What is industrial modernity?
Here, we will define industrial modernity, outline its current problems and argue for the need to redesign it.
Industrial modernity
Modern societies are based on industrial modernity: a set of ideas, institutions and practices related to the natural environment, science and technology. These traits are so pervasive that they can be found in almost any contemporary industrial society. Belief in limitless substitutability of natural resources, preference to regulate the consequences of using different technologies and widespread reliance on fossil fuels are a few examples.
Broadly speaking, these traits can be reduced to two core themes: 1) environment as a blind spot, resulting in its relative neglect in rhetoric, institution-building and resource use; 2) overconfidence in science and technology, resulting in a regular overestimation of their promises, underestimation of their perils and misspecification of their impacts. The history of industrialization is the story of the emergence, interaction, consolidation and crisis of these two themes.
The two core themes
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Why is industrial modernity problematic?
Because many historically dominant traits of industrial modernity have become maladapted to the current situation.
For example, whereas addressing the problems created by existing technologies through the introduction of new ones might have been justified in the past, using solar geoengineering as a techno-fix for climate change is very risky because of the rapidity, scale and uncertainty of possible impacts. Another example concerns recent optimism towards the full shift to renewables, arguably enabling a significant reduction in global energy needs. However, such arguments generally fail to consider pervasive rebound effects, where gains in technological efficiency are offset by a corresponding rise in demand.
This has led to the situation in which science and technology promise to solve climate and biodiversity crises on the one hand, while likely making them worse on the other. In other words, the historical legacy of industrial modernity keeps hindering the deep sustainability turn.
Maladapted traits
Overconfidence in science and technology: regular overestimation of future promises, underestimation of risks, and misspecification of various impacts
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Rethinking industrial modernity
Philosopher Albert North Whitehead has quipped that “the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”
Our work is premised on the assumption that if the industrial societies wish to survive the current polycrisis, then the invention work is not complete. A transformation of comparable magnitude to the industrial revolution, the Second Deep Transition, is required.
In order to achieve that we need to figure out which traits of industrial modernity are worth keeping, which ones we should drop and which ones we should rethink.
The good news is that many building blocks for reshaping industrial modernity already exist in various niches. However, at present we do not have a very good idea how to combine them. How industrial modernity has evolved over time, where is the major rethinking of its traits currently most likely to happen and which solutions we should use to reshape it are the core questions tackled in our research.
Designing alternatives
