What do you think?
Rate this book
The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment
Hornborg argues that we are caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology that prevents us from imagining solutions to our economic and environmental crises other than technocratic fixes. He demonstrates how the power of the machine generates increasingly asymmetrical exchanges and distribution of resources and risks between distant populations and ecosystems, and thus an increasingly polarized world order. The author challenges us to reconceptualize the machine―"industrial technomass"―as a species of power and a problem of culture. He shows how economic anthropology has the tools to deconstruct the concepts of production, money capital, and market exchange, and to analyze capital accumulation as a problem at the very interface of the natural and social sciences. His analysis provides an alternative understanding of economic growth and technological development. Hornborg's work is essential for researchers in anthropology, human ecology, economics, political economy, world-systems theory, environmental justice, and science and technology studies.
Find out more about the author at the web site.
Find out more about the author at the web site.
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
3 people are currently reading
169 people want to read
About the author
Alf Hornborg
26 books21 followersAlf Hornborg, Ph.D. (Cultural Anthropology, University of Uppsala, 1986), is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology in the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden. Previously he taught at Uppsala University and University of Gothenburg. He serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Ecological Anthropology, Signs,, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Ecological and Environmental Anthropology.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 25, 2014
Engineering unequal exchange
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com, Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com, Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' working conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
The fundamental idea of the book is that finite natural resources are the only source of value - not labour - and that it is these resources that industrial and then financial capitalism has been accumulating for two hundred years - not money - disposessing others. As a corollary to this, industrial production must be revealed as dissipation through the work of people and machines, which downgrades the creative potential of raw materials and energy sources blending the two into objects with a limited creative potential, but higher order.
Which is quite exactly the opposite of how we tend to interpret reality. From these premises, the conclusion that the economy is a zero-sum game - which is unacceptable and depressing to most of us. Neoliberalism, in its double-truth approach to influence, has always acted in line with the zero-sum game assumption, and preached as if the infinite growth (here 'cornucopia') paradigm were true. The increasing aggressiveness with which developed countries seek to secure energy resources and raw materials wherever they are based, in the name of 'security' and other rethorical devices, is a testament to this comeback of Physiocracy, as all attempts to deny climate change (on the grounds that if we leave fossil fuels unburnt, we give up the only available source of value).
What about machines then? In this finite, constrained world, machines - both materially and metaphorically as organizations and infrastructure - are the result and enablers of unequal exchange, which makes possible accumulation.
Fascinating, mesmerizing, machines hide underneath the veneer of complex order the reality of the appropriation of resources.
The weakest component of this theoretical framework is the use of thermodynamics, which is not fully explored as an actual law of physics or as a metaphor. Once it is agreed that value derives from natural resorces, the exergy/emergy treatment of the value transfer becomes superfluous. Exchange is not unequal because exergy rich resources are traded for exergy depleted goods, but because those goods are valued using a different value theory. We buy at staggering low prices (exergy depleted) goods from China, which have a value - based on the natural resource input they incorporate - several times higher. In sum, exchange is twice unequal because natural resources are undervalued when they are extracted and undervalued again when incorporated into products. The surplus is thus twice appropriated by the buyer.
Dismantling the underpricing mechanism is the only way to allow development and redistribute wealth.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com, Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com, Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' working conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
The fundamental idea of the book is that finite natural resources are the only source of value - not labour - and that it is these resources that industrial and then financial capitalism has been accumulating for two hundred years - not money - disposessing others. As a corollary to this, industrial production must be revealed as dissipation through the work of people and machines, which downgrades the creative potential of raw materials and energy sources blending the two into objects with a limited creative potential, but higher order.
Which is quite exactly the opposite of how we tend to interpret reality. From these premises, the conclusion that the economy is a zero-sum game - which is unacceptable and depressing to most of us. Neoliberalism, in its double-truth approach to influence, has always acted in line with the zero-sum game assumption, and preached as if the infinite growth (here 'cornucopia') paradigm were true. The increasing aggressiveness with which developed countries seek to secure energy resources and raw materials wherever they are based, in the name of 'security' and other rethorical devices, is a testament to this comeback of Physiocracy, as all attempts to deny climate change (on the grounds that if we leave fossil fuels unburnt, we give up the only available source of value).
What about machines then? In this finite, constrained world, machines - both materially and metaphorically as organizations and infrastructure - are the result and enablers of unequal exchange, which makes possible accumulation.
Fascinating, mesmerizing, machines hide underneath the veneer of complex order the reality of the appropriation of resources.
The weakest component of this theoretical framework is the use of thermodynamics, which is not fully explored as an actual law of physics or as a metaphor. Once it is agreed that value derives from natural resorces, the exergy/emergy treatment of the value transfer becomes superfluous. Exchange is not unequal because exergy rich resources are traded for exergy depleted goods, but because those goods are valued using a different value theory. We buy at staggering low prices (exergy depleted) goods from China, which have a value - based on the natural resource input they incorporate - several times higher. In sum, exchange is twice unequal because natural resources are undervalued when they are extracted and undervalued again when incorporated into products. The surplus is thus twice appropriated by the buyer.
Dismantling the underpricing mechanism is the only way to allow development and redistribute wealth.
June 20, 2008
I'd give this book a 5 but it is a tough read. Deeply philosophical, politico-ecological, post-marxist, exergy-based critique of capitalism and its effect on the environment. Got that? Mixes political ecological theory, entropic theory (essergy/exergy/emergy type stuff), ecological theory and global development stuff. Fascinating, brialliant and hard work. The bottom line? Material, exhange (supply-demand) and labor theories of value support capitalism's rape of the earth and the natural support systems that make out lives good. The only way to escape this cycle is to value the amount of energy put into a product, and/or the amount of useable energy still available in the product. Yee-haw!
February 27, 2012
Everyone has to read this book although that is impossible since it is written in academic ego language, but get past that and find a jem! Also find out that we are all intertwined in a complicated net of global relations that we more or less have been tricked into without realising it. Prepare to have your illusions about the world shattered and become mesmerized (after having to got know your dictionary at an intimate level)by the language spelling out the innerworkings of the worldssystem and our oblivious part in it.
January 20, 2021
Food for thought!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews