Appitalism

One-and-done technological fixes are a civilisational dead end

When I started writing this, my first line was: we’re living through the greatest stalling of progress in human history.

Then I realised that’s wrong. This civilisation isn’t stalling, it’s being pushed nose-down to the ground. The end of progress is being wilfully directed.

I mean actual progress. Not privatised space rockets types of progress, or virtual reality metaverse types of progress, or latest phone that ‘speaks’ to your heating system that ‘speaks’ to your car type of progress.

I mean the kind of progress responsible for shaping your fate from the moment you’re born.

I mean sewage treatment progress, clean water progress, mass vaccination programmes progress.

The types of progress that have slashed your chance of dying in childhood 30 fold in a generation.

That type of progress is over. And it has happened in our time, with barely a whimper. I often talk about the decline in life expectancy without spelling out what that really means: the chance that you, random average person, will die younger has risen globally for two years in a row. Which might be a surprise to many.

The one-and-done tendency

We were continuously told covid only kills the old. It didn’t. It doesn’t. It’s true covid kills more people 79 years old or over than people in any other age bracket, but if these were the only people dying, life expectancy wouldn’t be declining. The average life expectancy in most European countries is 79-81 years of age for males and females. If excess deaths were only being registered among people already at the top end of life expectancy, it wouldn’t drag down the all-population average. And these historic life expectancy declines are happening with barely a flicker of interest. And almost no media coverage.

Why? I think it is something to do with the structure of the political economy in 2023. A blend of capitalism, ideas of progress, technology, and post-modernity has led our culture towards one-and-done technological interventions in the face of deep crisis.
This desire for one-and-done technological fixes is a central feature (and terminal weakness) of our late capitalist, deep industrial political economy.

We could call it appitalism.

If we can’t break out from this mode, we’re toast. Well, if we can’t change our leaders who set this mode, we’re toast. Because they are the one-and-doners, desperately clawing for any false solutions that avoid meaningfully changing the system.

The pandemic has been a great example of this one-and-done tendency. I think we can forget how the first few months went. A sense of genuine global crisis saw the initiation of sweeping economic and social interventions. Evictions were banned in many countries; creditors were forbidden from chasing debtors; the homeless were found homes; people were effectively given a universal basic income. For a few months, our political leaders showed us that the barriers to doing the right thing to ensure people had decent conditions in which to exist were all fictional.

They were stories of impossibility told to limit our imaginations and stop us demanding new ways of organising society.

For a very brief moment, the science behind a crisis won. But by the very nature of the political economy we live under, it couldn’t last. These interventions were merely biding time for the technological solution that would mean everything could go back to normal. When that technological solution was perceived to have arrived in the form of vaccines, political and business leaders ended all the structural interventions, desperate as they were to get back to profits-as-usual. The arrival of the technology signalled the end of the crisis, and the restart of the brutality. And what a brutal restart it has been. Mass infection, constant sickness and record excess death, with ongoing early death looking likely to drag down life expectancy for a third year in a row.

The same one-and-done dynamic plays out in the climate and ecological sphere.

The elites tell us that the solution to climate change is renewable energy. If we just build more and more renewable infrastructure climate change will end.

Well no. You have to stop the bad thing first. You have to stop the fossil fuel infrastructure and the machines from belching out greenhouse gas emissions. And that isn’t happening.

Despite a massive amount of new renewable infrastructure being added to global power capacity, fossil fuel emissions are hitting record levels. Renewable energy is adding to the overall energy base of this civilisation, not replacing the dirty source at scale. Because that requires deep structural change. That requires taking on the owners of the machines. But there is no appetite for that (often because the owners of the machines and the ones who decide what those machines are at liberty to do are the same people).

Of course, we do need lots more sun, wind, and tidal power, but they have to actually replace fossil fuel sources of energy. And, because this is not happening, rather than face down the dirty machines and their owners, elites are turning to other technological moonshots.

Everything from iron filings in the sea, to blocking out the sun and new types of machines that capture greenhouse gases have been proposed as solutions to planetary crisis.

And why not? It is much more appealing to change how the machines output on the planet/add new machines than stop machines.

It’s much more appealing to believe in an app for planetary crisis.

I think this is also why the mass extinction event we’re living through is so heavily dodged by the media and our leaders. We can probably swap out most of the dirty energy machines for clean energy machines eventually and keep the basic structure of an extractivist economy in place.

But not killing all the animals requires the end of extractivism itself. The end of digging things up, the end of chopping down forests, the end of industrial farming, of industrial fishing.

But machine driven material extraction is the bottom line of modern political economies. So of course political leaders lean heavily on technological solutions. They want to retain this basic structure because it works brilliantly for them.

The one-and-done technological tendency has also been sold to us as the path to salvation at the personal level. If we just install another app on our phones we will be more organised/fitter/happy/healthier/more connected/in love/insert problem>solution.

Maybe this is why people don’t like masks. They are too analogue, not high tech. They wore masks 500 years ago during the black death. We’re modern. We have apps.

But we don’t need apps. What we need is system change.

And the longer we pretend this need for fundamental change can be compensated for by technological tweaks the closer we get to the brink.

I’m not saying that technology can’t be part of the future or new machines don’t have a place, I’m saying that most of the time it’s a distraction from the only real solution – system change based on a world beyond growth, a world that respects nature and natural limits.

A world of old-fashioned progress, you might say.

(Original artwork by @ronniefurbear on IG)