![cover|150](http://books.google.com/books/content?id=kL_tCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api) # Progressive Summary # Structured Notes # Rough Notes Money and technology are 2 ways in which capitalism mystifies or hides unequal exchanges. Slavery is an extreme example of unequal exchange, and both money and technology have the potential to enable forms of slavery. Market prices project the illusion of reciprocal exchange which conceals asymmetric material transfers – embodied labour, land, energy or materials. Technology does not replace labour, but displaces it. Who makes the technology we use? Underpaid labour in the Global South. Land and energy were intricately linked before the 19th century, as land was required to feed animals used in transport or manual labour. As a result, energy competed with agriculture over the use of land. With the discovery of fossil fuels, land and energy became untethered, as most land could now be used for food production, and our energy needs met by fossil fuels. Comparing the Britsh and US empires, the British empire needed more land, and it was self-sufficient in fossil fuels. The US empire was self-sufficient in agricultural land, but it needed more fossil fuels than it possessed. If the US had to switch to biofuels, it would require 7 times the land it currently dedicates to agricultural exports or 47 times the land in Brazil currently dedicated to sugarcane ethanol. Concept of energy did not appear until the 19th century. Laws of thermodynamics were formulated to understand the energy efficiency of steam engines. Neoclassical economics was inspired by the 1st law of Thermodynamics, but not the 2nd. It did not incorporate the insight that energy goes through irreversible degradation. Preindustrial societies understood that solar energy is the vital flow that animates all life on earth. As commerce and trade expanded, some groups began to understand flows of money as more fundamental to their subsistence. (Need to make a connection between this and Constructal Law. If money is an energy system, then it must flow out according to Constructal Law.) Marxian and ecological economics agree on the idea that market prices, or exchange values, do not do justice to "use" value. But Marx focused only on the use value of labour, and did not consider the use values of energy, land, and ecosystem services. The distinction between "use" value and "exchange" value goes back to Aristotle and the monetized economy of Ancient Greece. In Marxist thought, use values are equated with "real" wealth and denote material quantities of resources such as embodied labour, energy, land and water which provide for human needs. But as Baudrillard and Sahlins have pointed out, human needs are impossible to extricate from cultural context. What is the use value of pork to a Muslim? If use values are culturally determined, they cannot be objectively identified with material resources. Use value should be restricted to what people find useful and are determined by cultural semiotics. It cannot be measured in biophysical metrics such as Joules, tons or hectares. But those metrics are the ones we need to demonstrate that there has been ecologically unequal exchange. There is no way of deducing economic value from invested Joules, tons, hectares or hours of human labour. The Physiocrats saw land as the ultimate generator of economic value, whereas Smith, Ricardo and Marx emphasized labour. But all of them used the same structure of argument. They identified a factor of production which would yield more value than is required for its maintenance. Marx launched a radical critique of industrial capitalism, but his analysis fell short in 2 areas: his Promethean trust in technology, and his focus on a labour theory of value. 2 flaws with the labour theory of value: - labour can only be quantified in terms of time or energy, so there is no basis for arguing that it is underpaid (underpaid relative to what?) - why should labour be singled out among the factors of production as the source of profit? One could easily apply the same analysis to energy or land. # Symmetrical Anthropology Symmetrical anthropology refers to the practice of using other cultures as a mirror to reflect back upon our own culture. It was a project launched by Bruno Latour in 1993. The beginnings of anthropology were assymetric, because Western anthropologists would focus on studying other cultures, often considering them as more primitive than theirs. Understanding would flow in only one direction. Symmetrical anthropology seeks to correct this. It is a lens through which our own culture may not seem as superior or dominant as we suppose. Marx practised a form of symmetrical anthropology when he observed that human relations to things are always about human relations to each other, but that this was obscured by our fetishizing of things, especially money or the products of our labour. The "fetish" is a concept originally employed by Portuguese merchants to describe the religions practices of West Africans. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is our belief that a clear boundary can be established between things and their external relations (the reification of things.) This is also reflected in our language, and the preponderance of nouns over verbs. This is also a possible interpretation of the phenomenon of fetishism. Our culture fetishizes technology when it imagines that machines are independent of global price relations and resource flows. > "Money and machines may not be ensouled persons in modernity, but they are certainly believed to have autonomous agency. We pride ourselves on having abandoned animism, but have organized a global society founded on fetishism." > "Where political economy is about the social organization of human muscle power, people have to be *persuaded* to exert themselves for the benefit of those in power. Magic could be defined as the category of social strategies by which such persuasion is achieved." > "For example, when the Inca emperor offered Ecuadorian Spondylus shell to the gods to ensure rain and agricultural fertility, it was incumbent on his many subjects to labor on his terraces and irrigation canals. We can now conclude that the efficacy of such ritual sacrifices was dependent on human perceptions. The prehispanic agency of Spondylus, like that of modern money, was contingent on human subjectivity. But when modern farmers in an increasingly desiccated California resort to high-power water pumps to irrigate their fields, the efficacy of such practices is not perceived as dependent on human perceptions. The difference between magic and technology, we tend to believe, is that the latter is a matter of increasingly sophisticated inventions based on discoveries about nonsocial nature, which grant our economies the capacity to grow on their own account. > > But neither did the peasants of sixteenth-century Peru believe that the efficacy of ritual sacrifices was dependent on human perceptions. The efficacy of all magic hinges on it being perceived as independent of human consciousness. Like magic, power over other people is universally mediated by human perceptions (cf. Graeber 2001: 245–246), but this is never conceded, except in retrospect. Would it be possible to argue that modernists are as deluded by the magic of their artifacts as any premodern people ever were? Can we manage to expose the magic of our technology? Fundamental to such a shift of perspective are the implications of realizing that global price relations are systematically excluded from our definition of technology, even though, by organizing asymmetric resource flows, they are crucial for its very existence. Without a doubt, Cartesian dualism is at the root of the difficulties we have in perceiving our technological fetishism." > "When the California farmer imports oil to run his water pumps, the productive potential of oil appears to be objective, like turning a key in a lock, independent of perceptions. But here is the illusion of modern technology: his access to oil, and to the machinery it animates, is ultimately contingent on the socially constructed rates by which oil is exchanged for American exports on the world market. And whatever economists will tell us, we should never doubt that those rates are dependent on human perceptions." > "A conclusion from these deliberations is that we should distinguish between three fundamental categories of artifacts, defined by the specific ways in which they are delegated agency. The first is local, nonindustrial technology, which operates without the mediation of either human perceptions or exchange rates. It can be exemplified by keys or by locally produced implements such as the Andean foot-plow. The second is local magic, which operates by means of human perceptions, exemplified by coins or Spondylus shells. The third is globalized technology, which locally appears to operate without the mediation of human perceptions, but globally relies on exchange rates continuously shaped by the strategies of market actors. 16 It could also be called global magic, and can be exemplified by machines such as water pumps that run on fossil fuels or electricity. If we do not retain our capacity to distinguish between the subjective and the objective, the crucial differences between these three categories of artifacts will remain invisible for us." > "We must conclude that, from a global perspective, modern technology is magic. It is a specific way of exerting power over other people while concealing the extent to which this is mediated by human perceptions." > "More ominously, this conclusion suggests that the pervasive assumption of technological progress as the salvation of industrial civilization is no less naïve than other cultural illusions that have sustained premodern empires facing collapse. As our anxieties about the future prospects of this civilization become increasingly difficult to suppress, there emerges the contrary, neoromantic sentiment that indigenous, animist ontologies could provide us with clues on how to achieve sustainability and resilience. But rather than championing a magical ontology that most of us have irrevocably lost, an anthropological approach is more usefully applied to exposing the unacknowledged magic of our own ontology. Although the project of defamiliarizing and deconstructing our presumptively modernist categories is very much facilitated by juxtaposition with nonmodern ontologies, this is not necessarily tantamount to advocacy of the nonmodern, but may well amount to an acknowledgment that our categories have not been modern enough." # Problems with Technological Utopianism > "In 2010, the Bank of America opened a 55-story skyscraper in Manhattan Island, New York, which in the press was praised as “the most sustainable in the country” and as one of the “most environmentally responsible high-rise office buildings” in the world (Roudman 2013). The building had been given a Platinum certification by the so-called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and was applauded by Al Gore as a model for combating climate change. However, according to an assessment by New York City in 2012, the same building “produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan” and “uses more than twice as much energy per square foot as the 80-year-old Empire State Building” (ibid.). The main function of certification schemes like LEED, the journalist Sam Roudman concludes, is to create a market for sustainability and green publicity, rather than to save energy." > "The global implications of a particular technology can rarely be predicted at the local level where it is designed and applied. The paradigmatic example is the turn to steam power and fossil fuels in early industrial Britain, which was a local strategy for increasing profits, the long-term global implications of which could not be anticipated by individual factory owners (Malm 2016)" Solar power is often seen as the main successor to fossil fuels. However, this ignores the dependency that manufacturing photovoltaic cells has on fossil fuels and the toxic extraction of materials. Solar power remains the privilege of those societies wealthy enough to afford them. It relies on a global system of exchange which is inherently unequal. Just as the fossil fuel industry is being subsidized by society, so solar energy is being subsidized by fossil fuels. The economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was the first to consider the economic limitations imposed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He saw that economic activities inevitably result in the dissipation of available energy and an increase in total entropy. This became the fundamental basis of ecological economics. He further made the argument that it was not only energy, but matter as well that became irreversibly degraded (disordered and less available). He said that "salvation programs" based on solar power would require the dissipation of minerals such as copper and phosphorus, and other materials such as rubber in car tires. In making these arguments, Georgescu-Roegen was putting himself into opposition against some Marxist thinkers who continued to believe in technological solutions. # Quotes **Extracted Annotations (4/20/2021, 4:56:58 PM)** "As defined here, magic hinges on the attribution to certain objects of an agency that is actually contingent on human perceptions rather than on the physical properties of the objects themselves, but that to humans appears to be independent of their perceptions." ([Hornborg 2016:17](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=17)) "Among nonmodern, indigenous peoples throughout the world, it is generally recognized that a human or nonhuman organism is a manifestation of the webs of semiotic and material flows that constitute societies and ecosystems. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europeans, however, became obsessed with the internal constitution of objects such as organisms and machines. To trace the anatomy of the organism and the blueprint of the machine was regarded as a sufficient account of their operation, to the exclusion of the external flows that are as incontrovertibly necessary for their existence" ([Hornborg 2016:18](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=18)) "In order for slaves or fossil fuels to serve as an energy source for someone, they have to be made available for him or her to exploit. The societal arrangements by which energy sources are made available to different individuals or groups are what we conventionally refer to as the economy." ([Hornborg 2016:21](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=21)) "Economies can be defined as modes of distributing resources and risks in human populations. They are universally legitimized by cosmological systems justifying particular patterns of distribution by reference to moral principles. In this abstract sense, the societal function of modern economics is equivalent to the ideology accompanying ancient Egyptian slavery. If a reader should find the comparison objectionable, we might respond by observing that the global inequalities organized by modern economics are considerably more severe than those of ancient Egypt. But the main point to be made here is that "economies" are generally excluded from the definition of "technologies," even though the former are crucial conditions for the existence of the latter." ([Hornborg 2016:21](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=21)) "In modern society, Marx noted, relations between people are represented as relations between things. Marx referred to this exaltation of things, stripped of their social context, as fetishism. He coined the concepts of "money fetishism" and "commodity fetishism" to denote the tendency in modern society to exchange artifacts perceived as autonomous agents, because they are disembedded from social relations." ([Hornborg 2016:22](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=22)) "The conceptual detachment of objects from the relations which spawned them is a peculiarity of post-Enlightenment modernity. It implies an abandonment of a widespread premodern ontology that we may call relationism" ([Hornborg 2016:22](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=22)) "Bateson was aware that the form of each individual component of a living system develops in relation to the webs of interaction in which it is embedded. His wide-ranging studies in anthropology, psychiatry, and biology provided a corrective to the conventional inclination to explain behavioral and physical forms with reference to their internal drives and constitutions, rather than to their external relations" ([Hornborg 2016:23](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=23)) "Although, by now, the science of ecology and the environmental movement have helped raise a general awareness of how dependent humans are on their natural environment, it remains difficult for most modern people to conceive of organisms as vortices of matter, energy, and information reproduced by socioecological flows. Even more difficult to digest, the current argument would add, is that this also applies to artifacts. The conditions by which biomass is maintained also apply to what can be referred to as technomass." ([Hornborg 2016:23](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=23)) "Ingold specifically demonstrates how the emergence of modern technology can be seen as an externalization of work from human organisms onto machines." ([Hornborg 2016:23](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=23)) "Although Bateson and Ingold are highly concerned with materiality and with transcending Cartesian dualism, they paradoxically remain constrained by a fundamentally Cartesian understanding of society as a nonmaterial system of communication. But if social relations are indeed a subset of ecological relations, as Ingold (2000) has proposed, we should expect them to be no less material than the flows of matter and energy which we identify as ecosystems. The perspectives of ecological economics and ecosemiotics are attempts to transcend Cartesian dualism from opposite directions, the former by showing that society is also material and the latter by arguing that nature is also communicative (" ([Hornborg 2016:24](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=24)) "In Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974-1989) paradigmatic study, the economic development of individual nations in sixteenth-century Europe is explained in terms of an international division of labor within and beyond Europe. For Wallerstein, this sixteenthcentury world-system comprised a "core," a "periphery," and an intermediate buffer zone or "semi-periphery." The core is the main locus of capital accumulation, based on an "unequal exchange" of its manufactured products for raw materials from its impoverished periphery. The sense in which such exchange is unequal has not been convincingly theorized in the world-system literature, but the issue is fundamental to this book" ([Hornborg 2016:25](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=25)) "Frank (1998: 204; emphases in original) specifically attempts to reconceptualize technological development as "a world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy/system itself." His conclusion is that "there was no European technology!" If capital accumulation is a global social process implicating the entire system, then so is technological development. This is closer to a "field theory" of technology. The maintenance of technological infrastructure in core areas of the world-system is tantamount to the metabolism of the global social order. Frank (2007) even considered the social and ecological disorder imposed by the expansion of Europe on its colonial periphery in terms of the displacement of entropy." ([Hornborg 2016:25](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=25)) "Drawing on the natural laws of thermodynamics identified in physics, we can specify a basic requirement of the structures of exchange that maintain ordered processes such as living systems or the operation of machines. Biological organisms can stay alive only by importing more order-maintaining energy than they dissipate and discharge (Schrödinger 1967 \[1944\]). Highly ordered or "available" energy, referred to by physicists as "exergy" or occasionally "negative entropy," is what reproduces the internal order of any living system. The maintenance of this internal order, however, continuously dissipates the imported energy, making it less ordered and less available. In other words, the metabolic processes of living systems maintain order by exporting disorder, increasing entropy elsewhere. To stay alive, a living system must import more order than it exports. A basic requirement for its survival is thus an asymmetric flow of available energy, that is, a net import of order. This theoretical understanding of everyday metabolism is also applicable to technology." ([Hornborg 2016:26](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=26)) "The main point in this chapter, however, is that the technological artifacts which surround us should be reconceptualized as embodiments of a highly unequal global social system. They are not intrinsically innocent inventions that in principle could be available to everyone, given sufficient purchasing power." ([Hornborg 2016:27](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=27)) "Rather than fragment our understanding of this crisis into legitimate but separate worries over energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion, food shortages, climate change, global inequalities, and financial collapse, we need to realize that all these concerns are aspects of a single problem. This problem is the incongruous relation between modern social institutions and policies, on the one hand, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,1 on the other. The social arrangements and aspirations that are most fundamentally at odds with the Second Law of Thermodynamics are general-purpose money and beliefs in economic growth and technological progress. Of these illusions, the one that is most difficult to defamiliarize is undoubtedly that of technological progress." ([Hornborg 2016:29](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=29)) "What we have come to call land and labor were the ultimate energy resources, but they could be invested in capital in the form, for instance, of agricultural terraces, irrigation canals, roads, ships, armies, and temples. Capital is here defined as some kind of material infrastructure through which the extraction of energy can be increased" ([Hornborg 2016:30](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=30)) "Like other species we are still, of course, as dependent on solar-derived food energy as ever, but the dominant cultural image of how modern society operates tends to marginalize such concerns in favor of a preoccupation with flows of money." ([Hornborg 2016:31](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=31)) "But, like rationality, efficiency is ubiquitously defined by the cultural and societal context. If conceived in terms of an input-output analysis, the parameters for assessing efficiency were not related to expenditures of energy, but rather to the input and output of money, and of upper-class human time." ([Hornborg 2016:34](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=34)) "The logic of having a water mill built instead of purchasing slaves is essentially the same as using a vacuum cleaner instead of hiring a housemaid. In both cases, we could add, the owners of technology are able to imagine that technological progress has done away with degrading, low-wage toil. In both cases, however, a closer familiarity with the socioeconomic conditions under which the new technology is manufactured and maintained might have given them a different perspective. To take the example closest at hand, it is far from evident that the modern employees of Chinese vacuum cleaner manufacturers are better off than European or American housemaids were a century ago. Middle-class households in Europe and the United States have substituted domestic appliances of various kinds for their housemaids, but the Chinese factory workers who now produce these appliances are no more affluent than the low-wage Europeans and Americans whose labor those machines replaced a few generations ago." ([Hornborg 2016:35](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=35)) "The unequal exchange of embodied labor time in the modern world was demonstrated 40 years ago by Emmanuel (1972) and has recently been confirmed by Simas et al. (2015).2 The unequal appropriation of embodied land has been amply documented by the research on ecological footprints (Wackernagel and Rees 1996) and on the asymmetric global flows of materials, embodied land, and embodied energy (Lenzen et al. 2012, 2013; Yu et al. 2013; cf. Dorninger and Hornborg 2015).3" ([Hornborg 2016:36](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=36)) "A relevant question for social scientists, including anthropologists, to ask at this point in world history is whether modern technology has really replaced slavery, or merely displaced it." ([Hornborg 2016:36](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=36)) "If the concept of slavery is defined not primarily in terms of physical violence, but more fundamentally in terms of being coerced to perform alienating, low-status tasks for the benefit of a privileged elite, a significant part of the world's population would qualify as slaves." ([Hornborg 2016:36](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=36)) "Seemingly neutral concepts such as technology and the world market organize the transfer of their embodied labor and resources to an affluent minority. From this perspective, the operation of technology represents the deflected agency—the labor energy—of uncounted millions of laborers, harnessed for the service of a global elite. To view technology in terms of a set of energy slaves is thus indeed more than a metaphor." ([Hornborg 2016:36](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=36)) "Anthropologists are well aware that value is culturally constituted and cannot be derived from Marxist theory or from physics (cf. Sahlins 1976; Baudrillard 1981 \[1972\]; Bourdieu 1984 \[1979\]). To suggest that Marxist or ecological economists have a better understanding of what is valuable than market actors, and that the latter consistently underpay these more essential values, is the wrong way to approach the problem. The major mistake that these theorists make is to use the concept of value for some kind of material flow that is not in itself the object of valuation. It is not the quantity of embodied labor or energy that determines how much a consumer is willing to pay for a given commodity. The surplus value that provides profits for capitalists is not a metaphysical product of labor-power—one of several possible sources of energy—but simply the difference between the cost of inputs and the gain from sales of the output. In addition to human labor, the inputs may include, for instance, the work of draft animals, fuels, and raw materials. The paradox, then, is that critics of mainstream economics, in struggling to expose the ideological function of the market in mystifying asymmetric flows and to identify various forms of energy as the asymmetric flows thus mystified, have resorted to the mercantile notion of value to underpin their argument. This notion has for centuries pertained to money (i.e., exchange value) and consumer preferences. It belongs to the vocabulary of the market and should not be confused with the objective, material flows that both Marxist and ecological economists are concerned with. In order to argue that the world market conceals asymmetric flows of energy that contribute to global inequalities in the distribution of technology, purchasing power, and environmental quality, we would do best to talk about precisely that: asymmetric flows of energy." ([Hornborg 2016:37](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=37)) "In thus distinguishing material flows of energy from semiotic flows of money values, while simultaneously relating them to each other, we would be presenting an argument that would not be easy to dismiss. To observe that the accumulation of technological infrastructure in certain areas of the world, visible on satellite images of nighttime lights, would be impossible without a net input of available energy is simply based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Similarly, to observe that energy is dissipated in economic processes, implying that industrial products contain less available energy than the fuels and raw materials that were used in making them, is also completely in line with the law of entropy (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). From a physical perspective, in other words, production is destruction. The creation of consumer value or utility is simultaneously the creation of entropy. Finished products must be priced higher than the inputs—labor, fuels, and raw materials—but inexorably represent less available energy. The dissipation of resources is thus blindly and continuously rewarded by the market with more resources to dissipate. T" ([Hornborg 2016:37](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=37)) "But, someone might object, even if embodied labor or energy is not a value but a physical measure, wouldn't it be valid to propose that it is being underpaid? Couldn't the inequalities in the world be leveled out by adjusting exchange rates? Unfortunately, the basic problem is not simply that prices of embodied labor, energy, and resources are too low in relation to those of finished goods, but that if they were higher, there would be no incentive to continue the exchange. What would be the point of mechanization if it was not profitable? As argued above, the rationality underlying British industrialization in the nineteenth century was founded on the much lower price of land and labor in the colonies. The foremost rationale of industrial capitalism is to not have to pay for the costs of increasing social and ecological disorder in the surrounding world.4 This logic continues to pervade technological progress to this day." ([Hornborg 2016:38](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=38)) "A defining feature of an anthropological perspective is that it acknowledges the importance of cultural specificity. As Marshall Sahlins (1976: 170) succinctly put it, "no object, no thing, has being or movement in human society except by the significance men can give it."" ([Hornborg 2016:38](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=38)) "Anthropological, cultural analyses should have crucial things to say about past, present, and future concerns with sustainability, yet remain a very marginal perspective. Instead, a growing public concern about the prospects of socioecological collapse a few years back provided an ornithologist—a biogeographer—with the opportunity to produce a best seller on the turbulent history of human societies (Diamond 2005)" ([Hornborg 2016:39](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=39)) "Certainly, natural scientists need to realize that cultural sign systems such as language, money, and power are components of ecosystems, organizing significant aspects of their flows of matter and energy, but social scientists conversely need to realize that flows of matter and energy are fundamental to social systems, and need to be taken into account in any explanation of development, underdevelopment, and collapse." ([Hornborg 2016:39](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=39)) "It is deeply paradoxical and disturbing that the growing acknowledgment of the impact of societal forces on the biosphere should be couched in terms of a narrative so dominated by natural sciences such as climatology and geology." ([Hornborg 2016:41](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=41)) "The uneven accumulation of technomass visible on satellite photos of nighttime lights proceeds by means of a simple algorithm: the more fossil fuels and other resources it has dissipated today, the more it will afford to dissipate tomorrow. This account of our entry into the Anthropocene does not refer to the biological properties of the species Homo sapiens, but to a specific form of social organization that emerged very recently in human history, as a strategy of one segment of humanity to dominate the remainder. This form of social organization continues to be propelled by the interests not of our species, but of a social category (Malm and Hornborg 2014). As of 2008, less than 20 percent of the world's population was responsible for over 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions since 1850 (Roberts and Parks 2007). An average American today emits as much carbon dioxide as 500 average citizens of some nations in Africa and Asia (ibid.). It must thus be the work of social science to identify the drivers of rising emissions." ([Hornborg 2016:44](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=44)) "The world-systemic events of the eighteenth century were products of a global history of increasing interconnectedness and inequality ultimately founded on the human capacity for abstract representation. The big question is whether this capacity will be of any use in redesigning our global economy for survival." ([Hornborg 2016:44](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=44)) "A post-Cartesian understanding of the Industrial Revolution should fundamentally reframe the discourse on political ecology. Rather than dream of advanced technological solutions to problems of ecological sustainability,9 we would recognize most modern technologies as social strategies for displacing problems—labor as well as environmental loads—to areas where labor and environmental degradation are less expensive. Instead of technological utopianism, this radical reconceptualization of technology should prompt us to critically consider the role of general-purpose money in orchestrating asymmetric transfers of labor-power and natural resources in the world-system." ([Hornborg 2016:46](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=46)) "If the economic strategies generating globalization and industrialization are root causes of the perilous prospects of climate change, it should be theoretically possible to avert this threat by modifying the conditions of economic rationality. It should be feasible, in principle, to organize a monetary system that restricts the interchangeability of products to specific spheres of exchange through the use of special-purpose currencies." ([Hornborg 2016:47](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=47)) "It is difficult to imagine how money appearing as electronic information could be perceived as possessing intrinsic value. This suggests that electronic money, although currently maligned as the root of financial crisis, could potentially help us rid ourselves of money fetishism. Paradoxically, the progressive detachment of money from matter, obvious in the transitions from metals through paper to electronics, is simultaneously a source of critique and a source of hope." ([Hornborg 2016:49](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=49)) "The very concept of money is thus a pivotal cultural phenomenon that ought to be at the center of anthropological deliberations on modernity, development, and sustainability. Indeed, it can be argued that the concept of "indigenous people," which is often a central concern of anthropological research, could be defined as those segments of humanity who—in theory or in reality—have not yet succumbed to an outlook conditioned by modern money. Indigenous people fascinate modern people because they represent an imagined alternative—and a resistance— to money." ([Hornborg 2016:49](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=49)) "General-purpose money is a peculiar kind of sign. It seems impossible to classify it as belonging to one of Peirce's three general categories of signs: index, icon, or symbol. The distinction between these three types of signs is based on differences between how they relate to their referents (i.e., what they refer to): an index relates to its referent through contiguity, an icon through similarity, and a symbol through convention. A money sign, whether a coin, a paper bill, a check, or an electronic digit, does not generally refer to a specific commodity or service in any of these three ways. Although a specific money object can contextually evoke, for instance, the labor or sale that it represents, or its donor, or the monarch or nation whose imprint it bears, or even the purchase it is destined to perform, its fundamental property is its capacity to assume any meaning at all that its owner bestows upon it. This is tantamount to saying that money is a sign without meaning, that is, without a referent (cf. Rotman 1987). This semiotic property of money is undoubtedly the feature that qualifies it as both the most celebrated and the most condemned of human inventions." ([Hornborg 2016:50](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=50)) "the undifferentiated character of money cannot convey messages more meaningful than a signal to continue whatever is being done. It can be argued that this limitation has important implications for sustainability." ([Hornborg 2016:50](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=50)) "even if money is conceded to signify nothing but abstract quantity, such signification will mean very different things to different people, depending on the amount of money they have at their disposal. This inherently asymmetrical aspect of commercial transactions completely contradicts the liberal image of the generalized and unregulated market as free, fair, and of universal benefit (Reddy 1987: 62-106). Asymmetrical exchange is certainly not specific to money-based economies, but money is a way of concealing such asymmetries by couching them in an idiom projecting the appearance of reciprocity and fairness. This intrinsic asymmetry between market actors, inherent in their divergent assets, applies regardless of whether there are asymmetries in the physical substance of the exchange." ([Hornborg 2016:51](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=51)) "A fourth observation on the peculiarity of money is that "it is a form of social power that has no inherent limit" (Harvey 2010: 43). There is always a limit to the amount of physical assets a person can own, but there is no inherent limit to the amount of money he or she can command. Thus, there is no limit to the amount of money a human can desire. This is another way of phrasing the implications of the mainstream abandonment, within economics, of concerns with the finite, material aspects of the economy. As conceptualized by neoclassical economics, the economy can "expand without getting physically bigger" (Mitchell 2009: 417). The gross national product was invented to measure "the speed and frequency with which paper money changed hands," and it "could grow without any problem of physical or territorial limits" (ibid.: 418)." ([Hornborg 2016:51](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=51)) "There is a wide consensus that modern economics has emerged as the understanding and explanation of capitalism (Heilbroner 1999 \[1953\]). Although money, market exchange, and price relations have existed for millennia, it was the conceptualization of abstract land, labor, and capital as quantifiable and commensurable categories that created the discipline of economics (ibid.: 27). The emergence of economics has thus reflected and reinforced historical processes of commercialization and monetization. Although various schools of economics advocate different economic policies, they share the underlying assumption that (general-purpose) money is a valid metric for" ([Hornborg 2016:51](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=51)) "quantifying human transactions, and that statistics and mathematics offer methods for thinking and deliberating about them (ibid.: 314).2 Significantly, a standard textbook on the history of economics that has shaped the minds of generations of economists does not devote a single word to reflecting on the phenomenon of money itself, without which economics as a discipline would not exist.3" ([Hornborg 2016:52](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=52)) "The expansion of market trade in the late Middle Ages and early modern period contributed to a long-standing confusion about the relation between what Aristotle had called "use value" and "exchange value." The intuitive distinction between a traded commodity's substance or particular qualities and its abstract and quantifiable exchange value is valid, but rather than acknowledge that these two features of a commodity are analytically incommensurable, the history of economic thought has been plagued by unsuccessful attempts to derive the latter from the former. The challenge, as visualized by economists from the Physiocrats through Marx to ecological economics, has been to relate the material aspects of economic processes to the accumulation of monetary value. In the preindustrial world of the Physiocrats, it was the fecundity of the soil that was the ultimate source of wealth. For the economists of the Industrial Revolution, such as Ricardo and Marx, it was the power of labor. For many modern ecological economists, it is energy and "natural capital" (cf. Martinez-Alier 1987; Costanza et al. 1997). What these perspectives have in common is the notion that some particular, physical input in the production of a commodity has a specifiable relation to the monetary income from selling it. The urge to relate money and accumulation to tangible, biophysical realities is commendable—and an expression of a widespread dismay at seeing them diverge in both thought and practice4—but any attempt to derive the former in determined and definable ways from the latter is misguided." ([Hornborg 2016:52](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=52)) "From the late Middle Ages, avarice was viewed as less and less sinful (Hirschman 1977), and in 1714 Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees finally equated "private vice" with "public benefit," which ever since Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations has been the fundamental creed of economics" ([Hornborg 2016:55](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=55)) "As Aquinas's condemnation of moneymaking was based on his conviction that merchants and moneylenders do not create value as laborers do, there is an interesting line of descent from Aquinas to the labor theory of value (Bloch and Parry 1989: 3, reference to R. H. Tawney). It is thus no coincidence that schools of economics which today have moral objections to what they identify as forms of unequal exchange that are invisible to mainstream economists—primarily Marxian and ecological economics—are precisely those schools that maintain a strong concern with material processes. It appears that arguments appealing to moral norms such as justice and equality need to be based on real asymmetries in the flows of embodied biophysical resources, whether labor time, hectares of land, or Joules of energy. It seems very significant that neoclassical economics is as impervious to moral arguments as it is to material metrics." ([Hornborg 2016:56](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=56)) "The fundamental problems of global sustainability may not be inherent in the market principle in itself as much as in the implications of general-purpose money and the globalized scale of the market. A way of curbing the destructive consequences of economic globalization might be to rediscover the virtues of distinguishing local values (such as those concerned with food, shelter, energy, place, community, and face-to-face relations) from the values pertaining to global communication." ([Hornborg 2016:57](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=57)) "The Spanish Empire was largely based on the extraction of precious metals from the New World. These metals were the very substance of money in the Old World, and silver, in particular, was in very high demand because it was the primary means for Europe to conduct trade with distant China. The import of prestigious silk and porcelain from China to Europe had to be paid for in silver, because this was what the Chinese demanded in exchange. Ultimately, it was the demand for silver in China that propelled the Spanish conquests in Mexico and Peru." ([Hornborg 2016:63](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=63)) "However, if we consider the asymmetric flows of energy within an empire, arguably as essential for its reproduction as its own narratives of expansion, it should be valid to think in terms of what I have elsewhere referred to as the "thermodynamics of imperialism"" ([Hornborg 2016:67](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=67)) "Imperial Metabolism" ([Hornborg 2016:68](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=68)) "technology may not primarily be a matter of saving time and space, but of redistributing it in global society" ([Hornborg 2016:75](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=75)) "imperial projects can be viewed as attempts to control politically (and coercively) preexisting systems of agricultural surplus production and long-distance exchange, that is, to turn trade into tribute." ([Hornborg 2016:76](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=76)) "most of the productive potential of land and labor in an agrarian society ultimately represents solar energy captured through photosynthesis. The mainly agrarian, tributary empires in our sample (Han China, Rome, Inca, and Aztec) relied on a combination of religious devotion and military coercion to channel such energy to make it accessible for elite control. In the final two cases (the Spanish and British empires), we can more clearly see how they were at least initially geared to global market conditions, relying on advantageous exchange rates to complement religion and coercion in guaranteeing the accumulation of wealth." ([Hornborg 2016:76](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=76)) "technology is also a category of artifacts which can mystify unequal relations of exchange. Viewed from the perspective of time-space appropriation, technological objects reflect their owners' harnessing of the deflected agency of other people." ([Hornborg 2016:83](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=83)) "The amount of work that can be accomplished with a foot-plow or back-strap loom per unit of time is limited by the energy and skill of the laborer, but the amount of work that can be mobilized by a gift or sacrifice of Spondylus is limited only by human credulousness." ([Hornborg 2016:110](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=110)) "Money and machines may not be ensouled persons in modernity, but they are certainly believed to have autonomous agency. We pride ourselves on having abandoned animism, but have organized a global society founded on fetishism." ([Hornborg 2016:118](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=118)) "Georgescu-Roegen (1982: 10) observes that it is "beyond any question that matter dissipates primarily through friction of solids or fluids." He urges readers to think of "automobile tires, of the river banks, of the body of any living creature, briefly, of any material object with a definite form" (ibid.) and rejects what he calls the modern energetic dogma, which holds that dissipated matter can be completely recycled, if only sufficient energy can be applied. As even the economic processes that organize recycling convert available energy and matter into waste—that is, unavailable energy and matter—there can be no complete recycling of matter, regardless of the amount of energy applied. Any effort at recycling will produce additional waste. "This," writes GeorgescuRoegen (1986: 7), "is a regress without limit." The difficulties involved, he observes, are "instructively revealed by planning how to reassemble all the rubber molecules eroded from automobile tires by road friction"" ([Hornborg 2016:129](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=129)) "he argues that the weakness of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface means that "we need a disproportionate amount of matter to harness solar energy in some appreciable amount." According to Georgescu-Roegen, this constraint means that solar power will never be able to satisfy the demands of high-tech society in the way that fossil fuels have." ([Hornborg 2016:129](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=129)) "Technological utopianism is based on a conception of technology that reflects the historical experience of core nations of the capitalist world-system. This conception envisages technological solutions as straightforward challenges of engineering, rather than as societal strategies embedded in both economics and ecology." ([Hornborg 2016:133](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=133)) "The realization that money is fundamentally a fiction has over the centuries inspired numerous critical thinkers to advocate some kind of real, material standard of value—for instance, the energy standard proposed by the Technocrat movement or the gold standard established at Bretton Woods—but such approaches do not acknowledge the dissipative character of economic processes. In this final chapter we shall discuss how an economic system might be designed which does not simply peg money to a material standard—which has always ended in failure—but which guarantees that the operation of money does not jeopardize the material security and survival of the humans that rely on it." ([Hornborg 2016:137](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=137)) "Mainstream (neoclassical) and most heterodox (Marxian and ecological) economics remain confined within a worldview fundamentally shaped by general-purpose money. In not fully acknowledging the implications of Georgescu-Roegen's (1971) observations on the entropy-increasing character of economic processes, deliberations on economic policies, no matter how seemingly radical, that do not question the use of such money tend to promote increasing centralization, polarization, and environmental degradation." ([Hornborg 2016:137](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=137)) "Although the many disadvantages of increasing scale and the obsession with economic growth were clearly articulated already in the 1970s (for instance, Schumacher 1974; Daly 1977), the conceptual lock-in of general-purpose money has continued to constrain the widespread aspiration, four decades ago, to envision an alternative emphasis on community, localized resource flows, and sustainability." ([Hornborg 2016:137](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=137)) "It is both unrealistic and futile to propose a fundamentally revised discipline of economics, which links monetary flows to flows of embodied labor, land, or energy, but it may be slightly more realistic to suggest means of insulating people's basic material needs from the vicissitudes of financial fantasies." ([Hornborg 2016:138](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=138)) "To curb the destructive societal and ecological processes currently generated by the phenomenon of money, it will be necessary to redefine our cultural conception of commensurability. Such a shift means distinguishing values pertaining to basic human survival from the values in which financial institutions speculate. This would not need to be a matter of legislation as it would suffice to provide people with other options for survival than to sell their labor and buy their food in the same market that is used by corporations as an arena for capital accumulation. If people would indeed tend to prefer the alternative option, a fundamental transformation of the global economy could conceivably occur without either legislation or coercion. The idea is for national authorities to issue a complementary currency,1 which can only be used to purchase locally produced goods and services, and to distribute it as a basic income to all households in proportion to their size." ([Hornborg 2016:139](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=139)) "These movements have become a field of academic study with its own journal, the International Journal of Community Currency Research. A special issue (Blanc 2012) provides a recent overview of the history and prospects of such experiments with alternative currencies. Recurrent shortcomings include widespread dismissal, absence of a national governance system, inefficient promotion of local consumption, personal exhaustion of leaders, insignificant impact, accounting difficulties, risks of free riding, and unclear incentives on the part of shopkeepers. The editor concludes that "thirty years after their first emergence, \[community currencies\] still have to prove they can change the present state of things, while research agendas are increasingly considering them" (ibid.)." ([Hornborg 2016:140](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=140)) "As has been argued in this and previous chapters (see particularly chapter 3), the most basic assumption of economics is its faith in general-purpose money and global markets as signaling systems that promote the most efficient allocation of resources. Contrary to this assumption, the logic of general-purpose money in several respects promotes inefficiency, if other parameters such as energy are taken into account." ([Hornborg 2016:143](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=143)) "Power is a hybrid phenomenon involving both cultural and material aspects. A general definition of power could be built on the observation that it universally implies unequal access to material resources of some kind, including energy. But in order to be complete, such a general definition would also have to account for how such inequalities of access are socially maintained. A reasonable proposition is that the most pervasive, yet least salient, way in which social inequalities are maintained is through cultural mystification, that is, by rendering them either invisible or self-evident and natural. This is simultaneously a quite concise way of defining ideology. Of course there are other means of reproducing inequalities as well, notably coercion, but it can be argued that they are generally secondary to the power of ideology." ([Hornborg 2016:147](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=147)) "Inequalities in social power tend to boil down to inequalities of access to such resources, including armies with which to assert them, all legitimized by hegemonic discourses, whether concerned with the divine ancestry of the Inca emperor or with the invisible hand of the market. The phenomenon of social power includes not only unequal access to resources, but also unequal influence over the construction of mainstream discourse." ([Hornborg 2016:148](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=148)) "It would be completely in line with Holling's emphasis on the principle of congruity of temporal and spatial scales to observe that what economic anthropologists refer to as general-purpose money systematically defies that principle, by making all kinds of values commensurable, regardless of which level of scale they pertain to. Goods and services pertaining to the reproduction of individual human organisms, such as food and beverages, for instance, are considered interchangeable on the world market with goods and services pertaining to the reproduction of entire ecosystems, or even the biosphere, such as technologies for deforesting Amazonia. Due to the logic of general-purpose money, people thus routinely trade rainforests for Coca-Cola." ([Hornborg 2016:149](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=149)) "Although incapable of analyzing the cultural and political dimensions of sustainability, Holling's understanding of hierarchies of spatiotemporal scales in living systems provides an incisive analytical tool for identifying modern money—through its capacity to confuse scales—as a source of environmental degradation." ([Hornborg 2016:150](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=150)) "In accordance with the analysis above, this ought to be the central function of a currency system that would enhance local resilience. In order to achieve the desired effects, the new local currency would need to (1) offer consumers a superior alternative to purchasing commodities with regular money and to (2) specify the range of local goods and services that it can be exchanged for. In other words, a political decision to implement such an alternative economic system would need to include strategies for (1) persuading consumers to actually use the local currency, rather than regular money, and for (2) ensuring that its use actually promotes consumption of local goods and services" ([Hornborg 2016:151](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=151)) "But rather than inspire resistance to the neoliberal world order against which it was launched, the concept of resilience has been incorporated as a central component of the neoliberal model itself (Walker and Cooper 2011)." ([Hornborg 2016:153](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=153)) "The Scandinavian countries of the 1960s, which for many served as a model for development, now represent a privileged corner of the world, blessed by the success of their export industries on the very capitalist world market that they pretended to transcend. The levels of consumption— not least of fossil fuels—enjoyed by average Scandinavians are neither physically possible to universalize among seven billion humans nor are they defensible from the perspectives of global sustainability and climate change." ([Hornborg 2016:154](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=154)) "Money is the idea that anything can be exchanged for anything else." ([Hornborg 2016:167](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/IHI89ZFN?page=167))