HOW WE STARTED TO BELIVE IN TECHNOLOGY

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Industrial revolutions, starting in the 19th century, increased technology’s impact on our lives. The first revolution used coal and steam for mechanization. The second brought electricity, boosting production, comfort, and mobility. The third, driven by computation, created the digital age. [1] Now, the fourth Industrial Revolution integrates technology via the Internet, merging smart technologies like AI and robotics, enabling autonomous systems from driverless cars and food-ordering fridges. Decades ago, a phenomenon popularly known as ‘Moore’s Law’ was predicted, characterizing the remarkable exponential growth in the speed and capabilities of microchips. [2] Originally limited to the domain of semiconductors, this concept had evolved into a proxy for overall technological progress. As technology got smarter, it moved more and more from industry use into being in consumers’ hands and homes, making it part of a consumerist culture that framed new tech as outdated soon after consumption - well exemplified by Apple’s practice of launching new iPhone generations now twice annually. [3] This speed of renewal by shortened product replacement cycles was new and driven by quickly advancing technology [4]. Commercial interests advertised fast renewal or even established planned obsolescence, the practice of artificial shortening of product lifespans, commonly used in the market of consumer electronics [5]. With Moore’s prediction, technology became faster and faster in innovativeness and performance but also consumption and disposal.

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In 2021, long before ChatGPT gained global prominence, its inventor and AI pioneer, Sam Altman, released his own rendition of Moore, titled “Moore’s Law for Everything”. [6] Totalizing Moore’s concept towards everything, his manifesto concludes with a coercive theory: “A great future isn’t complicated: we need technology to create more wealth [...]”. This technocentric worldview is part of a common choir of ‘Techno Optimism’ [7], ‘Techno-determinism’ [8], or ‘Tech Solutionism’ [9]. In similar rhetoric, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt proclaimed in a seminal graduation speech at Berkeley University on the connectivity that the internet ushers in: “To connect the world is to free the world. So if we get this right, then we can fix all the other problems too.” [10] These perspectives share a common belief that technology has the potential to yield omnipotent solutions rather than being an actor in omnipresent problems.

THE LEADING NARRATIVE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Problems, there are plenty. Above many, a climate emergency that unequivocally resulted from human activities [11] which is intricately linked to technological progress. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, human actions have significantly hastened the pace of climate and environmental changes. The concurrent population growth, prompted by industrialization, necessitated expanded land use for agriculture and urbanization, which, in turn, led to extensive deforestation and environmental changes. With technological advancements came swift economic transformations, territorial expansions, unparalleled population growth, the emergence of urban centres, and a profound transformation of the global social fabric.[12] Architecture and construction industries play a grave role in that: the built environment as the centres of technological progress accounts for 39% [13] of gross annual carbon emissions worldwide and is widely recognized as a significant catalyst for biodiversity decline. [14]

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While technological advancements have clearly also brought helpful scientific advancements, it has propelled an era of tech-‘hyperconsumerism’ [15] in some societies of the world, at the cost of the earth’s resources all across the globe. [16] For the urban dweller in more developed countries, technology created a digital ‘on-demand economy’, boosted artificially by cheap financial capital that subsidized content, rides, and deliveries. [17] To consumers, technology became, first and foremost, a cheap enabler for an age of convenience. [18] Lubricated by convenience, the underlying patterns of (not only) environmental exploitation that technologies created were easily out powered. A common narrative on technology echoed in Eric Schmidt and Sam Altman’s statements framed technology as creating omnipotent solutions. The internet historian Evgeny Morozov has rightly questioned [19] this focus on solutionism, polemically framing contemporary tech-offerings as ‘solutions searching for a problem’ [20]. Consumer culture made tech solve problems that were merely matters of (in)convenience framed round ‘smartness’. Technological smartness grew to become a sociotechnical imaginary [21] - but one that was often tied to the powerful discursive dominance of large tech companies. [22] [23] [24] [25] From smartphones to smart buildings to smart cities [26], smartness and its persuasive convenience in many areas created a vulnerability towards passiveness and loss of agency of citizens as actors. The phone, the building, the city knows and acts covertly and autonomously, providing tailored convenience to users. And consumers buy in:  household penetration of smart home technology is expected to double within three years only. [27] Referring to this loss of agency embedded in smartness, Patrick Lecomte, Professor for Real Estate at Université du Québec à Montréal describes it as:

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 “Algorithms are concerned with the predictability of human behaviour, things happen passively to the occupants of smart buildings. Their role is limited to receiving stimuli whilst the invisibility of the technology maintains their illusion that they have sole control over their actions. These human-built environment interactions erode our will to take action, replacing it with desires shaped and calibrated by models over which we have no control. By denying the free will of their occupants, smart buildings challenge the right to action that the German philosopher Hannah Arendt defines as one of the most fundamental rights of humans, the one that differentiates us from animals”. [28]

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While this statement focuses on smart buildings, it exemplifies an abundant effect of technological smartness and its persuasive appropriation of sustainability narratives more generally, too:  wherever we transfer agency from human actors to the abstract domain of technology, this passiveness and loss of agency risk detachment from the underlying structural and systemic problems. Highly political matters, such as the urgency for a fundamental rethinking of stakeholder agency within architecture and urban planning in times of climate crisis and what is discussed as ‘climate injustice’ [29] are made to appear ‘solvable’ by technology. The imaginary of smartness as a problem-solver herein appropriates and over-simplifies the complexities within the concepts of sustainability and shifts agency towards the seemingly value-natural domain of technology [30], depoliticizing the discursive space on the matter [31].

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Such trends are represented and conceptualized by a wealth of theories, narratives and schools of thought such as most prominently the ‘Ecomodernism movement’ which theorizes a seemingly unambiguous belief that technology could solve mankind’s ecological crisis. This apparent theorem is deeply embedded in contemporary culture. It has, thus, been labelled the ‘leading narrative of the Anthropocene’ [32].

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THE TOLL OF TECHNOLOGY

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Applied to architecture and urban planning, ecomodernist narratives imply a causation relationship between applying more ‘green technology’ and more ecological issues being solved. This, too, lays bare the contradictory aspects of technology as the omnipotent enabler for so-called ‘green architecture’ [33] and green cities because it uncritically perpetuates the impetus of ‘more’ and ‘renewal’. In its modernist tradition and regardless of intentions, it cannot but embody deeply neoliberal paradigms as it leaves established patterns of human behaviours, consumption, and exertion of power unquestioned. [34] Quite practically, the individual commercial interests of a few become the more immediate beneficiaries of a supposedly green and tech-centric renewal instead of the communities most directly affected by the climate crisis. As we merely increase our penchant for replacement in the field of green architecture identically to consumer electronics, we continue to increase the burden on the earth’s finite resources and contribute more harmful waste to landfills. [35] 

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Any tech infrastructure, for convenience or efficiency, comes with an often overlooked environmental cost. They don’t function without their screens, circuitry, batteries, or energy-intensive data centres. [36] Regardless of their intentions, every bit of tech represents a toll on the planet along its value chains. Specific to these technologies is the use of Rare Earth Elements (REEs), without which the intended smartness cannot be achieved. Their extraction from the earth - mostly in parts of the world with low to no environmental protection in place, such as China [37] emissions from its transport and processing, and later its disposal as e-waste [38] in its afterlife stands out as a significant contributor to ecological harm. [39] Even in important and intentionally green technologies, such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, and low-energy lighting, there is growing concern about the environmental impacts caused by the mining and production of REEs. [40] Largely unaffected by that concern, tech is creeping into our buildings more and more - and changing the way we build. In a similar manner as described for the consumption of technology today, newer buildings have a life expectancy that is 45% shorter than the average lifespan. When a century ago, a residential building was expected to have a lifespan of over 300 years, recent modelling [41] predicts only just over 50 years for a residential building built today.

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While renewal technically is an opportunity to build better and greener buildings sooner, architects must obtain a holistic meta-assessment of impact and consider the effect of the built form’s ‘embodied’ [42] environmental toll [43]. Consequently, the more we tend to reduce the lifespan of buildings as we do so with the technology in them, the more we shorten the cycles at which we extract and dispose. Sheer renewal alone is not a strategy for sustainability. And wherever employed in that way, it has merely become a commercial term with its own commercial interests narrating a ‘brochure-friendly image of sustainability’ [44]  often adopted by developers to mask the ecological imbalance caused.

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In this way, developers are harnessing ‘green premiums’ based on voluntary eco-labels [45] or green ratings [46], thereby “influencing consumer preferences, supplier production, and the overall market supply and demand” [47]. Politics at the same time responded, too, as governments have more and more legislated to create mandatory environmental rating systems [48] for the built environment. Green architecture, loaded with smart technology solutions, has become an evocative term, a globally-advertised vernacular, a go-to approach in architecture, which promises to tick the boxes of powerful stakeholders’ interests and reflect contemporary worldviews. At the macro-level, there has been a more or less uncontested consensus created by stakeholders powerful enough to dominate that discourse. Within the interplay of urban–politico–economic dynamics [49] this mainstream societal discourse as discussed by Hammond has elevated sustainability [50] to the status of a largely meta consensual concept in politics [51]and public discourse. A highly political matter, in need of a diverse debate about fundamental systemic questions, has therein been reduced to what Human Geographers such as Prof. Erik Swyngedouw have described [52], as “the administration and management of processes whose parameters are defined by consensual socio-scientific knowledge”.

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THE DISCOURS OF "GREENNESS"

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Under this consensus, goals tend to be narrated at a high degree of abstraction (such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [53] or as abstract numerical targets for climate governance (such as targets for national greenhouse gas emission reductions) [54]. Abstraction acts as a form of simplification and is central to the scripting of political narratives of sustainability goals. [55] They are powerful as they come with “the systematic removal of the persons, places, and trajectories of the people being evaluated by the indicator and the people doing the evaluation”. [56]

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Abstract, commercial, and technology-centric framing, as part of a ‘discursive selectivity’ [57] around sustainability, as well as the appropriation of sustainability by a ‘commerce regime’ (see Bruno Latour’s Essay “To Modernize or to Ecologise?”) [58]and techno-managerial approaches by policymakers, must be scrutinized. They construct powerful technoscientific imaginaries [59] that are accepted and become unquestioned common sense. [60]  A narrative so convenient in the promises and so abstract and selective in its framing can form the foundations of a societal unification and standardization in which antagonist interests and perspectives are subordinated and negated. [61] All while these consensus are being established on the back and in spite of unaddressed profound ethical, social, and political dimensions of sustainability. This embodies a process of de-politicization of the discourse. [62] 

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Embedded in or veiled as meta-consensual metaphors, technocentric narratives of sustainability in architecture and urban planning tend to widen the divergence and detachment between human actors with their accrued patterns of power and consumption and the underlying patterns of exploitation of planetary resources. The more sustainability appropriates the language of competitiveness and growth – and vice versa –, the more conventional and convenient it becomes for societies to wilfully and uncritically hand over urgently needed agency to technology.
 

GREEN TECHNOLOGY ACROSS ALL SCALES OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 

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Beyond smart buildings or smart cities, at a planetary scale, this can be seen in the emergence of utopian geoengineering scenarios, in which ‘speculative architects’ [63] imagine smart mega-infrastructures and cities to ‘clean’ the earth of its man-made pollution. (For example, through Direct Air Capture (DAC) of greenhouse gases.) ‘Speculative architects’ like Liam Young at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 [64], render scenarios in which humans live in mega-urban-clusters, each inhabiting billions of people, while rewilding the rest of the globe. Such speculations imagine and narrate a scenario of reversing climate change. Such approaches envision creating the largest-ever machines to clean the large mess machines created in the first place, taking tech-solutionism to the planetary scale. Today’s scientific assessment, however, does not allow us to expect success: even such mega-technology at scale (like DAC) cannot alone save the world from climate change. [65] [66]

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Such speculations project the ultimate problem-solving power of an existential and anthropogenic crisis to technology at a mega scale. The tendency towards this belief can be seen in collective media narratives that employ overarching ‘master metaphors’ [67] of geoengineering as planetary utopianism. Framings on geoengineering are often shaped by a kind of mindset that simplifies the universe into a vast repository of commodities and services ripe for complete and effective exploitation by human interests and technological rationality. [68] So untrue - so persuasive.
 

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT VERSUS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE

All that has formed a hegemonic idea, a mostly uncritically perpetuated auto-response at all scales of design and engineering, that epitomized that progress inherently implied creating or applying more technology. For a few hundred years, driven by the development of the Enlightenment giving way for the scientific and technology-centric industrial revolution, a culturally Eurocentric perspective has amalgamated Capitalism and Colonialism to overwrite a wealth of indigenous knowledges, that for too long have been regarded as primitive. [69] This tradition of thought – expressed by the likes of Immanuel Kant – conceptualized this transition to be “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” [70] But facing today’s ecological crisis, alternative sets of knowledge, provide valid proof that alternative strategies are available, such as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) [71]. Today, indigenous communities protect 80% [72] of the planet’s total biodiversity, giving evidence to the large scale of impact that shifting paradigms away from tech-centricity can unlock. Applying Kant’s statement to today’s ecological dead-end of an uncritical relationship to technology as the sole agent of progress, architects, engineers, policymakers, and the general public need to ‘emerge’ further from their ‘self-imposed immaturity’, by harnessing the wealth of local indigenous knowledge available to respond locally to the challenges posed by climate change.  

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TECHNOLOGY IS NOT VALUE-NEUTRAL

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Both a technology-centricity as well as the abstraction and rationalization that shape public discourse reflect a philosophical theory that renders technology inherently ‘value-neutral’ [73] and thus would not embody layers of moral or other value [74]. Enveloped within this myth of neutrality [75], technology conveniently presents itself as a discursive tool for commercial and political purposes by depoliticizing the issue. 

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It is, thus, no surprise that visions of new cities now almost all encompass an eco-city narrative derived from technological ‘smartness’. Throughout the last 20 years, more than 40 countries have initiated the establishment of entirely new cities. [76] A growing share of these promote their concept using some form of the descriptor ‘eco-city’ (from Mexico to Kuwait and the Ivory Coast). Among the most renowned and extravagant are projects like Saudi Arabia’s ‘The Line’, the vision of a city called Telosa presented by billionaire Marc Lore, and popstar Akon’s ambitious but challenged endeavour, Akon City in Senegal. All these projects have garnered attention due to their climate-oriented tech solutions, including concepts like flying autonomous electric vehicles or seemingly implausible heat-reflecting mirrored city walls. [77] 

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In contrast to the label ‘eco’, the construction of gigantic air-conditioned mega-cities in the deserts, a project such as Saudi Arabia’s The Line would release 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, equally much as three years of Saudi Arabia’s total annual emissions. [78] And beyond emissions and destruction of natural ecosystems on socio-political level, occurrences like death sentences for protesting residents of local Bedouin tribes [79]who resisted eviction, give evidence to the power structures driving political and economic  interests behind some of these tech-centric utopias of eco-cities. 

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Nudging construction of entirely new buildings decades earlier than needed, envisioning new cities in the deserts displacing unwanted local, often tribal or indigenous communities to attract a global crowd as residents instead, or mega geoengineering-infrastructures as seemingly ultimate solution-machines manifests the impetus of ‘renewal’ at all scales of the built environment.

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This ’fetishization’ of the new – thought along the lines of Marx’ ‘Commodity fetishism’ [80], Debord’s ‘Spectacle’ [81] or Freud’s ‘Fetish desire’ [82] – represents an obscure hierarchy of value towards the ‘new’. [83] Drawing from the anthropological notion of a fetish, which pertains to a sacred or symbolic object believed to possess supernatural powers according to its devotees [84], all alternative strategies for tackling climate change effectively and more sustainably than to follow the gospel of new are subjugated in the hierarchy of value. As such, this dogma echoes definitions of modernism when it is described as “a ‘mania’ for the new’’ [85] lending the terminology of ‘mania’ from psychiatric vocabulary which defines it as an “abnormal or unusual state of excitement“. [86] 

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TECHNOCENTRICITY AND POWER

So why is this unusual state of excitement so unchallenged? Why are we reliving a modernist mania for the new as in the form of today’s ecomodernism? None of the material formations or societal configurations of modernism were inevitable. Instead, they represented specific social and cultural “commitments affirmed at a particular moment in time, choices about what the ‘good life’ ought to include, choices embedded in a collection of contingent technological styles“ [87]. Societies (both of the global north and south, if we consider that most eco-city projects are located in developing countries) seem to have agreed to the technocentric consensus without much criticism, accepting it as ideology. Deflecting criticism towards the hegemony of a technocentric consensus as noted by Connelly [88], engages in an exercise of power in a way that is identified by critical theorists as ideology. Constituents of this ideology chose to construct this hierarchy that conveniently handed over agency [89] to solve our planetary problems with technology. Hence, the concept of ideology can serve as a critical lens to elucidate the outlined phenomena as ideology typically operates as a discrete form of power, coercing individuals into adopting false belief systems that validate the existing structure while concealing its inconsistencies. [90] [91] Hammond adds a helpful account of this framework of ideology as “delud[ing] actors about their actual interests and their visions of a good life“ and masking the structural power pervading the functioning of social structures. [92]

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CHALLENGING THE TEMPTATION OF TECHNOLOGY

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Technology was successful in yielding the ‘good life’ of convenience. Not only practically wherever smart technologies increase convenience in our buildings or cities. But most of all, it offered the convenient temptation for society to be able to disclaim agency in the response to the climate crisis shifting it to the realm of a supposedly value-neutral technology that incentivizes blind spots for unsustainable human behaviours, exertion of commercial power over vulnerable communities, opportunistic techno-managerial politics and the effects of climate injustice. Therefore it needs urgent rethinking. Firstly, architects, political actors, and society at large need to come to conceptualize the physical environments they build, their materialities, and even their imaginaries as nowhere near value-neutral. Referring to Miller [93], it must be argued that “by virtue of their material properties no technological artefact is value-neutral. Everything we build is strongly imbued in normative moral and political order”. From smartphones to smart buildings to smart cities. Practitioners need to more strongly identify buildings not as static entities or standardized static objects but as dynamic materialities and politics that together form what is discussed (eg. by McGuirk 2015) as ‘material politics’. [94] [95] [96] [97] Much along the lines of the theoretical turn of architecture towards ‘practicing architectures’ [98], architects and other stakeholders need to identify the built environment not as a productised “accomplishment (or artefact) of human doing, but as an ongoing process of holding together”. Green architecture too often articulates its greenness by metrics of value and sustainability KPIs that are enacted upon completion of the building. Like a product, this narrows the focus on the moment of consumption and its momentary market dynamics. Conceptualized from a meta-perspective, truly green architecture, is and must be the collective and democratic process of response to the planetary challenges in the context of a particular site where the completed structure is the mere result of that consultation. The process matters more than its product. The planet’s ecosystems and all human communities must be seen as stakeholders of varying degrees in this response in every single piece of architecture – and likewise of technology. Green architecture in some cases can also be the ‘un-built-environment’, if ‘not building’ is the best response on a site. That decision, too, must be a possible architectural response. Every one of our responses needs to be confident to stand the test against the idea that “the greenest building is the one we don’t build.” [99] Surely an extreme but cathartic point of reference. In that process, it is of utmost importance that our responses need to foremostly redistribute agency and re-politicize the matter by dethroning the paradigm of convenience. Technology can and must help in doing so when used purposefully as a means to drive agency, democracy, and transparency in that process. In doing so, architectural practitioners, political actors, and society need to oppose the creeping depoliticizing of sustainability that is embedded in the unquestioned mania for renewal and techno-solutionism and redirect attention to alternatives, such as the wealth of indigenous knowledge. Summed up as Swyngedouw [100] put it: “From Environmentalizing Politics to Politicizing the Environment”. I add: to politicizing technology in our built environments and beyond. 

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