Maximilian Pieper
There is no such thing as “sustainable technology.” To believe that technology does anything by itself is to fetishize it.
After studying industrial engineering at the University of Augsburg and the University Politehnica of Bucharest in my Bachelor, I shifted focus to the socio-political aspects of technology during my Master in Politics and Technology at the TUM.
Besides my academic education, I also worked as a research assistant for the research group “Markets for Mankind”, on the ecological impact of agriculture.
In my master thesis, I explored how the dominant ontology of technology hinders political actors from solving global crises of inequality and ecological breakdown. Out of this research, my Ph.D. project emerged; with it, I will continue trying to understand society through technology.
The first article of my cumulative dissertation was recently published in Springer’s ‘Philosophy & Technology’ and is titled “Technology as a Strategy of the Human? A Comparison Between the Extension Concept and the Fetish Concept of Technology”. The article is available as Open Access and can be viewed here.
Maximilian Pieper receives a scholarship from the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (sdw).
Contact: maximilian.pieper@uni-a.de
If we understand technology in the context of the Anthropocene only through its technical aspects, we miss how modern technology is itself a social phenomenon that depends on a global ecologically unequal exchange of energy, labor time, land, and resources.
Technology Fetishism in the Anthropocene. Global Inequality, Environmental Destruction, and the Problem of Functionality
If we understand technology in the context of the Anthropocene only through its technical aspects, we miss how modern technology is itself a social phenomenon that depends on a global ecologically unequal exchange of energy, labor time, land, and resources.