Technophilia: The Mental Illness Behind Civilisational Collapse

The Civilisational Lie Series

Global capital has deceived billions who cared about the planet by selling them “green solutions” that are anything but green, simply by virtue of the fact that these solutions are products. All products are harmful to the planet however green their credentials may be. Bringing a product to market inflicts immense devastation: for a product to come online, a huge chain of carbon-intensive operations must be undertaken, and an army of specialised employees mobilised to cater to these tasks. Even something as simple and benign as a paper straw can mobilize all the carbon-intensive industries our self-destructive economy depends on: research, design, extraction, construction, electricity, transportation, communication, marketing, buying, selling. All these activities and people involved need energy and transportation for their work and their meetings. They must be paid, which means more money circulating in the economy causing more consumption and more carbon emissions.

Any product created for the purpose of profit is incredibly toxic to the planet however “green” it claims to be. The problem is not whether our products are “green” or not. The problem is modern products themselves, every single one of them: they take too many people to make, accumulate too many miles, and become trash way too soon. These are not products. These are planet-killing machines.

We have created an absurdly complicated civilisation whereby the process of creating, transporting and marketing a product from start to finish is infinitely more harmful than the product itself. The creation and marketing of products is so terrifyingly convoluted, no individual human involved in this insane sequence of tasks has a full sense of the endless chain of hands, places and processes a product must traverse before reaching its final destination as it accumulates carbon debt. From Gucci bags made in China but branded in France to apples flown from the US to South Africa for waxing then flown again to Europe to be sold, to cars crossing the US-Canada border back and forth multiple times to have parts added to them, you could be forgiven if you thought for a minute that we purposely designed this civilisation so that it crashes the planet’s climate as fast as physically possible.

The reason for all this complexity is the very nature of civilisation: highly fragmented, specialised yet globalised, but most of all, commodified down to the water we drink and the air we breathe. And with commoditisation comes branding. Branding is the science of lying. Product branding is the equivalent of a confessional sacrament: products walk in, confess all their carbon sins in secrecy, then receive the blessing to freely roam out into the world and destroy it. I worked in marketing, branding and advertising for two decades. My full-time job was to help products make false statements, that is, to claim that they are useful and benign. From online casinos to soft drinks, pet foods to the defence industry, I helped my multibillion-dollar clients highlight the “value” of their useless and dangerous products to their customers. As I was compensated to do this work for the world’s biggest multinational corporations, in the end I actually offered nothing of value to this planet: nothing other than making the productization process even more carbon intensive, expensive, and destructive to all 10 million life forms on Earth, including humans themselves.

So, the problem isn’t merely the quantities of useless single-use goods we consume, but the entire “civilisational set up” that produces them: the complex, convoluted, wasteful chain of processes that monetize and brand these goods, upon which the monster we call “the economy” depends. The entire sequence of extraction, manufacture and disposal is a funeral procession where real life forms, resources and even humans are sacrificed just so that this death cult we call the economy can continue to register record profits.

The emergence of “green” industries such as renewable energy is just one of the latest examples of how the marketing industry manages to rebrand and re-sell destruction. But it’s hardly a new phenomenon by historical standards. By constantly embracing new technologies that are young enough to evade scrutiny, capitalism always manages to rebrand itself as an improved version of its former self. Appropriating the vague and vacuous term “sustainability” and plastering it on every product and job title it creates, today’s capitalism has completely reinvented its brand, yet failed to change its dogma: growth, construction, profit and destruction, in other words more capitalism, more humans, more climate and ecological collapse.

Just like a fraudulent business, throughout its history this civilisation has repeatedly chosen to quickly rebrand each time rather than face its structural and existential problems. A recurring reliance on technology as a way out of problems over thousands of years has left humanity with a permanent case of technophilia: the inability to envision non-technological solutions to its problems, even though most of these problems have been caused by technology in the first place. As a result, the average citizen today automatically thinks of “sustainability solutions” as technologies and innovations, as opposed to the simple, non-technological and permanent solutions that have existed since the beginning of time: minimalism, deconstruction, reuse, repair, upcycling, simplification, contraction, degrowth and rewilding.

Technophilia is partly the result of hundreds of years of propaganda by the Unhappiness Machine since the industrial revolution: because it is better to offer people expensive solutions, than to show them how they can solve their problems. Doctors give us pills instead of helping us change our lifestyle. Food companies serve us overprocessed foods instead of helping us overcome obesity. And electronics manufacturers make sure their products never last more than a couple of years. Our industrial complex ensures that the technologies it invents keep producing new problems of their own, so that technology itself can get to keep its job: to keep on inventing new technologies. Rather than undoing its crimes, this civilisation always prefers to invent technologies which temporarily repair them, forgetting each time that technologies always introduce new problems into the mix. Humanity has spent thousands of years continuously inventing new technologies to solve the problems that the previous technologies caused. This vicious cycle has put technology in charge of the future of humanity, rather than the other way round. Therefore, the aspiration that technology would “save us” was tragically misguided, given that technology ultimately only cares about itself. A species which considers this self-destructive process as “progress” surely does not deserve to progress down the evolutionary journey. It has already amputated itself.

Many argue that the problem is not technology itself, but how it is used. But as long as the use of technology is dictated by those in charge of manufacturing it, marketing and updating it, it will always have a negative contribution to society and the planet. This parasitic economic system prefers to involve thousands of people and dozens of industry sectors globally to make just one product, rather than make it and sell it locally by the producer themselves.

The problem with minimalism and degrowth is that they are based on simplicity: they don’t fit within the monstrously complex economic machine which drives the relentless production of one harmful technology after another. Those who advocate that we can make technology “ethical” really need to check their notes. Because this requires a complete restructuring of human technophilic consciousness as well as who produces, owns and profits from technology. The only way we can implement degrowth is if we demolish convoluted value chains, eliminate all middlemen, and democratize profit so that the only ventures which thrive are the ones which benefit society and the planet as a whole – not the ones destroying it.

But unfortunately there is also an evolutionary basis behind technophilia. As a life form, we have evolved to thrive only through construction, destruction, exploitation and the generation of waste. Human consciousness only understands doing and has little concept for undoing or stopping altogether, and part of this has to do with our RELD brain. We talk about energy transition when it should be energy use reduction. We talk about family and prosperity when it should be population decrease. We talk about jobs and growth when it should be a steady-state economy. We talk about protecting nature when we should simply leave it alone. We always do, never undo. This obsession with doing rather than leaving things alone is the classic cognitive and behavioural bias behind technophilia.

Technophilia preys upon a key characteristic of the human brain: we are hyperactive, hyper-thinking beings who look down upon the cessation of any of our activities, while being too proud to simply “undo” our errors as this would be a shameful admission of defeat. Instead, if we invent a new technology that promises to “repair” things, we are saviours and geniuses. The stigma which humans assign to deconstructive and recessive solutions is largely responsible for the worsening situation this civilisation has trapped itself in.

Sustainability movements have failed because they constantly fall prey to technophilia and profit. They have repeatedly been bought out by capitalism, which only enforces a maximalistic bias towards growth. The global cleptocratic corporatocracy has repositioned itself very effectively as a “green” industry who “gets things done”, when in fact, if they knew anything about sustainability at all, they should have been working to get things undone. On LinkedIn you will find hundreds of thousands of “professionals” who dare to put “eco warrior” in their job title when in fact they are corporate fraudsters selling carbon credits and other “green services”. Equally, there are hundreds of thousands of highly paid job advertisements for environment and sustainability positions. With all these jobs out there, you would think we are doing something right, yet curiously, the planet is heading faster and faster towards Armageddon. These jobs are in fact THE REASON, most of them being full-time greenwashing positions helping global capital conceal its crimes and carry on. It is easy to see what they advocate: they talk about an energy transition when it should be energy reduction. They talk about family and prosperity when it should be population decrease. They talk about jobs and growth when it should be rapid economic contraction. They talk about protecting nature when it should be about simply leaving it alone.

The more we focus on technophilic solutions, the further we will fail as long as these solutions are funded by their own profits, supported by technologies that come with their own problems, and promise the oxymoron of population growth and prosperity for all.