Dmitry Orlov: How the Technosphere Threatens the Biosphere and our Freedoms

Geopolitics & Empire · Dmitry Orlov: How the Technosphere Threatens the Biosphere and our Freedoms #088 Dmitry Orlov rejoins us to discuss his book on the technosphere and how it threatens the environment or biosphere, limits our economic freedoms, and can become weaponized as a political technology. He gives some recommendations on ways to mitigate against the overarching influence of the technosphere. Transcript Podcast: Returning to the Geopolitics and Empire Podcast is author Dmitry Orlov. We'll be discussing his book, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-sufficiency, and Freedom, which touches on ways technology or this thing known as technosphere limits our economic and political freedoms as well as threatens the biosphere and environment. I'd also like to remind listeners to subscribe to all of our social media and weekly newsletter, all of which can be found at geopoliticsandempire.com, and thank the few of you who have left a tip via Patreon, PayPal, or Bitcoin, and ask new listeners for continued support because it does cost a considerable amount of time, energy, and money to produce this podcast. Without further ado, thanks for coming back on, Dmitry. [spoiler] Dmitry Orlov: Thank you for inviting me. Glad to discuss this topic. Podcast: Yeah, and I purchased this book from you a year ago, and only got around to reading it recently. You put to paper succinctly a lot of thoughts I've had on this subject of the technosphere, but let's start with what is the technosphere. The term, for me, evokes different themes, such as the technocracy, the 1930s scientific dictatorship movement, which I suppose is still alive today in some form. Some people talk about the term globalism, an elite who wield technology to tighten their grip on power, perhaps private corporations who wield greater power than states, such as Silicon Valley, who, at this moment, are purging any anti-establishment voices from their online platforms. It also, the technosphere reminds me of the Belgian utopian Paul Otlet who wanted to classify the world and create some sort of world city, as well as it evokes images of science fiction dystopian literature in film, such as The Matrix. Could you tell us what is the technosphere? Dmitry Orlov: Well, what got me thinking about it initially was this thought that there are systems that human being evolve at various points that are not necessarily in their individual or group interest and that these systems behave as emergent intelligences and as agents independent of the human will, that they manipulate people as opposed to people controlling them.Probably, the first one is agriculture. It made people sicker. It bound them to the earth. It made them unable to move around as they have before, but it increased population density and allowed more powerful systems of control to develop. It gave rise to empires, whereas before, we had basically bands and tribes. That took over. Then, later on, we had the development of the financial realm and money lending, which was only made possible by agriculture and by the accumulation of harvests, of harvested wealth. Eventually, this way of handling wealth involving money and debt took over and grew out of control, so that money became this necessary evil that people required to keep people at bay.Then later on, with industrialization and especially with the development of fossil fuels, we had the full development of the technosphere, which is now a realm onto its own, an emergent intelligence that we have no chance outside of that we must allow to take priority over our own interests, even if our basic interest is just elemental survival in terms of not destroying the biosphere or what's left of the biosphere. Podcast: Just, again, to clarify that note on your definition of the technosphere. It's not any sentient being, but I suppose it can be wielded by political elites? Dmitry Orlov: Yes, well, it can be used to one's advantage or one's disadvantage, especially in large groups. For instance, you could make the fatal choice of not industrializing, and then your country will be taken over that has not made that choice, but instead has industrialized and has produced weapons of war at the industrial scale. That has happened over and over again. Attempt to not be part of the technosphere leads to failure. Another move that people can make is decouple from the global financial system. Well, that leads to revolt eventually because the global system, with all of the injustices that it creates and all of its flaws, allows people to become wealthy. People, when deprived of that ability, will revolt eventually, as has happened all over the place.People can make decisions on some scale, but in terms of pushing back against the technosphere as a whole, the project is more or less doomed to failure. We are condemned to sort of nibble away at it at the edges to make, basically, lifestyle decisions so that we're not utterly ravaged by the technosphere, but we can't banish it altogether. Podcast: You also say that a technosphere demands homogeneity, and now we're seeing all this crisis with migration in Europe and Central America where you're having people from different countries going into European countries. We have this globalization of culture where, here in Kazakhstan, where I am, the most popular restaurant is Kentucky Fried Chicken.I mean, you go to the malls here in Kazakhstan and the local food chains, when you compare, the KFCs always got this long line compared to the local food chain. What is it about this technosphere that demands a homogeneity of culture, and is the migration crisis part of this push towards making nations homogeneous? Dmitry Orlov: Well, there are a lot of reasons why these global brands are actually global, and one of them is that they cater to the least common denominator. They care to immature tastes. Children like chicken nuggets. Adult don't necessarily, but they are forced to eat chicken nuggets because that's the most universally acceptable fare. There's a lot of that to it.In terms of controlling people, the first step from the point of view of the technosphere is to standardize everyone. Instead of having an educational system that basically tries to figure out what each person's aptitude and talent is, and allow them to develop it individually, which is what produces educated individuals, instead, the effort is to, again, cater to the least common denominator.For instance, mathematics is dumbed down so that those students in the class who are least capable are able to keep up, and then the smartest students, basically, are deprived of any stimulation in learning math and lose interest. Instead of actually learning how to solve problems, people are taught to fill in circles and multiple choice test forms. That sort of thing.In terms of the migrant crisis, the effort, which again is very much in line with the interest of the technosphere to commoditize everything including human nature, is to basically posit that there is this universal humanity, and that the universal human rights can supersede just about everything else, and that everybody must be treated the same regardless of how their ancestors have lived and what they have been conditioned to excel at. Some population groups, they excel at disease tolerance, and others excel at intensive farming. Those groups are not necessarily the same. Some other are excellent at industrial work, and they are disjoint with the other two groups, but everybody is lump into the same group. Everybody has to be treated the same. Everybody is processed based on the same side of bureaucratic principles. That's the goal. Podcast: Talking about the technosphere, it reminds me a lot of something Jim Rickards, author Jim Rickards has written about systems or complexity theory. It seems like the more complex a system gets, the more fragile or precarious it becomes. Then it creates these technologies, that it create unintended consequences, which constantly need to be mitigated to prevent the entire system and biosphere as well as technosphere from collapsing. You've mentioned nuclear energy, the problems we've seen with that in Ukraine and Japan, GMOs, nanotechnology kind of reminds me of Microsoft Windows updates, which are in need of constant patching for a system that is always failing until one day it can collapse. How fragile is this technosphere itself? Dmitry Orlov: Well, it's robust in the sense that it is very difficult to stamp out or destroy, and nobody has the ability to do it. It does not have anything resembling an off switch. It will blindly march forward until something catastrophic happens, but that catastrophe is very much coded into it because although it does possess a certain kind of intelligence, an emergent intelligence, it is not a human intelligence. The technosphere, to put a too fine a point on it, is an idiot savant. It is very good at growing. Like a cancer, it's capable of growing, but just like a cancer, it is incapable of seeing whether or not it's killing its host. The technosphere specifically is completely incapable of seeing physical limits to its growth and expansion. It has absolutely no way of measuring diminishing returns, be it in oil and natural gas extraction, or using the biosphere as a sink, or any of the other problems that develop along the way.It cannot see physical limits. It is also unable to see the limits of technology. Its basic assumption is that new technology is always better than older technology, but more technology is better than less technology. Then no matter what the problem is, the solution lies in the application of even more technology, even if its technology itself that created the problem, to begin with. Podcast: To talk a bit of its influence on the biosphere, something that you've written about for a long time, the environment and climate change.