The power of the machine: global inequalities of economy, technology, and environment

Description

Hornborg argues that we are caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology that prevents us from imagining solutions to our economic and environmental crises other than technocratic fixes. He demonstrates how the power of the machine generates increasingly asymmetrical exchanges and distribution of resources and risks between distant populations and ecosystems, and thus an increasingly polarized world order. The author challenges us to reconceptualize the machine-'industrial technomass'-as a species of power and a problem of culture. He shows how economic anthropology ha. 1. Technology and economics : the interfusion of the social and the material -- 2. Cornucopia or zero-sum game : the epistemology of sustainability -- 3. The thermodynamics of Imperialism : toward an ecological theory of unequal exchange -- 4. Ecosystems, world systems, and environmental justice -- 5. Conceptualizing accumulation from spondylus shells to fossil fuels -- 6. Use value, energy, and the image of unlimited good -- 7. Language and the material : probing our categories -- 8. Symbolic technologies : machines and the Marxian notion of fetishism -- 9. Money, reflexivity, and the semiotics of modernity -- 10. Ecology as semiotics : a contextualist manifesto -- 11. Exchange, personhood, and human ecology -- 12. The abstraction of discourse and identity : a case study.