Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene: Unraveling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex

Description

Are money and technology the core illusions of our time? In this book, Alf Hornborg offers a fresh assessment of the inequalities and environmental degradation of the world. He shows how both mainstream and radical economists are limited by a particular worldview and, as a result, do not grasp that conventional money is at the root of many of the problems that are threatening societies, not to mention planet Earth itself. Hornborg demonstrates how market prices obscure asymmetric exchanges of resources - human labor, land, energy, materials - under a veil of fictive reciprocity. Such unequal exchange, he claims, underpins the phenomenon of technological development, which is, fundamentally, a redistribution of time and space - human labor and land - in world society. Hornborg deftly illustrates how money and technology have shaped our thinking and our social and ecological relations, with disturbing consequences. He also offers solutions for their redesign in ways that will promote justice and sustainability. Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Rethinking Economy and Technology 2 The Anthropocene Challenge to Our Worldview 3 Producing and Obscuring Global Injustices 4 The Money Game 5 Anticipating Degrowth 6 The Ontology of Technology 7 Energy Technologies as Time–Space Appropriation 8 Capitalism, Energy, and the Logic of Money 9 Unequal Exchange and Economic Value 10 Subjects versus Objects: Artifacts Have Consequences, Not Agency 11 Anthropocene Confusions: Dithering While the Planet Burns 12 Animism, Relationism, and the Ontological Turn 13 Conclusions and Possibilities Afterword: Confronting Mainstream Notions of Progress References Name Index Subject Index