives of Silicon Valley express an ideology of ecomodernism, which believes that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline. In this article, I show how “whole-systems thinking” has become a key discursive element in today’s ecomodernist discourses. This discourse has developed from the 1960s onwards – inspired by cybernetic, ecological and computational theories – within the tech culture of California. This paper discusses three key periods in this development, highlighting key publications: the Whole Earth Catalog of the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report in 1972 and the cyberspace manifestoes of the mid 1990s. These periods are key to understand how techno-fixes became a popular answer to the climate crisis, eventually leading to a vision of the world as an ecosystem that can be easily controlled and manipulated, and of technological innovation as harmless and beneficial. I argue that “whole-systems” thinking offers a naive and misleading narrative about the development of the climate crisis, that offers a hopeful yet unrealistic perspective for a future threatened by climate change, built on a misconception of Earth as a datafied planet.

In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Citation2023) venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argues why we should all be techno-optimists, especially if we are worried about the future impact of the climate crisis. According to Andreessen, promoting unlimited technological progress is the only option: “there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment”. If we generate unlimited clean energy, we can improve the natural environment, whereas a “technologically stagnant society ruins it” (Andreessen, Citation2023). This is possible, he writes, because technologies enable processes of dematerialization and will eventually lead to material abundance. And, “We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system” (Andreessen, Citation2023). The manifesto thus conceptualizes technology as immaterial and the capitalist economy as an evolutionary system: it presents techno-fixes as a harmless form of environmental action, and economic growth as an inevitable process that political powers should not interfere with.

The “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is an example of a form of techno-optimism that places full trust in the potential of capitalist tech companies to help humanity “innovate” its way out of a climate crisis. Andreessen (Citation2023) cites historical figures including Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, Douglas Engelbart and Kevin Kelly as the inspiration for his manifesto, showing that the work of these figures and their communities is being remixed and reappropriated into the future visions of contemporary techno-optimists. In this article, I analyse how the belief in the environmental potential of techno-fixes is engrained in the ideology and history of “Silicon Valley” and is discursively constructed through a language of “whole-systems thinking”. I use the concept of whole-systems thinking as a lens to study how simplified notions taken from whole-systems theory and cybernetics played and still play a key role in techno-environmental discourse in the post-war era in the United States. I zoom in on three key events that help explain the origins and evolution of popular whole-systems thinking: the Whole Earth Catalog community led by Stewart Brand in the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome in the 1970s and the cyberlibertarian community in the 1990s. I will show how a new language emerged that used simplified notions of systems-thinking to promote the idea that technology would help understand, manage and save a planet in peril.

Through a discourse analysis of primary sources and literature review I present a critical reading of these events in the light of today’s techno-optimistic environmental discourse. My corpus exists of a number of primary sources, including the aforementioned “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023), Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., Citation1972), editions of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996), texts by Kevin Kelly (Citation1998) and Stewart Brand (Citation2009) and An Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., Citation2015). I have discursively analysed these sources for their discussion of systems thinking as well as environmental concerns. By analysing how whole-systems thinking became a popular way of addressing environmental issues, I aim to provide a “post-war genealogy” (Pedwell Citation2022) of the term and critique today’s promises about how tech can save the climate. As Johnston (Citation2020) has argued, tracing the development of a cultural perception of trust in techno-fixes reveals a complex and multi-sided history. I claim that the environmental dimension of techno-optimistic discourses requires a critical reconsideration of the ideological underpinnings of Silicon Valley, described as the “Californian Ideology” by Barbrook and Cameron (Citation1996). I will demonstrate how ecomodernism, including its belief that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline, allows us to better understand, and critique, the environmental ideology of Silicon Valley.

I will first expand on contemporary ecomodernism and present my thesis that “decoupling” nature from culture has come to underlie whole-systems thinking in contemporary techno-optimistic discourse. In the following three sections, I highlight a few historical moments to demonstrate the development of the cultural perception of techno-fixes, specifically as a means of managing the environment. I show how whole-systems thinking became popularized by the Whole Earth community, got incorporated in environmental debates through the Limits to Growth report and is reflected in cyberutopian dreams about immaterial societies. Building on my necessarily brief history, I argue that techno-fixes can be strategically presented as ideal solutions if the world and environment are imagined as simple systems and technology as immaterial and harmless. Finally, I return to contemporary US tech culture and argue that it is shaped by, and co-shapes, the ideology of ecomodernism in which nature and culture are decoupled. I conclude that this worldview expresses itself today in corporate visions, resulting in a false hope about how to innovate our way out of the climate crisis…

Eminently worth reading in full (if in the end, as for me, less as a wholesale rejection of techno-optimism and systems thinking than as a cautionary counterweight): “Fixing the earth: whole-systems thinking in Silicon Valley’s environmental ideology,” from @WeAreTandF.

(image above: source)

* Frank Tyger

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As we tangle with tech, we might pause to remember a man who bridged our understanding of the systems of the world from one paradigm to another: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS; he died in this date in 1944.  An astrophysicist, mathematician, and philosopher of science known for his work on the motion, distribution, evolution and structure of stars, Eddington is probably best remembered for his relationship to Einstein: he was, via a series of widely-published articles, the primary “explainer” of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the English-speaking world; and he was, in 1919, the leader of the experimental team that used observations of a solar eclipse to confirm the theory.

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