Technology and Power
Whose knowledge counts?
Every day, powerful actors design, develop and pitch new tools which they claim can fix the problems created by their predecessors. In our rapidly changing technological landscape, it’s vital that we develop our own frames and strategies to understand the implications of technologies. In 2023, A Growing Culture and ETC Group collaborated to unpack the role of technology and explore how to engage with it through a more politically informed lens — when to uplift, when to challenge and resist. One result of that collaboration is a publication, Politics of Technology. This is part two in a three-part series, laying out key aspects from the booklet, in the hope that they spark deeper conversations about technology within our movements.
In our previous instalment, we delved into the multifaceted nature of technology, highlighting its various components and the political dynamics that underpin its development and implementation. We examined different attitudes towards technology, urging for a more nuanced and politically informed approach to its understanding. As we continue our exploration, we will delve deeper into the roots of innovation and challenge conventional notions of expertise in technological advancement.
*Many of the ideas conveyed here grew out of a series of online conversations that took place
in January 2023 between A Growing Culture; ETC Group; La Vía Campesina; the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa; International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations; and Pat Mooney, and build in collaboration with the Center for Story-Based Strategy.
Any technology starts with the idea that our relationship with the world could or should be something different. This idea is fundamental to human existence. At its essence, it’s a process of reflection. Throughout time, communities have reflected and come up with all kinds of imaginative proposals for what could be. This process has, in turn, led people to seek out ways to take action and experiment — whether that means inventing something new, or adapting something from the past, or altering something that currently exists. Innovation has historically been a slow, patient process. It’s always been vital for communities to take time to understand what works and what doesn’t given social and ecological contexts; what meshes and what clashes with their values and ways of living.
When we ask why a technology is developed, we are, in essence, asking about the “problem” a technology is designed to “solve”. This “problem” is the true intention of a technology, and it may not always be what is publicly claimed. We can’t truly understand the implications of a technology unless we unpack the intentions behind it.
As our society becomes more dependent on technology, the power to design, create, and implement the technologies we rely on has become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few. This is called technocracy. The power of a technology rests on who defines the problem and the solution. Technocracy is the idea that the people and institutions that make the decisions governing our lives should be “experts” — those who have comprehensive and authoritative knowledge in a certain area. Expert is presented as a neutral term, but it is deeply political — rooted in our understanding of knowledge itself.
Throughout history, we’ve seen a shift in what is considered knowledge. European colonialism and hegemony erased Indigenous knowledge, practices, and worldviews, leading to the decline of philosophy and the rise of “scientism”. Today, in the so-called “Modern Era”, science, engineering, and technology have become the three pillars of knowledge.
Science
An organised system of knowledge or study based on observation.
Engineering
The design and construction of systems and structures to solve specific problems.
Technology
The tools and knowledge created to solve those problems.
Of course, science, engineering, and technology, as defined above, are social, political, economic, and ecological processes of which communities have always been a part. Siloing these processes into distinct fields seeded the idea that they are separate from social, political, economic, and ecological systems. Today, these three fields are defined and legitimised not by communities and their lived experiences but by institutions and their power. And so, in our technocratic world, an “expert” is someone who is given power by the powerful to define “problems” and shape “solutions”.
Experts have, in turn, fostered the belief that problems in the world are technical — not political. By extension, local histories, contexts, and struggles are unimportant, or at least less important than their technical knowledge. “Expertification” has steadily devalued the knowledge that communities themselves hold, suggesting that distant individuals and institutions are more capable of defining reality than those who face it every day.
Take the Green Revolution, for example.
This is an example of a political problem presented as a technical problem. Post World War II, the U.S. government and powerful institutions like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations united as part of a mission to “feed the world”. They saw a dire need to confront the issue of hunger, given the rising population. The Green Revolution framed hunger not as a symptom of impoverishment, but instead as a result of low food production tied to small-scale farming. The approach was to “modernise” agriculture by increasing yield and “freeing” farmers from the field (so that they could pursue higher-paying jobs in urban cities). The strategy proposed was to shift farmers over to larger-scale industrial monocrop production, replacing local seed varieties with new “high-yielding” corporate hybrid varieties and synthetic chemical fertilisers.
The Green Revolution’s fundamental focus was on increasing food production. This was the problem that institutional experts identified. Nearly all of the dominant initiatives to solve hunger today, likewise, focus squarely on increasing food production. However, there is currently enough food produced globally today to feed 10 billion people, nearly 1.5 times the world’s population, while over one billion people go hungry. Clearly, the problem is not food production.
The Green Revolution is heralded by many for “saving humanity”, but today even the institutions at the centre of the initiative are willing to recognise the widespread environmental harm it has caused (not to mention the social and economic harm). As Nick Cullather writes,“... President Jimmy Carter’s Global 2000 report found the green revolution left long-term trends in food output unchanged while making future gains more dependent on petroleum.”
The Green Revolution framed a complex issue (hunger), which is deeply connected to localised realities related to economic inequality and political disenfranchisement, as a standardised, scalable fix. The farming communities who for decades spoke out against the Green Revolution’s imposition of industrial agriculture were silenced or ignored, branded by “experts” as anti-science — accused of standing in the way of progress. Today, the institutions behind the Green Revolution are finally reckoning with (at least some of) its consequences, yet rarely do those same institutions acknowledge the inherent flaws in their approach.
Today, new technologies are being conceived, designed, and implemented rapidly, without space to consider the implications and consequences for farmers. As a result, the agricultural landscape is changing rapidly, and farmers face growing threats to their rights and lives. It’s, therefore, becoming increasingly vital to examine and critique this technological push. As it is, farming communities are often forced to decide whether or not to adopt tools that were created far from their fields and without their input.
Any technology starts with someone putting forward their understanding of the world, and how/why it could/should be different. Over time, as those in power have claimed knowledge and expertise as their domain, we’ve seen a devaluing of communities’ ability to describe their own reality. Increasingly, problems have come to be defined by actors and institutions further and further away from the people experiencing them. The solutions to these problems have become standardised and scaled, claiming to apply to vastly different cultures and contexts. The effect is that communities are put in a position where they are forced to try to understand and assess technologies that are introduced to, or oftentimes imposed upon, them — to gauge the implications and effects of tools they had no part in developing. The process of attempting to learn everything needed to assess a given technology can feel futile — partly because of how complex a tool can be, partly because of the fact that the decision-making and intentions behind a technology are often hidden.
In our next instalment, we’ll delve into the broader processes behind technological advancements. Through case studies of Golden Rice and the mechanical tomato harvester, we’ll unpack the complex interplay of power and knowledge in shaping technological processes, and explore how community perspectives can reshape innovation narratives. Ultimately, we hope these insights will initiate deeper conversations within our movements to reimagine how we can co-create decentralised, diversified, and distributive technological processes.
You can access the complete booklet on the Politics of Technology in three languages here.
This book by Nick Cullather, which tells an alternative history of the Green Revolution as a tool for expanding US political power, at the expense of small-scale farmer and peasant communities around the world.
This book by Yanis Varoufakis, introducing the idea that capitalism has actually been replaced by a system of feudalism, with big tech corporations in the seat of governance.
This book by Vandana Shiva, that exposes the exploitation of indigenous knowledge and biodiversity by powerful corporations and institutions for profit.
Every resource produced by A Growing Culture, whether a newsletter, article, post, or design, results from countless hours of research, reflection, and the synthesis of profound conversations held both within our team and with our partners and comrades. Behind the scenes, a wealth of effort goes into making these conversations happen, from overseeing our day-to-day operations, and securing our funding, to forging deep relationships with communities around the world who are leading food systems transformation. These relationships fuel our thoughts, inform our words, and inspire our actions.
We recognise that no single person can take credit for the work we collectively produce, which is why we prefer to sign as an organisation rather than as individuals. We believe that no idea is inherently our own and welcome anyone who sees value in our work to translate it, build upon it, adapt it to their own contexts, or share it however they see fit.
Thank you so much for all the work that you do! Very much looking forward to reading the rest of this series.