ABSTRACT Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive. Instead, especially those vehemently opposed to the technology should use it as an opportunity to (...) expand the attention paid to the underlying environmental problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: ‘inverse moral hazards’. (shrink)

Silicon Valley and its innovation center counterparts have come upon food and agriculture as the next frontier for their unique style of innovation and impact. But what exactly can the tech sector, with expertise in information and communication technologies, bring to a domain in which the biophysical materiality of soil, plants, animals and human bodies have most challenged farmers and food companies? Based on a detailed analysis of all of the companies that have pitched their products at events sponsored by (...) the Silicon Valley-based convener, Foodbytes!, we show that a large proportion of tech-driven solutions are digital technologies transferred from other domains. These technologies at best inform decision-making on the ecological processes of food and farming, but do not provide tools to treat them, and otherwise provide business solutions not even aimed at major challenges in food and farming. Drawing on a small set of interview data, we additionally suggest that tech entrepreneurs migrate to food and agriculture because it seems purposeful, exciting, or lucrative, but sometimes lack a clear understanding of the problems they might solve with their digital technologies. In making our case about the mismatch of problem and solution, we bring into conversation recent critiques of digital solutionism with abiding concerns in agrarian political economy and critical food studies regarding the role of the biological in both challenging food production and spurring technological intervention. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Human-technology interactions are omnipresent in daily life, a reality that must be faced to enact positive change without uprooting the technological systems that have come to define us. The present study develops a collective intelligence model for human-technology interaction design that aims to promote peace, prosperity, and happiness through design intentionality informed by utopian targets of radical improvement in society. Participants generated ideas, clarified and consolidated them, and then developed an interpretive structure model of the most important affordances identified (...) during the idea generation phase. Coupled with a two-pass thematic analysis of the original idea set, what emerged is a model that is informed by stakeholder users of the technologies of tomorrow. Affordance themes centered on the importance of promoting world peace through technological means, identifying and rectifying material and financial inequalities, addressing negative well-being effects in current technologies, and increasing global collaboration and eventual expansion into the cosmos. (shrink)