Description
My paper is on technology fetishism. To give context, in the introduction I analyse Britain's decarbonisation programme. While auguring major economic transformations, it is heavily geared to speculative technologies such as synthetic aviation fuel and carbon capture. These are proven at small scale but scaling up takes decades. The complexity of even one such programme is enormous; they cannot be compared to missions of “targeted specificity” such as the moonshot. Yet this is precisely the comparison that US climate envoy John Kerry drew earlier this year. Technologies will spring forth, he promised. This mindset, technology fetishism, prevails within elite responses to climate change. It is powerfully influential yet has attracted relatively little social-scientific attention. In this paper I present a Benjaminian account of technology fetishism and apply it to the climate-political field. I provide conceptual clarification on the concept of tech fetishism, via a critical survey of thinkers that include Marx and Freud, Walter Benjamin, David Harvey and Alf Hornborg. I deploy the concept of technology fetishism—Benjaminian at heart but enriched through the work of these other authors —to explore the crisis of climate policy today.
