The Anthropocene demands that we think technics and technology as historical mediations shaping economy, culture, power and the living world. Indeed, today it is impossible to think the human condition apart from the technical mediations that organize production, perception, communication and dwelling.
In a broad sense, technics refers less to tools or machines than to forms of know-how and of ordering collective life. Technology, by contrast, designates the modern crystallization of that knowledge into scientific-industrial systems, infrastructures and far-reaching artifacts. Lewis Mumford showed early on that the history of technics is inseparable from the history of culture: it is not enough to explain the appearance of new devices; one must understand the society that sets out to use them and to reorganize itself around them (Mumford, 1934/2020).
Similarly, for Karl Polanyi, industrial modernity implied not only a series of material innovations, but an institutional transformation that disembedded the economy from the social fabric. His critique of market society allows us to understand that modern technics was articulated with the commodification of labor and land, thus turned into “fictitious commodities,” and that the Industrial Revolution was also a “social invention” that subordinated life to market logic (Polanyi, 1944/2017). Thus, technologies condense political decisions, social hierarchies and ways of valuing the living, such that the relationship among technics, economy and society cannot be thought in terms of exteriority.
Bruno Latour and Michel Serres allow us to broaden this diagnosis. Latour proposes understanding the social as a network of associations between humans and non-humans, in which artifacts have distributed agency and participate in the production of the common; hence a philosophy of technology must study socio-technical assemblages and not only human intentions (Latour, 2005/2008). Serres, for his part, holds that the old social contract is insufficient in an age in which the physical world responds to our actions; he therefore calls for a “natural contract” that would re-inscribe politics, law and knowledge within the shared materiality of the Earth. Along the same lines, Flavia Costa proposes reading the present as the “Technocene”: a leap in scale in which highly complex technologies, structural inequality and ecosystem degradation make new “normal accidents” foreseeable (Costa, 2021).
The Meadows Report remains a key reference here, since it clearly formulated, in systemic terms, the conflict between exponential growth and a finite planet (Meadows et al., 1972). Consequently, if trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource use are not changed, the likely result is the overshoot of limits and the deterioration of living conditions.
Half a century later, climate science and the planetary boundaries framework reinforce the continued validity of that warning: human action has unequivocally caused global warming, and Earth’s stability depends on not exceeding interdependent biophysical thresholds. Hence the continued relevance of Jorge Riechmann, who insists that the way out does not lie
