We need to uncouple the concept of technology from the ideas of progress and development.

It often happens that, when I talk about the relationship between technology and capitalism, someone pops up to present me with an argument I call the iPhone fallacy. “Without capitalism, we wouldn’t have the technology you use to write from the comfort of your iPhone,” they retort. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have an iPhone, the point remains: it would be impossible to do many of the things we do today without the devices developed through and as technology—including criticizing technological advances. We couldn’t, moreover, criticize anything without the vaccines and other medical advancements that make our very existence possible. The capitalist imaginary has co-opted the creative power behind what we call technology so thoroughly that “technological advances” and “capitalism” are now treated as interchangeable ideas. Those who employ the iPhone fallacy label anyone who criticizes technology’s role in contemporary systems of oppression— specifically its role in our current climate emergency—as anti-technology and accuse us of wanting to push humanity back into a primitive state in which technological progress doesn’t exist. But they’re wrong. 

In broad terms, we can think about technology as a set of techniques, instruments, knowledge, and processes developed by humanity to create modes of relating to our surroundings. It is worth underscoring that this set we call technology is more than just technique; it is a dynamic, ever-changing system. By surroundings, I refer not only to the ecosystems of which humans form a part, but also to the societies into which we have organized ourselves. Beneath technology’s very existence lies the idea of an “other”—whether “natural” or “social”—with which it is possible to establish a relationship mediated by the metabolic system that is technology. This relationship transforms both “us” and that “other.” It goes without saying that technology, seen in this light, is closely related to creativity and that singular thirst for knowledge we talk so much about—the one that appears in many narrative traditions like the Mesoamerican legend of the possum and the myth of Prometheus, both of whom stole fire and the knowledge associated with its control to transform their surroundings. (In this sense, perhaps the distance between art and technology is not as great as is usually thought, since creativity underlies both concepts, though that is a reflection for another time.) Following this line of argumentation, we can assert what has already been said by numerous voices in different languages and traditions of thought: that according to this broad definition of technology, agriculture would be one of humanity’s principal technological innovations, along with writing and many other quotidian phenomena that are no longer viewed as technologies. Each society develops its own technological innovations according to its characteristics, needs, and systems of thought.

We can think about the Mesoamerican system of the milpa as a contemporary technology—I say “contemporary” because like all technologies it distills thousands of years of tradition, but it exists as a current mode of cultivating food for concrete societies. “Milpa” is a word that comes from the Nahuatl language and could be translated literally as “sown plot”— though, as is always the case, the term denotes much more than its etymology suggests. The milpa is an agroecosystem for the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, and a wide array of edible species that form a symbiotic feedback loop. And while it is possible to identify concrete techniques and instruments that have been developed for the cultivation of a milpa, this technology also comprises the knowledge of how to employ these techniques and instruments—as well as the rituals, beliefs, stories, holidays, and social relations woven around the milpa. Like every technology, the milpa exists within a broad network of meanings, social mediations, and even emotions. However, it stands in contrast to another contemporary technology associated with the cultivation of food: agro-industrial technology, which also exists within a broad network of social relations (above all economic ones), and which is oriented toward the capitalist demand of maximizing production. This is why it focuses on monocultures that require machinery, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides to achieve its targets, impacting the soil in ways directly linked to environmental degradation. The consumption of these agro-industrial products is shaped by certain dietary habits promoted by the advertising industry—while creating health issues that generate yet another market related, at least in part, to pharmaceutical technologies. As such, we can observe in both the milpa and industrial agriculture that technology is not neutral with regard to the traditions of thought and other aspects of the societies from which it emerges. Both technological traditions are constantly being innovated, and both present solutions to problems or desires specific to their contexts. Technology is neither ideologically nor economically aseptic. And yet positivist approaches to technological innovation present industrial agriculture as a more advanced and modern technology, while relegating the milpa to the past and to underdevelopment. This despite the fact that the milpa proposes a better strategy to confront a problem that is as contemporary as the climate emergency to which industrial agriculture has actively contributed. 

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