ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss the phenomenon of modern technology as a total social fact, viewed from the combined perspectives of history, sociology, economics, thermodynamics, ecology, epistemology, and culture theory. Anthropology is uniquely equipped to assemble such transdisciplinary perspectives on material aspects of contemporary societies and to “defamiliarize” lifestyles and social arrangements that have come to appear natural and desirable. It is high time for those of us who enjoy the benefits of modern technology and patterns of energy consumption to recognize our lifestyle as the privilege of a global minority, and technology itself as a strategy for appropriating and redistributing time and space in global society. Such a reconceptualization of deeply rooted notions of “technological progress” and “modernization” would make it easier to grasp the nature of the global crisis that we are currently facing. Rather than fragment our understanding of this crisis into legitimate but separate worries over energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion, food shortages, climate change, global inequalities, and financial collapse, we need to realize that all these concerns are aspects of a single problem.
