What is the technological system?

The technological system is the set of buildings, infrastructures, factories and machines built since the first industrial revolution. It is a system in the sense that all its components are interconnected and controlled centrally. A change in the state or activity of one component influences the state or activity of the other components of the system. The development of a technical system of unparalleled complexity and power, with global ramifications, has led to an unprecedented upheaval in the evolution of life on Earth.

Several names exist to describe this system: technological or industrial (or even techno-industrial) system, industrial civilization (or thermo-industrial), technosphere, technotope, etc. The term “technological system” (or industrial) seems to us to be the most accessible and the most accurate.

General characteristics of the technological system

We have established a list of the characteristics of the techno-industrial system that radically differentiate it from the tools and techniques of the pre-industrial world. It would be difficult to provide an exhaustive list, so we think that these elements are sufficient to understand in general terms what the techno-industrial system is.

Infrastructure networks

This is probably the most defining characteristic of the techno-industrial system, the one that marks a total break with previous civilizations. Infrastructure networks now connect almost every place on the planet, even the most remote ones. There is virtually no place on Earth that is completely disconnected from global transport and communication flows.

These networks of various types have been superimposed on each other as technological developments have progressed. To organize the flow of goods effectively, to increase the speed and volume of exchanges, ever more efficient means of communication were needed. All of these networks are powered by power plants. These networks not only provide goods and services, they embody a new form of government for human societies by imposing total material dependence. Langdon Winner talks about “sociotechnical constitution”^[1] ”.

To go further:

• Technology rules us

The new Pangaea

Globalized transport infrastructures and machines in constant circulation create bridges between continents that have been separated for millions of years, forming a new Pangea. More than 90,000 commercial vessels carrying 10 billion tons annually ply the world's oceans and seas.^[2], including 28,000 cargo ships over 100 meters^[3]. More than 500 million trucks (800 million expected in 2040) drive on roads and highways around the world^[4]. And more than 27,000 commercial planes (36,000 expected in 2033) are scaring the sky in a deafening noise^[5].

The flows of materials, humans, and non-humans are so massive that they create huge disturbances for formerly isolated human and non-human communities. This phenomenon is largely responsible for the disappearance of the incredible biological and cultural diversity that still prevailed in the pre-industrial world. When cultures and species that have evolved separately for thousands of years are brutally brought into contact, many of them do not survive the shock.

Seeking to naturalize this homogenization of the world, the Technocracy generally associates these cultural extinctions with the action of natural selection. But any evolutionary biologist will tell you that evolution has a tendency to produce diversity, not uniformity. The recent standardization that we are witnessing cannot therefore be described as a simple continuation of biological evolution. It is something radically new: an anomaly, a cancer.

The technological environment replaces the natural environment (artificialization)

According to a study published in 2020 in the journal Nature, in 2020, the mass of all the buildings, machines and infrastructures of the techno-industrial system exceeded the mass of all living beings on Earth (plants, which account for 90% of the biomass, are included in this calculation).^[6]). The buildings and infrastructures necessary for industrialization tend to replace the organic, natural environment. The border between humans in the industrial age and the living world is becoming more and more airtight.^[7]. To this end, it should be remembered that the system covers the earth with concrete and bitumen at a staggering rate of 20 million hectares per year.^[8], an area of land equivalent to more than twice the size of Portugal that disappears every year.

Machines need to be made “specific worlds” for them, something well analyzed by Langdon Winner, using the example of the automobile.^[9]. A car works more efficiently on a smooth asphalt road than on a bumpy road in the Namib Desert. And the more the number of cars increases, the more it is necessary to develop their specific world, to establish new constraints to prevent accidents. The same was true for the railway, which required harmonizing the clocks of cities connected by the rail network in order to reduce the risk of collisions. More generally, the abandonment of natural cycles (day/night, seasons) for mechanical time was necessary to build an industrial production and transport system.

Extractivism

Any large-scale production requires extracting resources from the Earth's crust in industrial quantities (coal, metal ores, non-metallic minerals (mainly sand and gravel), etc.). In addition, there are the materials necessary for the construction and maintenance of buildings, energy, transport or communication infrastructures. In France alone, billions of tons of sand have been extracted on the territory for the construction of the road and highway network^[10]. This is why the industrial system is based entirely on innumerable material extraction sites — mines, farms to produce biomass (rubber, oils, wood, meat, fat, and others), not to mention oil and gas wells. The number of extraction sites is growing sharply to meet the global demand for materials.

The driving role of scientific research and engineering

Scientific research and engineering are the main drivers of the technological system. Very schematically, scientists are uncovering the laws of inert and organic matter^[11] ; engineers use it to build ever more efficient and powerful machines to dominate matter. Most of the time, experts and technicians have no idea — and in fact care very little — about the social and ecological implications of their work. Like many people in the industrial system, they are primarily concerned with satisfying personal psychological needs (need for social recognition, quest for power). This is probably what makes Jacques Ellul say, on the subject of technical progress, that it is a “phenomenon blind to the future, in a field of integral causality.^[12] ”.

Technocracy, the new social elite

Scientists and engineers are both architects and products of the industrial revolution. They derive their power, prestige, and privileges from the growth and maintenance of the industrial system. Most captains of industry in the 19th and 20th centuries were engineers, chemists, physicists, or otherwise associated with this type of profile. Let's mention Henry Ford the car magnate, the inventor Thomas Edison at the origin of General Electrics, Ernest Solvay, the Belgian chemist at the origin of the industrial empire of the same name, or the French chemist, doctor and politician Jean-Antoine Chaptal who worked hard to impose his polluting factories, and In fine the chemical industry in France. That is still the case today. Today billionaires, the founders of GAFAM all have an engineering background.

https://youtu.be/xgv4FQZIUxI?si=NCWkOAyqhxFL_P8U

The unconsciousness of scientists is palpable among the developers of artificial intelligence. In this documentary, the leaders of AI seem to be fully aware of the potential human and ecological disasters that this technology could cause. But they don't give a shit, because the satisfaction of their personal psychological needs comes before the common well-being.

Law of maximum efficiency

The quest for efficiency, which is the prerequisite for obtaining a surplus of power, has become a central value — if not THE central value — of the collective imagination in the industrial age. This pathological obsession is so pervasive that there are now all sorts of tools, techniques and applications to optimize one's personal life. It is necessary to eliminate the grains of sand in the cogs; optimize the human-machine to adapt it to the society-machine. And contrary to beauty or other moral considerations, effectiveness can be measured and quantified. There is no longer a choice between two methods, it becomes automatic. The most effective method — the method that makes it possible to make more money, to go further or higher, to strike harder or to grow more quickly — always wins.

In order to naturalize technical progress, the laudators of industrialism claim that the system would be the continuation of biological evolution. That is not the case. Species that reach a high level of efficiency and power create significant disturbances in biotopes (overpopulation, overexploitation, saturation with organic waste, etc.), and are generally quickly put back in their place by regulatory mechanisms (examples: epidemics, famines). In this perspective, the collapses of ancient civilizations following the artificialization of land, deforestation, the artificialization of rivers or the irrational exploitation of the land, can be considered as the result of regulatory mechanisms specific to evolution.

Energy production at all costs

Energy is the lifeblood of the techno-industrial system, but the similarities with a plant end there. When a tree redistributes a quantity of energy in its forest environment (dead leaves, dead wood, exchange of nutrients with other individuals via the root system), the technological system consumes all the energy in the environment for its sole benefit (example: to build new infrastructures and new machines). It only leaves barren land for living beings. Intensive agriculture illustrates this dynamic in a very good way. Biological diversity is eradicated in a territory in order to produce biomass or bioenergy on a large scale from a single species.

Power plants have become a major strategic issue, because the more energy you inject into the system, the more power you get. And power is precisely what the main transnational firms and industrialized nations are looking for in order to maintain their hegemony (example: the United States). And that's what their rivals are looking for in order to move up the hierarchy and impose their own dominance (example: China). Because of this competition, the very idea of reducing global energy production without dismantling the techno-industrial system seems completely absurd^[13].

An unbreakable system

Some people think they can separate the good effects of technology from the bad ones. Have butter and money. They dream of having nuclear energy without the atomic bomb, a modern health system without the constant threat of a pandemic, modern comfort without the contamination of global ecosystems. It is to deny the rigidity of the system, the laws guiding its operation, its very nature.

To go further, see our deciphers of the technical facts:

• ” Let's separate the good parts of tech from the bad ! ”

An Uncontrollable System

We have already touched on this point previously. The more industrialized society is, the more it operates according to the mechanical laws of the machine, the more the illusion of absolute control seems to plague people's minds. Technocracy, which excels in depoliticizing the social problems of which it is at the root, actively maintains this illusion of a possible piloting of the “spaceship Earth”^[14] ”.

However, it is plain to see that as industrialization progresses, the more the power and complexity of the system develops, and the more instability increases everywhere on Earth: the two biggest conflicts in history occurred in the 20th century; local conflicts erupt everywhere around the issues of raw materials; there have never been so many genocides and ethnocides^[15] ; industrial greenhouse gas emissions are disrupting the climate; industrial pollution is disrupting ecosystems; technological progress is constantly destabilizing society, communities, families; terrorism and organized crime are thriving thanks to new technologies; etc.

The explanation is simple. Human societies are complex systems, especially technologically advanced societies. It is impossible to predict how complex systems will react to changes. This inability to anticipate the evolution of a complex system makes it impossible to plan the development of a society.

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