The Political Ecology of the Technocene - Study Notes

Introduction

• The chapter engages with the current Anthropocene discourse as a convergence between Earth system science and post-Cartesian social science, suggesting the Enlightenment split between Nature and Society is obsolete in light of humans becoming a geological force.
• The Anthropocene is framed not only by climate change but by broader anthropogenic transformations of ecosystems, leading to calls for transdisciplinary approaches to human–environment relations.
• Hornborg notes that social scientists have long engaged with the Nature/Society interfusion (1990s: Narain & Agarwal 1991; Haraway 1991; Croll & Parkin 1992; Latour 1993; Descola & Pálsson 1996; Peet & Watts 1996; Escobar 1999), and argues for clarity about political and societal implications rather than philosophical abstractions.
• Key questions posed at the outset:
  • In what sense should the Anthropocene alter our understanding of human–environment relations, history, and modernity?
  • If post-Cartesian perspectives illuminate climate change, how might they illuminate the history of technology and development?
  • Do these perspectives imply dissolving Nature and Society, or reconceptualising them?
  • Is the term Anthropocene adequate for the current period?
  • What are humanity’s prospects for surviving planetary transformations?
  • Can we dispense with the categories of 'Nature' and 'Society' altogether?
• He cautions that physical mingling of Nature and Society does not justify abandoning analytical distinctions between factors arising from human social organization and those from the pre-human universe, e.g., the Second Law of Thermodynamics vs. market logic.
• He critiques the habit of representing technological progress as purely natural, arguing social relations of power and exchange shapes technology as much as physical laws do.
• Descola’s question, “where does nature stop and culture begin?” is cited to illustrate the temptation to dissolve Nature and Society; Hornborg argues for maintaining an analytical distinction to study their interaction.
• Thermodynamics is presented as a natural law that predates human societies and remains otherwise unchanged by human action, while markets are contingent on political decisions and historical context. The claim: thermodynamics and markets are intertwined in fossil-fuel capitalism, but one should not blur the other.
• He emphasizes the empirical separation of categories: Nature (laws) vs. Society (social organization), while acknowledging their interaction in practice.
• He argues for transdisciplinarity: physics and economics must be united to understand fossil-fuel capitalism; no single discipline can provide a full account.

A post-Cartesian perspective on the history of technology?

• The abandonment of Cartesian dualism invites reconceptualising human economies and technologies as hybrid phenomena that interlace biophysical resources, cultural perceptions, and global power structures.
• Focus extends from micro-level interactions with artefacts to macro-level global assemblages, which he terms 'technomass' (Hornborg 2001).
• The global sense of technology as a system-wide totality reveals how global power relations are embedded and buttressed by technology.
• With a global perspective on environmental predicaments, we should study socio-technical networks the same way we study the biosphere.
• Conventional historiography of the Industrial Revolution often credits British ingenuity, yet a closer look shows it was predicated on inequitable global processes: depopulated New World, Afro-American slavery, British labor exploitation, and global demand for cheap cotton cloth.
• The uneven distribution of modern fossil-fuel technology is itself a condition for its existence and its very emergence; technology has been an index of unequal exchange rather than purely ingenious invention.
• The argument that “technology” has been defined too narrowly by ignoring global price relations and resource flows; these factors are crucial for the existence of high-tech society and fossil-fuel capitalism.
• Crutzen’s framing of Watt’s steam engine is criticized for neglecting colonialism and slavery embedded in the historical context of technological progress.
• Cartesian dualism is identified as root of fetishism in perceiving technology: moderns view tangible objects as given, separate from the networks of relations that generate them. This separation alienates humans from non-human nature and from the products of labour.
• A tractor without diesel is as inanimate as a starving organism; thus, technologies are deeply entangled with resource flows and capital relations.
• The density of technology distribution, driven largely by purchasing power, reflects capital accumulation, resource consumption, and transfer of environmental loads to less powerful populations.
• The disjunction between exchange values and physical properties is foundational to modern technology; economics tends to obscure this asymmetry.

The Anthropocene debate and the case for the Technocene

• Hornborg challenges the standard Anthropocene narrative that centres on Homo sapiens as a species and on innate human traits driving climate change.
• He highlights empirical inequality: as of 2008, less than 20% of the world’s population accounted for over 70% of carbon dioxide emissions since 1850, with an average American emitting as much CO2 as roughly 500 people in many African/Asian nations.
• The dominant Anthropocene narrative treats emissions as expressions of innate human traits, rather than as drivers of social, political, and economic structures that can be transformed.
• He argues social phenomena such as worldviews, property relations, and power structures lie outside the reach of natural science and require social-scientific analysis.
• He proposes naming the epoch the Technocene instead of the Anthropocene, to emphasise the socio-technical system and its inequality-based dynamics rather than a human-centric biologically defined species phenomenon.
• He critiques Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and similar positions that collapse agency across humans and non-humans; he argues for maintaining distinctions between human perceptions and artefacts while acknowledging their interactions.
• He notes Latour’s view that artefacts’ agency can anchor in language, symbols, and material objects; Hornborg agrees artefacts matter but asks how to distinguish technology from magic and how materiality and imagination relate.
• He connects this to a broader argument: while modernity demystified some 'magical' aspects, much of today’s social-economic power remains rooted in networks that make technology appear autonomous.

The three categories of artefacts and agency

• Hornborg identifies three fundamental categories of artefacts based on how agency is delegated to them:
  • Local, non-globalised technology (keys): operates without mediation by human perceptions or exchange rates; exemplified by a key that grants physical access; agency is local and procedural, not dependent on belief in value.
  • Local magic (coins): operates by means of human perceptions and beliefs in value; coins enable social persuasion and exchange because people believe they have value; agency is dependent on collective belief.
  • Globalised technology (global magic): locally operates without mediation by human perceptions but globally depends on exchange rates and human strategies; exemplified by machines powered by fossil fuels or electricity; power is exercised globally but its effects are normalized and hidden from daily consciousness.
• This framework helps explain how artifacts function differently at different scales and how power relations are embedded in material culture.
• A key comparison is made to Keynes’ distinction between organic (belief-dependent) and atomic (independent of beliefs) propositions (Marglin 1990): local/practical matters vs. universal truth independent of beliefs.
• The three categories illustrate how technology can be seen as a form of magic in which power relations are concealed behind the apparent neutrality of technical systems.

Political ecology in the Technocene

• The political ecology tradition emerged in the early 1970s to connect local ecological dilemmas with global political economy.
• Two main lines of research emerged:
  • An objective Nature with contesting actors over resources (more traditional political ecology).
  • Poststructuralist, constructivist approaches that deconstruct images of Nature and actor identities (Escobar 1999).
• The constructivist wing, while philosophically nuanced, has been criticized for under-emphasizing concrete capitalist extractivism and systemic power structures.
• Latour’s influence on political ecology has been criticized by Wilding (2010) and Söderberg & Netzén (2010) for over-emphasizing micro-level actor networks and under-emphasizing macro-level social structures like capitalism and state power.
• Hornborg argues that social power and material power are inseparable: societies negotiate meanings, generate unequal exchange, and enable people to exert power over one another, with non-human components recruited into networks but driven by human incentives and agency.
• All power relationships have material components; the challenge for social scientists is to expose how these material dimensions are obscured in hegemonic discourses and worldviews (e.g., unequal exchange of labour, energy, and biophysical resources) and how technological progress is a fetishised narrative that displaces environmental burdens.
• The Anthropocene narrative is gaining ground as a hegemonic worldview, but it must be engaged critically by social scientists to avoid ignoring the interlacing of material and social in globalized technologies.
• A post-Cartesian understanding of the Industrial Revolution should reframe political ecology: rather than looking for utopian technological fixes, we should examine how money functions as a social technology and how global capital uses technology to displace problems (labour and environmental loads) to cheaper areas.
• The goal is to critically rethink the role of general-purpose money and the structure of exchange in orchestrating unequal transfers of labour and natural resources across the world-system.

Undoing industrialism: redesigning money to curb globalization

• Hornborg asserts there is no biological necessity linking human biology to industrial capitalism; the crucial historical enabler was general-purpose money, which allowed the commensurability and interchangeability of diverse goods and labour in global markets.
• He argues that the “economic rationality” of globalization and industrialization could be redirected by redesigning monetary institutions to limit exchange to certain spheres, thereby reducing reliance on long-distance transport and fossil energy use.
• Proposed mechanism: introduce a special-purpose currency along with a universal basic income (UBI) that is tax-free and distributed monthly to every citizen, but restricted to purchases within a specified geographic distance from the point of purchase.
  • The new currency would circulate locally, fostering a parallel informal sector alongside the formal economy.
  • Each citizen would receive an amount that covers basic survival needs; individuals could still earn conventional money if they wish to pursue higher consumption.
  • Local farmers and entrepreneurs would be encouraged to accept the new currency for local labour, services, and goods; some of the currency could be converted back to conventional money at favorable rates by authorities.
  • The expected effect would be a drastic reduction in long-distance transport demand, contributing to lower energy use, emissions, and waste, while enhancing local biodiversity, resilience, and social cohesion.
• Practical considerations and scale of reform:
  • The amount of basic income and the conversion rate between currencies would need to balance entrepreneurs’ demands and the government’s tax revenue loss.
  • Examples of LETS-like local currencies exist, but broader, state-backed complementary currencies would require political will and institutional design.
  • The transformation is not about eliminating exchange but about reorienting it to reduce emissions and environmental degradation.
• What could prompt such systemic change?
  • The mainstream economy’s inability to resolve climate crisis and ecological limits could erode confidence in conventional market logic.
  • Plausible threats to prompt reform include:
  • A definitive collapse of the global financial system due to rising costs of energy and diminishing resources.
  • A global ecological crisis framed by planetary boundaries and biophysical limits.
• The broader aim is to consciously redesign money as a social sign system to reflect the intertwined nature of Society and Nature, moving away from abstract globalisation toward local, sentient relationships with the non-human environment.
• This approach envisions a more local, cooperative, and resilient economy, while acknowledging the need for global-level reforms and the possible phase-out of some high-footprint technologies.

Connections, implications, and concluding reflections

• Reframing technology as a socio-technical construct highlights the central role of power relations, global price dynamics, and unequal exchange in shaping what counts as “progress.”
• The Technocene concept directs attention to how global capitalism, rather than biology, structures emissions, resource flows, and technology diffusion.
• A post-Cartesian, transdisciplinary stance does not deny the value of natural science; rather, it seeks to integrate it with social theory to better understand and respond to crises.
• The critique of Latour and ANT emphasizes the need to maintain analytical clarity about the different kinds of agency: human intentionality, social structures, and material systems, while recognizing their interdependencies.
• The money redesign proposal foregrounds a concrete policy instrument for reducing ecological impact without abandoning market exchange, by reorienting exchange toward localities and reducing long-distance transport.
• Ethical and practical implications include questions of sovereignty, equity, political feasibility, and the potential unintended consequences of currency restrictions on innovation, global trade, and development.
• The chapter ultimately advocates for a radical rethinking of economics, technology, and governance to align human activity with ecological limits, while preserving the social capacities for coordination, cooperation, and innovation.

Key terms and concepts to remember

• Anthropocene vs Technocene: the author argues for Technocene to emphasize socio-technical dynamics and inequities rather than a species-wide biological narrative.
• Cartesian dualism: the once-clear separation of Nature and Society, now problematised but still analytically useful when interpreted as interacting realms.
• Technomass: the global assemblages of artefacts and infrastructures that constitute modern technology as a system-wide, power-lueled network.
• Unequal exchange: the global pattern by which wealth and energy/resource flows are redistributed through prices and labor disparities, enabling capital accumulation.
• Three artefact categories: local technology (keys), local magic (coins), globalised technology (global magic).
• Money as social architecture: general-purpose money enabled the Industrial Revolution; rethinking money could rewire global exchange patterns toward sustainability.
• Complementary currency: a proposed local monetary instrument tied to basic needs and geographic proximity to reduce long-distance transport.
• Federation of disciplines: transdisciplinarity bridging physics, economics, anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history to understand fossil-fuel capitalism.

Selected historical and theoretical references mentioned

• Crutzen (Geology of mankind) and the broader turn to Earth-system thinking.
• Descola (Beyond Nature and Culture) on the nature–culture boundary.
• Latour (We Have Never Been Modern; Politics of Nature; Facing Gaia) on agency, actants, and modernity.
• Malm and Hornborg (The geology of mankind?; Capitalocene concept in related debates).
• Wallerstein on the Modern World-System; foundational for world-systems analysis.
• Marglin (organic vs atomic propositions) and Keynes on the nature of economic truth vs. belief-driven propositions.
• Escobar (After Nature) and other political ecology literature.
• LETS and local currency experiments as precedents.

\Delta S \ge 0

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy (disorder) increases in an isolated system; Earth is not isolated, but this law remains a natural boundary condition affecting a fossil-fuel-based economy.

• As of 2008, less than

• An average American emits as much CO2 as ~500 average citizens of some nations in Africa/Asia.

• The year 1784 (Watt’s steam engine) is highlighted as a point where global price relations and imperial contexts made technological progress possible, not merely engineering ingenuity.

• The distance-based currency proposal factors include a monthly basic income, geographic distance constraints, and exchange-rate-based conversion rates to conventional money.

• The discussion of three artefact categories uses the terms: local technology (keys), local magic (coins), and globalised technology (global magic).

Quick study prompts

• What is the main critique of the Anthropocene in Hornborg’s framework?
• How does Hornborg define and differentiate between the three artefact categories?
• Why does Hornborg advocate naming the era the Technocene rather than the Anthropocene?
• How could complementary/local currencies realistically reduce long-distance transport and emissions?
• In what ways can/should social science engage with Earth system science according to the text?