Podcast: Generative Futures
Episode: David Edgerton on Historical Analogies, Technology, and AI
Pub date: 2026-06-09
Get Podcast Transcript →
powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationDavid Edgerton is Professor of History at Kings College London. His book Shock of the Old challenged the way we think about innovation, arguing that we systematically overvalue the new and ignore the old (including maintenance). He has also written importantly on the British ‘warfare state’ and his book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation argues Britain became a fundamentally national economy from 1940-1985.
In this conversation we discussed the uses of history in understanding AI and society, why the word ‘technology’ might mislead more than clarify and what a detailed material understanding of our world might look like.
Philip Bell: David, you are a professor of history at King’s, and I think I’m right in saying you founded the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London. In the foreword to Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s new book, More and More and More, he describes it as coming out of the intellectual environment at Imperial, because I think he was a researcher there as well. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining.
David Edgerton: My pleasure.
Philip Bell: The genesis of this conversation was the use of history and historical analogy in understanding what might inadequately be called technology. One thing I’ve found quite interesting about AI is that there seems to be a geopolitical divide in how it’s considered in historical context. The US, and the West generally, tends to compare AI to the atom bomb or the Manhattan Project — an existential threat to be contained. Whereas Chinese companies and policymakers, if you look at the “AI Plus” strategy in China, tend to compare AI to electricity — more of a utility to be diffused. Do you think analogies are helpful in understanding technologies or technical change, or do historical analogies trap us into particular responses?
David Edgerton: Clearly some analogies will be helpful and others won’t be. What’s interesting about analogies in this strange area — discussion of technology, where we don’t really know what it is — is that they are often very predictable. Comparing AI with the atomic bomb is just a replica of comparing the Human Genome Project with the Manhattan Project. Desperately unoriginal comparisons. Comparing things with electricity is a bit richer and not quite so common. Suggesting that artificial intelligence will cause an industrial revolution just like the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century — that’s a very, very common argument. Not a very helpful one. So we need to beware the analogies. We need to wise up to the small range of analogies that are in play, and to understand why they’re being used and what they’re being used for.
Philip Bell: That’s an interesting point about the predictability of the analogies. I’ve looked up a list of different analogies that have been used with regard to AI. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, described AI as “more profound than electricity or fire.” Yann LeCun, until recently head of AI at Meta, said the invention of the printing press is the closest historical parallel to AI. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, compared AI to the Manhattan Project. It’s interesting because technologists seem very interested in talking about history. It reminds me of the famous Keynes quote: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” How would a technologist go about getting a better historical framing?
David Edgerton: Well, you say technologists — who are these people? They’re not necessarily technologists. They are figures associated with great enterprises. I think that’s an important distinction to make. Yes, there’s a nice little list of comparisons. It’s always the big ones, isn’t it? They could have said agriculture. They could have said the Neolithic Revolution, but that wouldn’t sound quite right, I guess. They are looking for big ones. And that’s all they’re trying to say: this is going to be big. So they search back — probably just Google — for other big changes in the past. They could have come up with the wheel, actually. Why is it fire and not the wheel? Why is it the Manhattan Project and not the project to build the B-29 bomber? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not the product of research. It’s just a PR gambit. It’s not to be taken seriously; it’s just propaganda.
Now, if one actually wanted to make a historical comparison, I guess first of all we wouldn’t, because AI hasn’t had a major impact yet. We have to start with a proper definition of what it is in the present that we want to compare with the past. Another way of looking at it: AI is, at the moment, very largely hype. So let’s look back at other cases of hype. Nuclear would be a very good example. The claim that nuclear would transform the world — that electricity produced by nuclear reactors would be “too cheap to meter.” Well, that didn’t happen.
In fact, the Manhattan Project as a comparator is a very strange one, because if you take the Manhattan Project seriously — beyond just a kind of reference to big bangs and lots of money — we find that atomic bombs have not been used in war since 1945, and that the generation of electricity through atomic power has not in fact been that significant. We could easily have lived without nuclear power in the world. What is the story that’s been told?
These aren’t proper histories; they’re other kinds of hype. Airplanes would bring world peace. Dynamite would lead to the end of war. There are lots of these. This is a very, very old way of thinking about this mysterious thing, “tech.” You’d have thought we’d get over it. But in some ways AI itself makes it worse, because if you were to ask AI — as the Tony Blair Institute did — what is the future of AI, it will just trawl through all the rubbish that’s online and tell you it’s going to be like the atomic bomb, or like fire, or like the Industrial Revolution. We are living in a kind of miasma of very bad, very cheap knowledge about these things. My immediate reaction is that none of this is to be taken seriously except as PR, except as lobbying. There’s no analytical intelligence behind any of these claims; there’s a political intelligence behind them.
Philip Bell: That’s an interesting point about using AI to regurgitate historical analogies. I think Adam Tooze has described AI as a kind of “technology of technology,” which I thought was interesting. But in your book The Shock of the Old, I think you describe historians as the true experts of the future — please correct me if I’m wrong. In my experience studying history as an undergraduate, I took away two principles: the contingent nature of society, the fact that the past was continually surprising, which makes me think the future is likely to be surprising too; and also a kind of humility about the fact that people got lots of things wrong. Do you still believe that historians are the true experts of the future, and why?
David Edgerton: Yes, I do. And you’ve already explained it. We’re the experts on the future because we have to train ourselves to remember the future isn’t here yet and we don’t know what it is. We have to train ourselves because, of course, we’re looking at the past and we know what’s going to happen next. So we’re always going to beware the idea that war was inevitable in 1939 or that India would get its independence in 1947. We are very used to the idea — or should be — that the future is not completely open-ended, but as you say, will very likely be surprising. Anyone who claims they know what the future is doesn’t know anything about the future for sure, and doesn’t know anything about history either.
Philip Bell: I was thinking that in a way, then, it’s useful not to look too deeply into the past. If you have a particular functional reason for acting — let’s say you want to raise lots of capital in venture capitalism — maybe there’s a balance. If history does teach us to be slightly more hesitant about our predictions, that might be less useful for someone trying to raise billions of dollars. So maybe there’s a slight paradox where it’s functionally not helpful for some people to carefully examine the past?
David Edgerton: No, exactly. But nobody is carefully examining the past. As I say, this isn’t serious. What is serious is that it’s PR — PR to investors in particular, PR to governments who have to support these new technologies. If you are a serious investor, would you look at historical analogies? Well, no — unless you’re doing it really, really seriously. You’ve got to look at the present, you’ve got to look at the technology, you’ve got to make guesses as to what is going to happen. I think the one lesson to take from history is that predictions are likely to be wrong.
One very important reason is that new techniques aren’t exactly the same as old techniques. In what sense is AI like a steam engine or like electricity? You mentioned Adam Tooze referring to AI as a “technology of technology.” So it’s different in that sense. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the first technology of technology. The very word “technology” means the study of the technical arts. It is a way of understanding that allows you to change the techniques we have — a generalised view of the capabilities of machines, processes, whatever. So that’s not new. And the processing of information is not new either — that’s been central to our lives for centuries. The capabilities change, of course; the kinds of sensors change. But every new technique is by definition new, so you’re not going to find an exact parallel in the past.
Philip Bell: That reminds me — I was listening to Andrej Karpathy, who used to be head of AI at Tesla, describing how AI coding feels more like a continuous evolution rather than a massive break with previous tools that supported coding and programming, in terms of the integrated development environment, which already auto-completed bits of code.
David Edgerton: But look, why are we talking about AI? Why is that the one new technique that everybody is on about? Is there nothing else changing in the world of technique, the world of engineering, the world of chemistry? Clearly lots of things are changing, but we’re saturated with this PR about AI. And I’m not an expert on AI. Most people talking about it are not experts on AI. We’re just being deluged with nonsense. Now, that’s not to say AI might not be important — it’s important to stress that — but the talk we have represents, I think, a deliberate attempt to stop us thinking seriously about how the world is changing and how it might change. It is utterly self-interested.
One reason we perhaps don’t see that is that part of the self-interested discourse talks about the downsides. “It could be dangerous, the machines might take over and kill us all.” Look, a critical voice. Well, it’s not a critical voice. It’s just a voice telling us that AI is really, really powerful by telling us it could do some very damaging things. That’s not new. It’s true of arguments about dynamite: dynamite would either bring world peace or destroy the world. Airplanes, same: they’ll bring us all together or they’ll bomb us all to smithereens. Either way, it’s an argument for the power of the airplane. And we have a prior question: what exactly is the airplane? What exactly might its powers be? That is the question we need to ask.
Philip Bell: That’s a really good point. A common theme of your work is what makes our thinking visible or invisible. I’m thinking about The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, where you talk about the historical narrative of the welfare state needing to be quite dominant in our thinking in order to stimulate support for it, whereas other narratives didn’t need to be as obvious. And in The Shock of the Old, the hidden counterfactual alternatives to technologies — we think about technologies compared to nothing, rather than compared to actual alternatives. And you talk about the term “technology” itself as potentially confusing us. What do you think is the allure of understanding the history of technology as a sequence of ages marked by a particular technology?
David Edgerton: I try to avoid using the term “technology” because it rots the brain. If we talk about cars or airplanes or knives and forks or spades, we have sensible, grown-up things to say. As soon as we use the word “technology,” our brains turn to mush and we start thinking in very Manichaean terms. The reality is that we don’t have a decent account of what I like to call the material constitution of our world — the machines, the processes. And we cover this up with this concept of technology.
We think we understand something called technology, but if you actually take a look at what people mean by “technology” in history, they don’t actually mean what we use to live or to fight or whatever it might be. What they mean is the early history of some techniques which have been taken to be important for reasons that aren’t usually analysed. So what you have in effect is the early history of those techniques which have been thoroughly propagandised, which have been very visible. Atomic bombs are going to be there because people have been talking about them for eighty years. They make a big bang. You can see them on screen. Airplanes — a very visible form of transportation.
What do you not talk about? The great mass of things. You don’t talk about ships in the twentieth century. Ships are much more important in terms of carrying trade than airplanes, but they’re boring, they’re old — who cares?
So you start with this account of this weird concept, “technology,” which is the early history of things deemed important for probably the wrong reason. And then to create a nice narrative, you assume that in any particular era there are one, two, or three key technologies. Then you assume these emerge in clusters and you call these clusters “industrial revolutions.” The first Industrial Revolution in the UK in the late eighteenth century; the second in Germany and the United States, about electricity and chemicals; then a third, possibly in the 1960s; and in the most common variant, a fourth industrial revolution, which is something we’ve been living through maybe since 2010. Some people have five, some have six, some have two. It’s basically all made up. There’s no evidence behind any of this, but it’s a nice story. No politician or indeed historian has been booed off the stage for talking about a second, third, or fourth industrial revolution. You can talk any old rubbish if you start talking about technology and the fourth industrial revolution.
Philip Bell: It reminds me of Fressoz, who describes our tendency to think about energy as defined by particular technologies that transition from one to another — and he undermines that argument. To give one example, he argues the so-called “age of coal” was also an age where wood was very important, because wood was needed to build coal mines, and wooden sleepers were used on train tracks to enable the transport of coal. I was also reading an article by David Graeber about whether animals play. He argued that, given the nature of our society and current political system, we tend to consider competition over cooperation — and that there’s no reason to think animals might not play and cooperate with each other, but our dominant metaphors lead us to consider animals as competing. Do you think that has anything to do with our narrative of technological change as a series of phases?
David Edgerton: There is certainly the sense that the new obliterates the old — that is, if you like, a competition. But I don’t think that kind of thinking is the source of these stage models of energy or material development more generally. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s point is that it’s not we who think like this. We’ve been trained to think like this. We’ve been subjected to very particular models of stages and transitions in energy by interested people. He goes back, for example, to nuclear scientists of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s who wanted to say that we would transition to nuclear. They produced diagrams that purported to show transitions as the share of nuclear went up. That kind of thinking has become deeply ingrained in professional and academic circles, and it diffuses out from there. It’s not a natural condition of the human mind to think in those ways.
If you look out the window here in London, it’s very obvious that the past is still with us — the layout of streets is old, a lot of the buildings are old. We wouldn’t immediately conclude that the world is completely renewed every supposed industrial revolution. That would be an absurdity. And yet, even sitting here in London in that material environment, people do go on about energy transitions and industrial revolutions. That’s because that’s the mode that has become established for talking about both of those things. But the point is it’s got nothing, or very little, to do with either present reality or historical reality. This is just a way of talking. This is stuff that’s in books and on the internet. It’s not what actual engineers work on or do. It’s a fantastical world.
And it’s all to do with convincing us to buy these new things, and above all convincing government. This is why some things are public. The welfare state has to be public because it’s about government money, about politics. Most chemical production doesn’t have to be public because chemical companies just get on with it. But AI has to be public because we’ve got to pay for the energy, we’ve got to pay for the water, we’ve got to buy the things on offer to supposedly, for example, get the National Health Service working properly. This isn’t a disinterested analysis; this is a sales operation on a major, major scale — part and parcel of huge investments that have been made by very powerful people.
Philip Bell: Do you think there’s some degree of legitimate, necessary simplification of the history of technology? Sometimes people talk about how, when we’re teaching students history, we wouldn’t necessarily teach them the way we’d teach a PhD student. Is there some argument that at different levels of expertise, we can have different levels of simplification?
David Edgerton: Of course, self-evidently, we need to have that, and we do. But that’s not the point. The point is: what simplification? If you’re saying to me that for the grown-ups we should have proper history and for the plebs we should have any old rubbish, I’d say no. And the stuff we get in these histories is not just in “history for the plebs” — it’s in histories for the elite. It’s about this mysterious thing, technology, and it’s rubbish. The question is: why is it rubbish? Not why is it simplified or dumbed down — why is it wrong?
To be sure, we need to simplify the histories of the material. What those simplified histories should be is an open question. Some people have some fun with this — what is the most important innovation of the twentieth century? And some people will say the washing machine. It’s not an uninteresting case. I think we can have lots of interesting simplified histories which would help us think. What we have is a lot of simplified histories which are stopping us thinking.
It’s always the defence: “Oh, we’ve got to have a simple narrative, a story we understand. That’s why we talk about industrial revolutions.” It’s a very, very common defence. My critics try to say that my criticisms are intellectual criticisms just for the elite. No — my criticisms are precisely about the kind of stuff that has been fed to people. And actually, I would say there are much more interesting stories to be told than the ones we’re routinely fed.
Philip Bell: I think that point about starting with the question is maybe counterintuitive but naturally quite engaging. I can imagine that being a really good way of teaching the history of technology in the twentieth century — using “what was the most important technology?” as a starting question. The fact that it’s contentious would actually make it engaging.
David Edgerton: I’d avoid the use of the word “technology” if I could. What is the most important process? What’s the most important machine? What’s the most important technique? People are really interested in that, because they start thinking about alternatives — what we use things for, what sort of use is more important than some other. And crucially, you ask people to reflect on their own historical knowledge. It’s not the case that people don’t know what machines were used in the past. They do know, from all sorts of sources. So you’re getting people to think on the basis of their own knowledge, their own experience indeed sometimes.
Philip Bell: In The Shock of the Old, you present a much more chronologically jumbled picture than is commonly presented. Some examples: electric vehicles were more common in the 1900s than petrol cars; the German army in 1941 invaded Russia with more horses than Napoleon did in 1812; small modular reactors are now coming back into fashion even though they were invented in the 1950s, and many people in the AI world are talking about them as the future of nuclear energy. The electricity grid is becoming incredibly important for emerging technologies, which is not a new technology in itself. Do you think other domains of study are less teleological? Are we able to understand regression better in economics or other aspects of society?
David Edgerton: It’s teleological, yes — particular models of replacement of the old by the new. Are we better in other areas? I guess we are, in that we are more likely to want to find continuities in history in other areas — maybe in political history, for example. One wouldn’t imagine that politics was invented yesterday, or that the particular kind of politics we have today was invented yesterday.
On the other hand, our accounts of the modern world are profoundly influenced by the stage theories of the material. Even political or cultural historians, who might well want to stress continuity, when it comes to the material will also tell these stories of radical discontinuity. These stories have a very particular influence, because we do believe — or most academics at least in the West believe — that we live in an industrial age, or a post-industrial age, a scientific age, a technological age, an age of mass production, an age of post-Fordism. These are all concepts about the material which are taken to represent profoundly important realities.
Some people would say that anthropologists — and Bruno Latour would say anthropologists looking outside the West — have a kind of straightforward empirical view of the complexities of the interactions of nature and culture, and we should apply that insight to the West. But I think it’s not so easy, precisely because we understand the West in these very particular terms.
It’s not difficult for non-academics, though. We just look around. It’s no surprise to us that our world is full of machines of different vintages. It’s kind of obvious. It’s just not obvious once we get into the realm of books and the word.
You have to look around. I’m sitting in a room here. I’ve got computers in front of me, obviously, but I’ve got copper cable. I can see a wooden window. I can see glass, plastic — all sorts of stuff. And most people will have a sense of how old all this stuff is.
Philip Bell: That’s a really interesting point — it’s the word, once we get into the realm of thinking about words, that can cause us to think differently.
David Edgerton: Yes, and we think more intelligently about steel than we do about technology, or indeed science.
Philip Bell: This question might be confusing the matter further, but do you think our society is becoming more techno-deterministic?
David Edgerton: No, because technology isn’t determining. You’ve got to ask: what is the “techno” bit? What is the technology? And what people usually mean by that is innovation. Innovations can’t determine anything. Innovation is just the first use of something. It doesn’t have to be used again.
This whole technological determinism thesis is itself nonsense, because it’s usually interpreted to mean that selected innovations drive history. Some foolish people say or imply that. But if you were to ask the question — is the primary shaper of our range of possibility the material constitution of our world? — then you might start thinking, well, that’s an interesting question. How might I answer that? And you’d have to work out what the material constitution of the world was before you could start making comparisons between that material constitution and possibilities. We’re nowhere near there. We don’t have the means to answer that question. The idea that the world is more technically determined now than before is simply unanswerable.
Philip Bell: I was more asking whether our society thinks of technology as becoming more deterministic. When I watch the news and hear people talking about new technologies, it feels to me as if they’re spoken about as self-determining natural forces. Is that a new phenomenon, or have people always thought about technology in this deterministic way?
David Edgerton: First of all, people aren’t thinking about technology in any broad sense in that deterministic way. They’re making claims for very particular innovations. It’s not “technology” — it’s the particular innovation. And yes, people write as if AI had its own logic and was imposing itself on the world, and we can’t resist it, we just have to adapt. Very common argument. It’s meant to stop us asking: who’s behind this? Who’s telling me this? Is this new? No — it’s as old as the hills. Or I should correct myself, especially as a historian: it is certainly more than 150 years old.
Philip Bell: What do you think the determining factors are?
David Edgerton: What is driving change in the world? There are actually lots of different answers to that question. If you ask experts, they might say forces of production, or science and technology, or innovation. But the serious ones would also want to discuss the concept of capitalism. Capitalism is the main driving force in the world and might indeed be driving innovation, driving the development of the forces of production.
Other people might say something like industrialism, as opposed to capitalism. Some might say competition — once you release people’s innate capacity to want to do new things by opening up markets, you get change. People who are religious believers might give you different sorts of answers.
I often find that people react to my casting doubt on technology as the driving force by implying that leaves us with nothing. But there are lots of other explanations of change, which we in fact routinely use in political discourse, in academic discourse, in daily life. We don’t go around saying our lives have got worse or better because the internet came along — unless you’re having a conversation about the internet. We talk about wages, prices, crime, the weather. We are much more capable of having serious discussions about our world than the discourse on technology and science suggests. We can have a much more intelligent conversation about the washing machine than about AI or technology in general.
Philip Bell: Roberto Unger, the philosopher, in a 2007 book — I think it’s The Knowledge of Society — asked the question: who gets to innovate? Evgeny Morozov has also explored this question. Do you think this is useful?
David Edgerton: Absolutely. Who gets to innovate? Nowadays, we’re all supposed to be innovators. We’re all creative. We apply for jobs: “I’m an innovator. I don’t teach like anybody else. I don’t manage my time like anybody else. I’ve innovated.” In fact, by using that language of innovation, you’re just showing that we are all very imitative. We’re expected to say we’re innovators.
But the reality is that the capacity to innovate is highly restricted to very particular institutions. Large firms. New firms which have a lot of money behind them. These are the institutions which are innovating, and we need to understand them if we want to understand innovation. States innovate in certain ways as well. Why do they do it? Why do they innovate in this area rather than that area? These are absolutely the key questions.
Philip Bell: Would you say in The Shock of the Old that the true heroes of innovation are the users?
David Edgerton: No, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think there are any heroes in Shock of the Old. But people have wanted to see my story as one that says ordinary people are innovators, and I’ve reacted against that a little bit.
Yes, we all change things; we all have some agency. But when it comes to inventing really big things, we don’t have much agency. In fact, systems are there to make sure that we don’t have any agency. My book is a plea to understand where technical change comes from — not to talk ourselves into a world in which we believe we are all contributing to the big changes. We’re not.
We live in this very weird culture where we are expected to say that we are all creative and innovators. Actually, we live in the greatest age of imitation.
Philip Bell: Would you say it’s important that innovation should be, in an ideal scenario, somewhat inclusive or democratic — so that if there was some innovation being foisted on people that materially made their lives worse, they could have some say in it?
David Edgerton: Well, sure, of course. But just believing that we’re all innovators and creative isn’t going to help us with that. On the contrary, it stops us seeing where the innovations are actually coming from and what it would take to control them. And what it takes is not having some discussion about research policy or having people involved in discussions with scientists. No — because the scientists and the universities aren’t deciding on these things. It’s corporations and investors.
If you’re saying we should have democratic economic planning, I may well agree, but achieving that would be extremely difficult because it would meet enormous resistance from the very people who are controlling innovation. We can’t talk our way into controlling technology by believing that we are innovators, or that as users we necessarily have the power to change things.
We do have some power. One important thing to remember is that we have to reject most of the new things we’re offered. “We” here is not just ordinary people, but also investors or the management of firms. They will have to choose between different research projects, between different ideas to pursue. We as consumers have to choose which phone we’re going to buy. We can’t buy every phone. But if we turn down the Samsung, people don’t say, “You’re a Luddite — you’ve turned down the Samsung.” That would be absurd. But when we talk in general — “I don’t quite like this new machine that we’ve been offered” — suddenly it’s “You’re a Luddite, you’re stopping progress.” No, I just don’t like this particular machine. Come up with a better one. Our language is deeply loaded and profoundly unhelpful.
Philip Bell: I sometimes wonder if language is a technique that’s quite democratically shaped. Northern Irish people — I’m from Northern Ireland — don’t speak in exactly the same way as English people or Scottish people. We have some of our own words, and we have Irish, which is a separate language. I wonder whether that is one example where there’s some level of democratic input — where the only source of power an individual has isn’t just rejection, but also some generative power.
David Edgerton: Sure, of course. But when it comes to machinery and things, where does one find this kind of thing at the political level? It’s very hard. It is different, and I hope we will be able to find this sort of language. I hope we’ll have a richer, more open, more democratic understanding of — I come back to this phrase — the material constitution of our world.
If you ask the question, what are the most produced materials in the world, most of us wouldn’t have a clue. But up there are things like water, sand, gravel, pig iron, steel, chlorine, ethylene, salt. We don’t see these things, partly because some of them don’t come out of factories, partly because they’re extremely cheap, so they don’t register very heavily in economic statistics.
They make up our world. Steel is so cheap that it’s everywhere, in more massive quantities than ever before. If you want to think about climate change — which is maybe one area where we have a kind of democratic politics about the material constitution of the world — we need to absolutely understand all these things. If we are going to reduce CO₂ emissions, we’ve got to change the nature of our transport vehicles. If we’re going to keep petrol, they’ve got to stop getting bigger. If we’re going to use steel, we’ll probably have to make it more expensively. These are very big issues which are going to require democratic consent. This isn’t just an academic discussion — it’s really serious. How do we change the material constitution of the world, which we need to do, without a good elite understanding of what that is — which is our major first problem — and without popular understanding?
Philip Bell: That’s a really interesting point. I’ve heard climate breakdown being described as one issue where we’re all perpetrators and victims at the same time, although some obviously more victims and some more perpetrators. The question about NIMBYism — whether people are willing to have a solar farm in their community, or offshore wind farms — I know some people who’ve asked me to sign petitions trying to stop wind farms in their area. That’s a good point about the democratic aspect: thinking about how the benefits of wind farms or solar panels could be put back into those communities.
David Edgerton: Yes, but Fressoz’s brilliant book makes the fundamental point that you can’t just think about climate in terms of wind turbines and electric cars. You’ve got to think about the whole world of production and carbon. And to do that, you need to understand where the carbon dioxide comes from. It’s not just electricity generation. It’s not just cars. Making wind turbines uses coal, which produces carbon dioxide. It’s a really complicated issue. And any serious politics of decarbonisation has got to go very much further than asking whether windmills are a good thing — and very much further than saying AI will help us optimise our emission profile.
Philip Bell: One thing I took from Fressoz’s book was that he wasn’t saying the transition or a more sustainable future isn’t possible. He was just saying it’s very difficult and we need to be serious about it.
I wanted to link your work in The Shock of the Old to the idea of “temporal claustrophobia,” which Jonathan White takes from the historian Chris Clark. Jonathan White talks about our current political situation being narrated as an emergency, which reduces our ability to think in the medium and long term. Do you think that short-termism and our obsession with the new are related? Are we addicted to the new in part because we’ve lost the ability to value longer-term qualities like repair, maintenance, stability?
David Edgerton: Who’s the “we” here? I don’t know the answer to that question. But I would say that all this emphasis on the new is nowhere near as convincing as it used to be. We’ve had this very old rhetoric about novelty and change. But we’re less inclined to believe it, and we’re less inclined to believe it because economies have been stagnating, because living standards haven’t been going up.
In the 1950s and ‘60s in the UK, being told that the future was going to be better than the present was a plausible argument, given that people’s standard of living was rising pretty rapidly. It’s not so plausible now. So I don’t think we are as gullible, as receptive to claims for innovation as we might think. Politics has changed in all sorts of ways, and it certainly can’t be reduced to a cult of novelty.
Philip Bell: Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.
David Edgerton: Thank you.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit genfutures.substack.com
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Phil Bell, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
