Technology won’t save the planet
A critical review of ‘The Age of Low Tech: towards a technically sustainable civilization’ by Philippe Bihouix
Bihouix, P. (2014). L’âge des low tech: Vers une civilisation techniquement soutenable. Paris: Éd. du Seuil.
During the last four decades, we have been constantly surpassing the Earth Overshoot Day[1], the moment of the year when all regenerative resources for a year are depleted and we start consuming what belongs to the next years. Even so, each day we face a rush of advertising encouraging vain consumption, analysts concerned about the slow growth prospects, and journalists covering, with no critical eye, how technology is solving every single flaw of our system. I decided to read Philippe Bihouix’s The Age of Low Tech (L’Âge des Low Tech) because the systematic exploration of alternatives to that blind faith in technology to solve environmental problems has not been a widely debated topic. If there is a wide production of low tech literature, most of it is less scientific and more pamphlet-like. Additionally, try searching for “low tech” and “high tech” in Google Scholar, just to see the enormous differences in citations among the top articles. True, high tech literature does not treat the same topics as low tech literature. The former includes a mix of every subject that uses cutting edge technology, while the latter mostly deals with the promotion of the concept and its applications. But that is ultimately the point: no one has to convince others about the benefits of high tech, it is embedded in social and economic practices. Even more, as a technology and public policy student, I have come to learn how misled we have been by tech discourse[2], so the idea of building a simpler, slower, humbler, and sustainable future is appealing.
From that stance, The Age of Low Tech is mostly deceiving. I would broadly describe it as an introduction to slow tech, a book for a general audience who is just confronting other possible alternatives, who just discovered the reality hidden by mainstream discourse. Bihouix takes his position as a technical expert in scarce resources to clear up the view: facts do not support our present system and, with some imagination and a switch of some values based on sobriety, we could build a new, still comfortable, reality.
The analytical perspective
Nevertheless, I must admit that the expectations for this type of ‘resistance’ literature are quite high. Not to be called naive, an idealist, or a smoke seller, he who dares to propose an alternative system should cover all technical, political, economic, social, and cultural factors, including a plan for the transition. Even more, our current neoliberal rationality is severe in judging alternatives when they don’t manage to fit the homo economicus. Bounded rationality is the standard for judgment.
But being critical of rational choice theory and its reluctance to proposals containing other rationalities does not distance me from the tools it offers to make a realistic assessment of low tech. As I will discuss in the following paragraphs, my reading of The Age of Low Tech has been crossed by rational choice institutionalism as a heuristic device to critically evaluate its arguments.
General book overview
Philippe Bihouix takes the opposite position to the cornucopian school, which believes in the continuous progress of humanity through technological advancement. Bihouix defends de-growth, but he is not a collapsologist. He argues that the current system is unsustainable and that its essence must be challenged, building an alternative system based on the opposite values of high-tech. “Since the high-tech system goes into the wall (or towards the cliff, don’t quibble) why not try something else, take the opposite way and turn to the low tech?”[3]. In the first part of the book, Bihouix makes well-grounded documentation of the contradictions and limitations of today’s economic system. He refutes the key argument of cornucopians which goes on to say that capitalism and technology have always found a way to solve constraints through innovation. The problem with this position is that, even if we manage to solve the next crisis, the cost of extracting new non-renewable resources does not stop increasing and it will arrive a moment when it will not be any more profitable to do it.
Even more, putting faith in technology has problematic socio-technical consequences. Namely, the rebound and park effects. The first refers to the interrelation between the decrease in the cost of technologies and the increased efficiency they allow for resource use[4]. The author presents several examples of how technological improvements have led to a permanent increase in resource consumption, and not the contrary. This is the case of the ‘Jevons Paradox’. On the other side, the park effect refers to the replacement rate of old pollutant technologies and the quick deployment of new, clean ones. For Bihouix, the observed replacement rates make impossible to rely on technological updates, if we want to reduce resource consumption. All these elements have led to a triple dead end: of unsustainable exploitation of resources, increased pollution (including CO2 emissions), and depletion of natural spaces for artificial materials, particularly hard surfaces.
As growth and high-tech are not viable options, the question then is about forced or chosen de-growth. Collapse is a possibility, so Bihouix suggests we should anticipate it. Orienting towards the low tech is assuming an ethical stance to not let the world fall into collapse. This is particularly explored in the second part of the book that describes an ethical framework of low technologies. One valuable thing we learn is that opting for low tech is not a rational and technical consequence of the established political and economic logic. We need to alter the main decision rationale for it to work. That is, making sobriety a permanent criteria for choice. Almost the rest comes as a consequence of it and the book follows this logic, seeking to prove that it is possible to live with sobriety, without returning to the Middle Age. This extends to say that there is not properly a state of low tech, but a process of lower-tech, where the principle of sobriety is continually extended into new areas.
Up to this point, the book is rather illustrative and provocative. A well-conceived first part nevertheless contrasts with the second, which delves more in philosophy than in science. The growing enthusiasm for reaching the promised age of low tech is, however, not well compensated with what happens in the last two parts. The third part of the book makes a shallow review of applied low tech in different fields such as agriculture, transportation, finance, technologies, among others. The fourth part talks about the transition and how four main constraints (employment, change in a globalized world, culture, and morals) may be tackled to make change possible.
The supply-demand debate
These two parts are the source of the main problem I find in The Age of Low Tech. The book shows that the technical side of the problem could be covered, but we are rather facing a political and economic problem. We are in a crossroads of inaction. The world is saturated with technical alternatives but lacks political imagination. I would agree that reading this book in 2019, five years after its publication, is an issue. We have gone through various COPs, new IPPC reports, increasing global temperatures, and, with mass protests and motionless political leaders, an adverse political scenario for environmental protection. Specialized audiences could say they have had enough illustration. But even if we were not specialists, even if we are just discovering low techs, this question about scale and collective, coordinated action remains.
This is problematic in two ways. In the first place, the economic mechanisms to push for action are not clear. The book is full of “it should be…” and “it is necessary…” language. Even if mail marketing, cars, or programmed obsolescence are products and practices that should be replaced by others, making that change in a market democracy is the real challenge. Much of the proposals are good wills that can only be implemented in a dictatorial system.
Bihouix is nevertheless cautious about this, he recognizes much of these proposals, if simply mandated, would become liberticidal, so he adopts an ethical and moral stance, talking to individuals, pushing for changes first at the personal level. Someone should renounce to using the car by self-constraint, than by an external obligation. But this is the source of a second problem, an ambiguous consideration of supply and demand approaches for implementation. The author is explicitly against a certain type of supply-side ecologists that push for green-growth solutions (e.g. replacing classic electric plants for renewable ones), and instead is in favor of demand-side ecologists that would push for de-growth solutions (e.g. unplugging televisions). This perspective heads in the right perspective, but, by focusing on this particular demand-side solutions, misses the discussion about collective and coordinated action.
Collective action is an absent topic in The Age of Low Tech. How are we going to coordinate the change in the demand side that the book is pushing for? In a moment of crisis and urgent action, a leadership discussion is much needed. This will certainly not come through conscious persons who have read this kind of literature and, one by one will start making a change in the world. The individualistic perspective has, at least in 2019, proven short. Collective action will either need to come through social organization and direct action or through supply-side mechanisms. Indeed, by rejecting the supply-side ecologists, Bihouix misses the most relevant position to push for systemic, overarching changes. It is not only possible but necessary to be a de-growth advocate on the supply side. For example, when mentioning the Jevons Paradox, Bihouix position is fatalistic. Nevertheless, States can find mechanisms to discourage additional consumption when resource use gains are achieved through innovation. This might legitimate technological innovation, but low tech literature needs to explore how the modesty and sobriety perspectives might also be applied to high tech developments. Another example has to do with the banking and financial systems, their dependence on permanent and growing credit, and the effect this has on economic growth. Bihouix does not consider, for instance, increasing the cash reserve ratio, as a measure to reduce secondary emission. This type of simple (although polemic) measures are in line with low tech principles, but as they belong to the State and public policy, they do not enter into the book’s reflections.
This is symptomatic of the lack of consideration given to the design of new institutions. The Age of Low Tech, as happens with mainstream low tech literature, speaks to the individual, but presents a set of proposals that cannot be attained by individuals. This is what happens, for example, in its Epilogue where the book calls for resistance. “Resistons”, it says. Yes, a new type of resistance, but resistance after all. It is the same script social movements have been following for decades. One may resist injustice, but building a better future requires organization.
Finally, on this issue also comes about the globalization discussion proposed by Bihouix. He does bring some interesting points, admitting the difficulties a low tech agenda will face in a globalized world. On the one side, there is a prisoner dilemma because a wide, early adoption of slow techs will probably make an economy more vulnerable to others. The first mover could lose, except if he manages to create a standard that others will need to adopt, as it happened with the United Kingdom after the abolition of slavery in the mid-XIX century. Here the key factor was the UK, the most powerful country at the time. Today, any type of slow tech adoption will necessarily pass by the United States, and this question is not even touched by the book. This will certainly require complex political processes, and to do it, more collective action.
But the other side of the globalization debate left unfinished by Bihouix is the type of international, multi-stakeholder coordination that should happen to push for these types of changes. This is inexistent in the book. Without more solid and tangible institutional mechanisms (even at the advocacy level), it will be difficult to even envision a minor adoption of low tech. As a philosophy and an ethical stance towards life, it could remain a niche phenomenon, but the planetary crisis calls for scale.
The digital question
For its publication year, The Age of Low Tech brings some remarkable insights into the understanding of the environmental impact of digital technologies. As a high tech, digital technologies are questioned in various parts of the book, both for their environmental direct impact as for their indirect contribution to the acceleration of the traditional economy.
Facts do not support the idea of zero marginal cost expressed by Jeremy Rifkin or Albert Wenger. “Once a piece of information is on the Internet, it can be accessed from anywhere on the network for no additional cost”[5], says Wenger. “That additional YouTube video view? Marginal cost of zero. Additional access to Wikipedia? Marginal cost of zero. Additional traffic report delivered by Waze? Marginal cost of zero.”[6]
Nonetheless, the French think-tank The Shift Project estimates that, by 2020, digital technologies would emit 4% of greenhouse gases or twice the emissions of air transportation[7]. This is represented in the energy required to keep data flowing, cooled data centers, and technological equipment production. Additionally, there is the question of the increasing material complexity hardware requires, depending each time more on rare materials, and using such small quantities per unit that it is almost impossible to recycle the materials.
So the direct environmental impact of digital technologies is a non-negligible reality. The biggest problem might come through their indirect impacts, although they are more difficult to measure. To Bihouix, the potential to build a smarter and more efficient economy through digital technologies is surpassed by the acceleration of the present, traditional economy through digital tech. A sample of this is that our pollution and resources consumption levels are higher today than they were before the massification of digital technologies.
Bihouix’s critical diagnostic goes beyond the environmental. He takes a holistic approach and explores different other related consequences of high tech. Reflecting on the nature of work in a mechanized and automated context, he points out that “because it always takes a human being to carry out maintenance and supply spare parts, it is even more so since the system is complex because there is also the one who ensures the maintenance of the tool of the maintainer, and so on”[8]. This is at the same time matched by the de-localizable jobs a digitally connected world facilitates. The matter is then not about job loss through technology, but about its transformation. This reflection matches the recent work published by Antonio Casilli, En Attendant les Robots, where, using novel qualitative data, he uncovers the recent myth of the great replacement of jobs by Artificial Intelligence. What is truly happening is the digitization and precarization of labor. The digital context as we know it then is problematic both for the acceleration of environmental impacts and the precarization of human labor.
Ultimately, this section exemplifies a recurring problem in The Age of Low Tech: good diagnostics do not match the roadmap for implementing solutions. In this case, Bihouix only proposal is adopting a sense of digital austerity. I would argue that a deeper exploration of institutional mechanisms (including complex digital ones like special software, sensing, and smart contracts) would provide a richer contribution to this debate.
The book’s legacy
I have been arguing that The Age of Low Tech paints a clear picture of ‘low tech’, but leaves ‘The Age’ promise midway through. Nevertheless, although not expressed by the author, I understand this book’s main contribution as a recognition of the problems and alternative principles at hand, based on Axel Honneth’s notion of recognition as the central element of social conflicts. The individual application of its teachings is possible and desirable. The collective scenarios it depicts are nothing more than a utopia.
One other way to describe this piece is as ‘draft ecology’: written experimentations of a desirable situation, this time strengthening a new ecological approach based on sobriety, the recognition of material limits of technology, and that solutions should be socio-technical, not technologic. But it is not enough yet to build a new paradigm. Probably it will be up to Bihouix’s most recent book, Le Bonheur était pour demain, where his message could begin to take a political content. But on what concerns The Age of Low Tech, I read on its pages the desperate cry of an engineer that sees the madness we live in, presenting a hard and critical diagnosis, but lacking concrete operationalizable solutions for a complex political and economic context.
Footnotes
[1] https://www.overshootday.org/
[2] Zapata, Ricardo (2019). “A new social contract or a mere blank check?”, https://medium.com/@RZapataL/a-blank-check-or-a-new-social-contract-28077b0828f0
[3] P. 113
[4] Note that this concept is neutral about the ultimate variability in resource consumption.
[5] Wenger, A (2018). World After Capital: Digital Technology (Zero Marginal Cost). https://continuations.com/post/170801220375/world-after-capital-digital-technology-zero
[6] Ibid.
[7] The Shift Project (2019). « Climat : l’insoutenable usage de la vidéo en ligne » : le nouveau rapport du Shift sur l’impact environnemental du numérique https://theshiftproject.org/article/climat-insoutenable-usage-video/
[8] P. 162.
