A prominent Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen stated in his manifesto "there is no material problem - that cannot be solved with more technology". This ideology that now has the ear of President Trump and can be felt in our answer for everything from warfare to climate change. But, writes Caroline Ashcroft, this technological optimism has ideas deeper than a mere fascination for fancy gadgets, it instead forms a part of a totalising world-view about the force that shapes our political possibilities. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt's work in the aftermath of the nuclear bomb, Caroline argues we need to reassert that all technology is political, and that a blind faith in technology can only lead to ruin.

Radical techno-optimism abounds in the twenty-first century. The tech industry proclaims the myriad benefits of its offerings and rejects external oversight and regulation. Venture capitalist and tech billionaire Marc Andreessen’s ‘The Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ offers one particularly extreme version of these claims. “We believe,” he writes, “that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.” This sentiment lies at the heart of techno-optimism: more technology; technology to solve the problems of technology. While we might be sceptical about the biases of the Silicon Valley elite, there is also a more pervasive optimism about the possibilities of technology. The UK government’s Net Zero Strategy (along with others like it) relies upon the effectiveness of a range of technologies to reduce or balance emissions, and politicians globally see green technologies as a means to mediate between the ever-growing energy demands of industry and economic growth, and the threat of climate change and environmental degradation. Amongst other things, the promise of technology offers a way of sidestepping certain problems, thereby evading the costs of non-technological solutions: social, political, or economic. Technology is the Deus ex Machina of our time.

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Modernity’s unquestioned faith in technological progress would result in catastrophe.

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A group of political theorists, working in the context of the Cold War, also believed that techno-optimism characterised the world they lived in, and argued that this was a terrible mistake. Thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt or Lewis Mumford believed that modern technology posed unprecedented risks to society, and that modernity’s unquestioned faith in technological progress would result in catastrophe. ‘Technology’, in the sense they use it, describes not only technological artefacts, nor even the total aggregate of those artefacts, but a mode of action in the modern world. This idea was described by the French thinker Jacques Ellul as a technique: a “totality of methods…having absolute efficiency…in every field of human activity.” Technology, in such terms, is not a thing (although its character appears in the technological objects we see in the world), but rather a kind of force which exerts its own particular influence upon the world: material, political and ideological, and thus a force which is not entirely within the control of human agency.

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Technology, this means, is no longer something we can pick up or leave, a set of useful, although limited tools, but becomes interwoven with almost every aspect of our life.

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