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Speaker 3We are living in this really strange moment where climate anxiety and technological optimism are accelerating at the same time. On one hand, we're being told that geoengineering, carbon capture, and even de-extinctions can solve the climate crisis. On the other hand, there's this growing feeling that maybe the same technology or technological advancement outlook that got us into this mess can't get us out of it. So can technology really save the planet? My name is Rae Johnston, and you're listening to Download the Show on ABC Radio National. What you're about to hear is a conversation with Richard King, author of Here Be Monsters, which asks, "Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity?" And Brave New Wild, which asks, "Can technology save the planet?" This is a shortened version of a conversation we had at the Sydney Writers Festival earlier this year. Richard, when people hear "technology will save the planet," what kinds of technologies are we actually talking about? There's a broad range there, isn't there?
Speaker 4There is. So the. Well. I'm talking about a particular kind of technology, I suppose, and talking about the technofix. So these are very radical proposals that we're talking about. Radical interventions that are being talked about in connection with climate change and its attendant calamities. The eco-crisis, I'll call it for short. So probably the one that's just kind of breaking through into the public consciousness would be geoengineering. So there are different kinds of geoengineering, which essentially involves, to some extent, taking control of the planet's weather. Probably the most realistic and, for me, the most alarming proposal would be something like stratospheric aerosol injection, which is a form of solar radiation management. Sorry, if you haven't heard all the lingo. But this would essentially involve firing sulfates into the Earth's upper atmosphere in order to block out radiation from the sun. OK. So this works, by the way, because it works already in the case of large-scale volcanic eruptions. Just by the way, when your proof of concept is Krakatoa, you know the situation is really, is really, really bad.
Speaker 3Especially if we get an additional Krakatoa once we've already put this up there, right?
Speaker 4Well, a double dose of cooling, yeah. So then that could, arguably, and according to many of the experts, be as catastrophic as climate change. Plus, of course, if you did do. I don't know, stratospheric aerosol injection, the greenhouse gases that are currently trapping radiation from the sun, of course, because that's how the greenhouse effect works, would continue to accumulate. And so you'd have to keep doing it in order to avoid what's called termination shock. So that the sun. In other words, if you stop doing it and the sky is cleared and the solar radiation came back in, you know, there would be so many greenhouse gases that there would be a sudden, a sudden and quite. And quite radical increase in warming. And because you were continuing to do it, precipitation would increase, the oceans would continue to acidify, all that kind of stuff. So there are material risks involved in these kinds of interventions, of which this is just one example. There are also, I argue, in the book, Brave New Wild, that is, you know, what we might call moral or ontological, spiritual, even, risks, you know, that are, you know, that are, you know. That's, you know, to do with our sense of what is, you know, what is possible, what is permissible, the kind of relationship that we want to have with nonhuman nature and so on and so on. So, yes, that would be one example. There are other examples of technologies would be the de-extinction technologies that you talked about. So here, the idea that you could, quote unquote, resurrect species that have died out due largely to human influence is one, is an idea that is kind of critical. I mean, you know, there's a lot of kind of core imaginations across the environmental space. And I don't think you need to buy the shtick of the bearded front men in their kind of, you know, jungle explorer style leather jackets to know that biotechnology is being talked about very seriously in connection with the environment. So you've now got, you know, and it has been for a long time. Again. It is
Speaker 3difficult to think of the downsides of de-extinction, I think, especially when we are presented with, you know. You know, the idea of being able to bring back the thylacine, something that we are responsible for having wiped out quite recently.
Speaker 4I think the risks, well, I think the risks are in that second category of the moral risks, if you like. And I think the moral hazard there is enormous. I mean, if we start, if we've convinced ourselves that wiping species out is okay because you can always bring them back, then you really are in a radically different situation to the one that has. Yeah. obtained for most of, well, all of human history, really. So the idea that we can just go on sort of engineering our way out of the problem without ever thinking about how we got into the, as you were saying in your opening remarks, about how we got into this situation in the first place, that's to say, we'd be reproducing the very kind of hubristic Promethean mindset that I think got us into this pickle.
Speaker 3I think it's important at this point, Richard, to establish that you are. You are not anti-technology, despite what we're hearing. No. So what is the line for you between a useful innovation and what you're calling the techno-fix mindset? Yeah. Okay. Is the problem the technologies themselves or the wild view that's behind them?
Speaker 4It's very important distinction, I think. So the book is called Brave New Wild. And my agent, who might be in the. In the audience somewhere, when I first said this was going to be my title, she said. She just assumed it was one of my awful dad jokes, but it's actually perfect, because. Maybe not from a marketing point of view, but from an argumentative point of view, I think it's about right, because as this literary audience will know, it's an allusion to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the title of which is an allusion to Shakespeare, of course. And what Huxley does in that book is something quite striking. He imagines a society deep in the future in which everything works, quote unquote, perfectly. So the society is productive, it's integrated, it's peaceable, it's rational, okay? There's just one problem with it, that the people within it don't appear to do, in their natural state, at any rate, they don't appear to do terribly well. So rather than create a society that engenders happier human beings, the controlling, the rulers, as they're called, of the world state, as it's called, decide to change the human beings such that they can fit into the society they happen to have made. So there's this broad kind of satirical inversion. And I think that's as good a description of the technofix, as we're calling it, as I'm calling it in the book, as we're gonna get. There is, in other words, a reversal in what I regard to be the proper direction of fit between ourselves. Yes. And the planet's systems and ecologies. It's not just about mitigation or adaptation, all of which needs to be done. Of course it does, for goodness' sake, renewables, yes, please, 3D printing, great. It's about the idea, which is a very, again, to use this word, Promethean idea, that we can somehow, you know, reengineer nature such that we can go on having the kind of society that we've ended up with.
Speaker 3So do you believe that we are already crossing or have already crossed that psychological threshold where we stop seeing nature as something that we are a part of as human beings and as something that we manage and manipulate instead?
Speaker 4Yeah. And it's a lot. Absolutely. And it's a long story. You know, you could start this story from a number of points. But I think probably it goes back to the beginnings of modernity, when, you know, scientific revolution, enlightenment, of course, when a more instrumental attitude towards nature began to take hold. I mean, you have indigenous heritage, so I don't need to tell you that in those cultures, there is a much more reciprocal, one could almost say familial attitude towards the. It's not just different ideas about the world, the different subjectivities. So, yes, I think, you know, people in, quote-unquote, advanced societies have moved into this kind of way of thinking. And what I'm trying to do in both Here Be Monsters and Brave New Wild is to kind of blow the dust off of what I call the techno-critical tradition, which goes all the way back to Socrates, you know, famously took against writing, I think, you know, with some good arguments, but I think we probably. I'm trying to flog a book, so I'm not going to agree with him. But, you know, and Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and all those other guys that aren't read nearly enough as they ought to be, in my opinion. So, yeah, I mean, it's absurd to be against technology. I mean, we're technological creatures, right? But the use of stone tools predates the emergence of Homo sapiens by some three million years. So we woke up in technology. There is no Homo sapiens without technology. We woke up in it. Or in a way analogous to the fact that everybody here woke up in technology in the form of a bed with blankets and a ceiling, which is part of a building, unless you had a very rough night, I suppose. It's to know how these writers' festivals can go. But, you know, to be against technology isn't even an option. This is our point of entry into the world. But technology includes, you know, hammers and power drills and, you know, two sticks with a rubber band around it that helps you get, you know, bread out of the toaster without electrocuting yourself. It's not all about, you know, advanced biotech and all that kind of stuff. What I would love to see is people take control of their tools again and become more technological, not less, since that is one of the ways, one of the key ways, in fact, this argument is made in Here Be Monsters, that we live our humanity, that we fulfill the human telos, if you like. So I want to become more technological, not less. I don't want my kids going to school and sitting in front of a computer for five hours. I want them to come back and say, you know, and say, well, yeah, we learned how to, you know, use a nail gun today or something like that, you know. It's really cool. Like, put that away. Thank you very much. But you know what I mean. You know, they could be working on permaculture projects and all this kind of stuff, understanding the world around them. How does a house work? How does a house work, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Remember those beautiful, I'm going to sound like a terrible boomer now. You remember those beautiful books? I can't remember the name. Scarry. Scarry was his name. Yeah, Richard Scarry. What people do all day, you know. And you read those books and you basically get a lesson in how to make bread. You know what I mean? And why did so many people in the COVID lockdown start making bread? It's because it's like this almost, I don't know, sacred act, you know. There are a lot of bread makers in people's cupboards that have never been used now, though, aren't there?
Speaker 3So how do you feel when people say that technology is neutral? It's about how you use it.
Speaker 4It's nonsense. So this is the view that kind of dominates in Silicon Valley, I think. And it's the instrumental view of technology. You know, you can use a hammer to drive in a nail. You can use it to hit your neighbor when he throws leaves over your fence. You know, you can use it. You can use it as a weapon, whatever, whatever. So, you know, the hammer has no kind of, you know, it has no content. It has no politics. There's a very famous essay by Langdon Winner called Do Artifacts Have Politics? Or something like that. Anyway, talk about it in Hebrew Monsters. So that's one end. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got a kind of deterministic view. You know, television's making us all into idiots and all that kind of stuff. You know, that's where you go. You get your sort of moral panics. I think the only way to think about technology is by using what I call the substantive lens. What does this technology give us and what does it take away? That was Neil Postman's question. Okay. The printing press, you know, gives us what? The spread of literacy. It gave us. The birth of Luddites. Yeah. Yeah. It gave us. What else? The beginnings of the public sphere. You know, a diminished and beleaguered space, but still here. We wouldn't want to be without it. In fact, saving it is now the goal, is it not? It's the great thing about, you know, festivals such as this, that they allow the public sphere to have its day. So, but, you know, there are also other things that come with the printing press, you know. Because people suddenly can begin to. Identify with people who are not physically present to them. You know, you get the rise of nationalism, for example. You know, there is no colonialism without the printing press. So, you need to be a little bit nuanced about this and a little bit dialectical. And, yeah, I think that's the only way to think of it. So, the instrumental view, no, I don't buy it at all. The deterministic view is often just very reactionary. So, I think you need to be, as I say. I don't need to take some from column A and some from column C. But stay largely in column B.
Speaker 3One of the mindsets that you write about in Brave New Wild is eco-modernism. Yeah. Can you explain a little bit about eco-modernism for us today?
Speaker 4Yeah. So, eco-modernism is the tendency, let's call it, the mindset, the approach, the tendency to view climate change and. The eco-crisis more broadly as a technical problem, first and foremost, demanding a technical or technological, certainly technocratic, maybe technoscientific response, okay, or set of responses. So, that's what I'm calling eco-modernism. I think it's helpful to distinguish, though, between what we might call the hardline eco-modernists. That's to say people who would characterize them. So, I mean, I think, you know, a lot of people who would call the hardline eco-modernists are the ones who would call the hardline eco-modernists and the ones who would call the hardline eco-modernists yeah so that's what i'm calling eco-modernism but i think it's important to distinguish between the kind of crazies at the center of it if you like and that broader periphery of people who's who yeah just just think in that way yeah about um who you see no other option i suppose just back on the the technological innovation stuff i mean technological innovation is great but it needs to be combined that such as my argument with with social and political innovation that's the problem and technology seems to have given the slip to the conversation about how we live in community with one another which is to say that the the political conversation you know we just accept this crap that's thrown at us all the time um you know nobody wanted chat gpt apart from a few
Speaker 3the eight people making billions of dollars out of it god bless them
Speaker 4you now i've been
Speaker 3reporting on technology for over 15 years now almost 20 years and i started reporting on technology because i love it and i love gadgets and i love playing with things and getting excited about the ways that tech can solve problems and the way that it can help people uh and i think that's why i care so much about technology and i think that's why i care so much about technology so much now about who controls it and what they do with it, but technological optimism now, it feels quite different. It feels like something to be wary of slipping into, you know, this idea that we don't necessarily have to change anything about how we live because innovation will sort it out for us. So, do you think that comfort or the pursuit of comfort even is part of why these ideas become so politically attractive?
Speaker 4Well, I think it's less optimism now than it is fatalism.
Speaker 3That's even more depressing.
Speaker 4Well, yeah. I mean, there was a techno-optimism. I mean, the last techno-optimist moment I suppose we have would have been the late noughties, 2010s when it was all kicking off in the Maghreb and the Levant and we had the Twitter revolutions and the Facebook revolutions and all that kind of thing and the Occupy and the Indignados in Spain and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3Connecting with people and finding our communities. We're going to have
Speaker 4a new horizontal politics and it's all going to be different. It's amazing. Everyone's voices can be heard. We are the 99%, all of that kind of stuff, which I'm not dismissive of, but it was just, yeah, it was Minerva's owl spreading its wings before sunset. Not the beginning of something, but maybe the end of something. I don't know. It's a work in progress, isn't it? But I think that's all gone. I don't think there are many techno-optimists around and the ones that are around are, you know, often very powerful and seem to have problems with impulse control and all the other things that make our fellow human beings bearable. But there is a fatalism. And, yeah, and I think that there needn't be. There needn't be. I said last night in this talk that I gave at the lovely Hornsby Library that there are now no non-radical futures open to us. You know, whatever the future is, it is going to be a crazy place. You know, it might be good, more probably going to be kind of scary, very scary, maybe. But there are now no non-radical futures open to us. But with that in mind, why not then pick the future that you want to see, which I think would be a future with more, you know, more conducive to your social being, to your creative being, to security and all those deep needs that we have that are so essential to our flourishing. Why not pick that? And you'll be amazed at how much consistency there is in what people imagine. When they imagine something better, why not pick that and just go for it? And we won't get there, we probably won't get there. But in the attempt to get there, we'll do something meaningful, we'll become maybe more human, not less. So look, we need to be pragmatic. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying everybody should suddenly become very utopian in their thinking. You need to be pragmatic because apart from anything else, where we're standing, we're not going to be able to do anything different than what we're standing in 10 minutes time depends largely on where we're standing now. Right? But where we're standing in 10 minutes time also depends on which way we're facing. And that's where you have agency to say, okay, I think we're headed in the wrong direction. I think we should be headed in that direction. What can I do? Whether it's joining a political party or starting a permaculture thing or, you know, forming a discussion group or whatever it happens to be. What can I do in order to bring that about? And I think what people will find without wanting to sound impertinent is that in doing that, I'm trying really hard not to say be the change you want to see. But I think because I can't stand that bloody bumper sticker. But anyway, and Gandhi didn't say that anyway. I suppose he might have done. But I think in doing it, you actually get a sense of what that kind of world might be like.
Speaker 3Yeah. I've got a question here from Freda that says, how can we advocate for other types of change as an antidote to this sort of techno optimism?
Speaker 4Well, it's a really good question, because a lot of the technologies that we're talking about here happen to be are being innovated, evolved, developed by the very people that are that are presently collapsing. The thing I referred to earlier, which is the, you know, the technology that we're talking about, which is the public sphere. So I don't have a good answer to that. But what I can say is that it might have to be the thing I write about next, because I don't see that we can get through this, this crisis or set of crises, if we don't have a healthy public sphere. Today, in this room, and in countless pockets of intellectual activity around the world, the intelligent public sphere is alive and kicking. But there's no point pretending that it's not, it's not in crisis, still got the ABC still got people like Ray, doing great work. So Norman Swan this morning going into our team, you know, all these great people that are doing great kind of work within the public sphere, but the public sphere is in trouble. So I don't know what to do about that. Maybe the answer is to keep one eye on that and do something about that. So write to your local MP about universities or something and turning them back into institutions of proper critical, you know, proper humanistic oversight, as opposed to the, the abattoirs that they've become, frankly. And I work in a, I work in a university. So don't get me wrong. I know there are many great people that work within universities, but my goodness, they are ridiculous places. Joseph wants to
Speaker 3know, he says, human leaders have traditionally made terrible big picture decisions. What's your feeling on the likelihood that decision makers will navigate the technological possibilities intelligently and carefully?
Speaker 4A bit chaos. I mean, we're moving back to a position of multipolarity. So I don't see any chance that people are going to somehow start coming together. We should be coming together. I mean, Australia, for example, should be looking at partners and saying, look, what can we do together in order to navigate this crisis? What can we, you know, how can we reciprocate? How can we, how can we have some saner dispensation that isn't just based on, on, on, on growth and profit and all that kind of stuff? But no, I don't hold out much hope there at all. So this, this question is, is in part political, of course. And, and I mean, as I'm sure you can tell, one of my feelings is that we need a much better class of, um, politician, um, than we have currently.
Speaker 3Yes. Final question before we finish, Richard. Can technology really save the planet?
Speaker 4Well, look, when I wrote Here Be Monsters, uh, which is subtitled, is technology, um, reducing, reducing our humanity? My shtick was to go around saying, you know, spoiler alert, it is. Okay. Uh, and then with this one, when it came out, my shtick is to get, which is subtitled, can technology really save the planet? My shtick has been to go around saying, spoiler alert, it can't. Okay. But actually the answer is a little bit more complicated than that in the sense that, yes, depending on what you mean by save, like the controllers in Brave New World, you probably could save it. You know, you could, they've saved society after all from being unproductive and, you know, irrational and, and all that kind of stuff. The question is at what cost? Um, that's my question. And I would say the cost would be high.
Speaker 3Please join me in thanking Richard King, everyone. And that's all for this week. Make sure you subscribe. So you don't miss any of our episodes. And we do love hearing all of your thoughts, all of your feedback. Please send them over to download the show at abc.net.au. Myself or my wonderful producer, Jessie Kay, we'll get back to you. You can also slide into my DMs on Instagram at Rae Johnston. This episode was produced on the lands of the Gadigal, Burramadigal, Darug, Gundungra and Wurundjeri peoples. I'm Rae Johnston, and you've been listening to Download This Show. Thank you for listening to Download This Show. I'm Rae Johnston, and I'll see you next week. You've been listening to an ABC podcast.
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