This post was initially written in French, La technologie nous sauvera-t-elle ?
I feel as though I keep hearing, more and more often, that climate change is above all a problem of innovation. Emissions continue to rise, targets keep slipping out of reach, yet we fill our collective imagination with carbon-capture machines, artificial intelligences supposedly able to optimize the transition, and even technologies designed to alter the climate itself. There is nothing absurd about such confidence in itself, and technology will very likely help. But it becomes politically suspect when it serves mainly to postpone difficult questions, beginning with this one: what are we willing to change, here and now, in the way we produce, consume, and govern? The literature on “mitigation deterrence” helps us understand how the promise of a future intervention can legitimize delaying present efforts. Nor is this mechanism unique to climate change. The COVID pandemic, it seems to me, offered a strikingly similar scene, in which fascination with the biomedical response sometimes pushed into the background the social, institutional, and political tools that the strongest research nevertheless regarded as indispensable.
Technological solutionism
Let us begin by clearing up a possible misunderstanding. Criticizing technological solutionism does not mean claiming that technology is useless, nor does it amount to advocating some romantic form of powerlessness. What this critique targets, rather, is the tendency to believe that social, political, health, or environmental problems, simply because they can be described through indicators, can also be treated as mere design flaws calling for technical correction. Evgeny Morozov, in his book subtitled The Folly of Technological Solutionism, shows clearly that solutionism begins when deeply moral, political, and sometimes irreducibly conflictual dilemmas are reframed as questions of efficiency, transparency, or incentives. This shift is not trivial: it changes not only the way we respond to problems, but first of all the way we define them.
Solutionism is not simply about proposing tools. It consists in presuming the nature of the problem before its terms have even been discussed. Morozov insists on this point when he writes that Silicon Valley’s promise has dulled our capacity to question not only the means, but also the ends. We readily debate whether particular devices are feasible, far less whether the worlds they envision — and impose on us — are desirable. Yet a world in which everything becomes measurable, steerable, optimizable is not merely a more efficient world. It is also a world in which we risk treating as anomalies to be corrected what once belonged to deliberation, compromise, conflict, and even democratic imperfection itself. In this perspective, ambiguity, opacity, slowness, or friction cease to be ordinary features of social life and become system defects.
Benjamin Pajot, in Le solutionnisme technologique : vrais problèmes, fausses solutions ?, identifies the same mechanism in a somewhat different way. He defines techno-solutionism as a vision that claims to offer technological solutions to social issues that are, by nature, complex and multifaceted. In his reading, this vision is gaining ground at the expense of the public interest, especially in environmental, health, and security matters. What is particularly interesting in his text is that he is not merely describing an intellectual fashion or a rhetorical habit. He sees in it a deeper ideological framework, one that tends to replace the analysis of power relations, inequalities, and collective choices with a search for supposedly neutral, rapid, and rational technical fixes. In other words, instead of asking who decides, who bears the costs, who benefits from the gains, and according to which priorities, we ask which tool might make the situation more efficient.
This substitution is far from innocent. It produces a simplification effect that is also a depoliticizing effect. A social problem becomes a problem of architecture. Disagreement becomes an information failure. Inequality becomes an access deficit. Crisis becomes a coordination failure. And the solution, in every case, tends to take the form of a platform, an algorithm, a smart infrastructure, a well-calibrated market, or an innovation designed to bypass conflict rather than confront it. The point is no longer to transform structures, but to optimize their most visible effects. Pajot also notes that contemporary solutionism belongs to a historical continuity with Alvin Weinberg’s techno-fixes, especially Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?, that is, with the idea that it would be preferable to solve problems “from above,” while minimizing social disruption, behavioural change, and normative contestation.
One can then understand why solutionism is so appealing to the leaders of contemporary societies. It offers something exceedingly rare in politics: the promise of transformation without major confrontation, correction without open conflict, and above all reform without substantial redistribution, visibly painful sacrifice, or brutal arbitration between divergent interests. In this sense, it is not merely an ideology of innovation. It is also an ideology of circumvention. It makes it possible to claim that action is being taken while postponing the question of what would actually have to change. The success of such a posture lies precisely in its moral comfort. It allows the recognition of danger to coexist with a refusal of its most troubling implications.
That is why solutionism should not be understood as a mere excess of optimism. It rests on an implicit political anthropology. It assumes that societies struggle to transform themselves through deliberation, constraint, or conflict, but that they might reform themselves more easily through devices. Where politics appears slow, divided, and messy, technology presents itself as clean, fast, and results-oriented. Where collective action requires negotiation, consent, institutions, and sometimes legitimate coercion, the device promises gentle, distributed, almost invisible adjustments. Society is no longer changed through openly debated rules, but through environments that “nudge,” platforms that reorganize behaviour, and systems that make some choices more likely than others. The solutionist dream is thus indeed that of government without politics, or at least of a politics that has become almost unrecognizable.
Morozov pushes this critique a long way. His point is not that technologies are ineffective. Some of them may well work. But that is precisely why they must be judged not only by their effectiveness, but also by the ends they serve and the ways of life they encourage. A device may be technically brilliant yet politically impoverishing. It may solve a local difficulty while installing a diminished conception of autonomy, responsibility, or the common good. In some cases, it may even remove the symptom while consolidating the cause. Solutionism is therefore objectionable not only because it simplifies problems, but also because it selects, among possible responses, those that require the least collective repoliticization.
One can therefore see why solutionism flourishes especially in periods when societies doubt their own capacity to act upon themselves. When trust in the collective erodes, when public power appears delegitimized, when the state is portrayed as inherently cumbersome and the market as naturally inventive, the technological promise takes on an almost providential quality. It ceases to be one means among others. It becomes the socially acceptable form of political hope. We no longer really believe that democratic institutions can reorganize the economy, impose fair constraints, redistribute burdens, or produce lasting consent. But we still want to believe that an innovation elegant enough, profitable enough, and scalable enough will spare us the worst.
Yet the ecological transition, more than many other issues, forces us to ask politically explosive questions. Which forms of production must be reduced? Which infrastructures must be shut down? Who pays for decarbonization? Which inequalities must be corrected to make the transition bearable? Which forms of restraint are acceptable, and for whom? Faced with such questions, solutionism offers an escape route. It holds out the hope that new technologies will allow us to preserve the essentials of current economic trajectories while neutralizing, later on, their most harmful effects. The promise is no longer merely that of technical assistance. It becomes the promise of a transition without any visible transformation. This is exactly what William F. Lamb, Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, and their coauthors show in Discourses of climate delay. Their argument avoids the overly simple opposition between believers and skeptics. They show that climate delay does not stem only from denial, but also from discourses that acknowledge climate change while justifying minimal, postponed, or inadequate action. Among these are precisely the discourses that promote non-transformative solutions and shift attention toward technology or market mechanisms, at the risk of diverting debate away from the deeper transformations required by the scale of the problem.
Solutionism is not merely a cognitive illusion. It is a socially organized way of making the gap between the gravity of the diagnosis and the weakness of the response bearable. It does not necessarily deny catastrophe. It proposes to manage it without altering too much the structures that produced it. It does not always oppose action head-on. It reformulates action in such a way that it remains compatible with a horizon of minimal adjustment. In this sense, contemporary technophilia is not merely faith in machines. It is also, and perhaps above all, a way of avoiding the question of what we are still capable of doing together. It is in the field of climate that this logic appears most clearly today. For the promise of carbon removal technologies, negative emissions, or a future repair of the damage gives concrete form to this politics of postponement. We must therefore now examine what the recent literature calls “mitigation deterrence,” that is, the way in which the hope of a future solution can weaken present efforts.
Climate, the promise of carbon removal, and the new rhetorics of delay
The climate question is interesting not because technology would be useless here — quite the contrary. Part of the literature reminds us that some degree of carbon removal will probably be necessary, notably to deal with residual emissions or to correct a temporary overshoot of carbon budgets. But it is precisely because these technologies may have a real use that they become so politically powerful. Their technical relevance is easily transformed into an imaginary promise, and then into an argument for postponement. The problem, then, is not the existence of carbon removal. The problem begins when its future possibility is mobilized to relax the demand for present-day emissions cuts. This is what Nils Markusson, Duncan McLaren, and David Tyfield proposed to call, in Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence by negative emissions technologies (NETs), “mitigation deterrence,” that is, the risk that the introduction, or even the mere consideration, of another climate intervention may reduce or delay mitigation efforts. In their account, this phenomenon does not simply arise from poor individual calculations. It is embedded in sociotechnical imaginaries, power relations, and a political regime that tends to exaggerate the substitutability between present emissions and future repair.
What is at stake is not simply the presence or absence of climate policy. It is the way a climate policy may be organized around a promise of compensation. In Confronting mitigation deterrence in low-carbon scenarios, Neil Grant, Adam Hawkes, Shivika Mittal, and Ajay Gambhir show very clearly how carbon removal can substitute for emissions reductions in two ways. First, over time, by allowing immediate mitigation to be relaxed in the name of future removals. Second, across sectors, by allowing some sectors to retain residual emissions that are supposedly compensated elsewhere. When the uncertainty surrounding the future deployment of carbon removal is taken seriously, it does not become rational to reduce less today, but on the contrary to reduce more in the 2030s. In other words, the more uncertain the future technology, the less it should serve as an alibi for delaying present action.
There is, here, a striking reversal of technophile common sense. In public debate, future innovation is often presented as a reason for patience. In the work of Neil Grant, Adam Hawkes, Shivika Mittal, and Ajay Gambhir, especially Confronting mitigation deterrence in low-carbon scenarios, it becomes, on the contrary, a reason for prudence, and therefore for accelerating immediate reductions. This makes it possible to formulate a broader point: the wager on technology is not merely a scientific wager; it is also, and perhaps above all, a political and moral one. It consists in treating the continuation of present emissions as acceptable on the basis of a future capacity that remains partly speculative. The riskiness of this reasoning is all the greater because, as the authors remind us, scenarios often treat emissions reductions and carbon removal as perfect substitutes. Yet it is precisely this equivalence that deserves to be questioned.
In Is carbon removal delaying emission reductions?, Wim Carton, Inge-Merete Hougaard, Nils Markusson, and Jens Friis Lund do not simply ask whether the risk exists. They also show why the literature is so divided. According to them, the disagreement stems not only from the available facts, but also from the very way in which one defines what would count as evidence of delay. Narrower, often more individualizing approaches look for direct, explicit, immediately observable evidence, as if delay had to take the form of an open declaration saying that we should reduce less today because we will remove more tomorrow. More structural approaches, by contrast, focus on institutional architectures, technological promises, economic incentives, models, and imaginaries that make substitution thinkable, acceptable, and sometimes desirable. Carton and his coauthors thus conclude that “mitigation deterrence” is indeed a recognized feature of many modelled scenarios, but that its existence in the real world depends on whether or not one takes these broader political and economic contexts into account.
The promise of carbon removal fits into an institutional framework in which compensation is already culturally familiar. The carbon world has long learned to treat the atmosphere as a space of substitution and accounting equivalence. In Carbon dioxide removal and mitigation deterrence in EU climate policy: Towards a research approach, Alina Brad and Etienne Schneider show very clearly how this logic becomes embedded in public policy. Expectations surrounding carbon removal technologies may weaken “conventional” reduction targets or encourage arrangements that treat removals and reductions as equivalent. Yet this equivalence is not a natural fact. It is a political construction. The authors also show that, even when it is too early to identify fully stabilized cases of “mitigation deterrence,” decisive opportunities to prevent it have already been missed, notably when policymakers refuse to separate explicitly reduction targets from removal targets.
This question of separation helps avoid two symmetrical errors. The first would be to deny any role to carbon removal. The second, more common, is to integrate it into a broad “net” account in which everything becomes exchangeable. Yet it is precisely the logic of the “net” that creates the illusion. When we reason in terms of a balance, we imply that a ton emitted here and now can later be neutralized by a ton removed elsewhere, as if the temporalities, uncertainties, political effects, and material conditions of those two operations were equivalent. Brad and Schneider insist on this point, showing that preventing delay requires, first of all, a clear separation between reduction targets and removal targets, as well as a refusal to allow removal credits to compensate for avoidable emissions.
Viewed from this angle, contemporary climate technophilia appears less as enthusiasm for invention than as an art of politically convenient equivalence. It allows two contradictory propositions to be upheld at once. On the one hand, the gravity of the climate problem is affirmed. On the other hand, the idea lingers that the fundamental trajectories of the economy can be prolonged, provided that a layer of technological correction is added later. Markusson, McLaren, and Tyfield say this very clearly in Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence. The increasing integration of negative emissions technologies into scenarios has helped sustain high-level policy conclusions according to which climate targets remained reachable through a “managed” transition, without overly abrupt or disruptive transformations of energy and economic systems. In other words, technologies are not only invoked to repair the climate. They also serve to make imaginable a future in which transformation remains compatible with the continuity of dominant structures.
One can then understand why William F. Lamb, Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, J. Timmons Roberts, Stuart Capstick, Felix Creutzig, Jan C. Minx, Finn Müller-Hansen, Trevor Culhane, and Julia K. Steinberger can speak, in Discourses of climate delay, of “discourses of delay” rather than simple denial. Their typology seems very useful to me because it shows that climate delay no longer stems primarily from a blunt rejection of science. It stems from more sophisticated discourses that accept climate change while contesting the need for deep transformation, shifting responsibility elsewhere, exaggerating the costs, or promoting non-transformative solutions. Among these, technological optimism figures explicitly, shifting attention away from rigorous policies toward market measures or minimal-intervention technical devices, even when they are insufficient to the scale of the problem. Delay is therefore no longer the opposite of action. It becomes a certain way of talking about action.
This gives contemporary climate rhetoric, it seems to me, a somewhat different tone. Hardly anyone says anymore, “there is no problem,” but one often hears instead, “the problem is real, but we do not need to draw overly brutal consequences from it, because innovation will open up a less conflictual path.” In this sense, carbon removal often plays a far more symbolic than technical role. It materializes the hope of a transition without visible rupture, of decarbonization without too harsh a confrontation with existing infrastructures, interests, and ways of life. This no doubt helps explain the political force of the slogan “net zero.” It makes it possible to proclaim a very high level of ambition while maintaining, in the shadows, a vast zone of indeterminacy about what will actually be reduced, what will be removed, what will remain emitted, and who will retain the right to go on emitting. Carton, Hougaard, Markusson, and Lund show well, in Is carbon removal delaying emission reductions?, that the proliferation of “net zero” commitments often goes together with a lack of precision, an excessive reliance on land-based removals, and the possibility for companies to proclaim climate ambition while continuing to invest in new fossil fuel projects.
The question is no longer simply whether some technology or another will work. It becomes this: what kind of relation to political time are we organizing when we make a future promise the condition for accepting our present inadequacies? To that question, the literature on “mitigation deterrence” gives a disturbing answer. It suggests that climate technophilia is not merely an excess of hope. It is also a moral economy of postponement. It makes it possible to tolerate the fact that immediate reductions are slower, narrower, or more selective than they ought to be. And that is why it deserves to be analyzed not as a technical detail of the climate debate, but as a central feature of our contemporary political culture. The most striking thing is that this logic is not unique to climate. The COVID sequence made it visible in an entirely different domain. There too, an indispensable innovation was sometimes invested with an excessive function. There too, the promise of a technical solution could serve to marginalize more ordinary, more social, more institutional instruments. Put simply, the vaccine at times occupied, in the public imagination, a place analogous to that occupied today by carbon removal technologies in the climate debate.
COVID: the vaccine as horizon, or the temptation of a purely biomedical exit from crisis
The COVID sequence was valuable in that it made visible, over a very short period, an intellectual structure that the climate debate unfolds over a much longer timespan. Here again, it would be absurd to oppose technology to everything else. Vaccines constituted a major advance, as did treatments, tests, and surveillance tools. But it was precisely because these innovations were real, effective, and spectacular that they were sometimes invested with an excessive function. In the public imagination, the biomedical response often occupied the place of the decisive solution, the one that was supposed to allow an almost self-sufficient exit from crisis, relegating to the background the social, economic, organizational, and political dimensions of the pandemic. Yet the strongest literature says exactly the opposite. In A multinational Delphi consensus to end the COVID-19 public health threat, Jeffrey V. Lazarus, Diana Romero, Christopher J. Kopka, and their coauthors remind us from the outset that, despite scientific and medical advances, broader political, socioeconomic, and behavioural factors continue to weaken the pandemic response. Above all, the panel’s top-ranked recommendations insist on three points. We need approaches involving the whole of society. We need approaches involving the whole of government. And we need to maintain a so-called vaccines-plus strategy, combining vaccination, prevention, public support, and the rebuilding of trust.
This matters because it runs counter to a much poorer reading of the episode. In the same article, Lazarus, Romero, Kopka, and their coauthors specify that vaccines are an effective tool, but that they will not, by themselves, put an end to the public health threat. A strictly vaccine-based strategy runs up against several well-known limits, whether immune escape, waning immunity, unequal access, vaccine hesitancy, or the absence of sufficiently robust immunization strategies. Hence the need, they write, for a multifaceted approach integrating testing, surveillance, treatments, community engagement, social prevention measures such as masking, distancing, or quarantine, structural interventions such as ventilation and air filtration, and economic support measures. The core argument is therefore not merely sanitary. It is institutional. A pandemic does not end through an isolated biomedical innovation, but through the articulation of technologies, behaviours, organizations, social protections, and public trust.
From this angle, the pandemic offers an illuminating mirror of the logic examined above with regard to climate. Just as carbon removal can become the promise of a future repair that makes present emissions tolerable, the vaccine can become, in the political imagination, the promise of a solution prestigious enough to make us forget everything that, in pandemic management, belongs to ordinary collective organization. This is precisely what the literature on the social determinants of health helps make visible. In Covid-19 pandemic and the social determinants of health, Lauren Paremoer, Sushmita Nandi, Hani Serag, and Fran Baum remind us that the pandemic exposed the structural drivers of health inequality. They point to precarious working conditions, widening economic gaps, anti-democratic processes and institutions, and the entanglement of these factors with class, origin, gender, and migratory status. Their thesis is simple but decisive. Vulnerability to disease is not only the effect of a virus. It is also produced by the structure of labour markets, inadequate social protection, housing conditions, unequal access to care, and durable power relations.
In many cases, it was not the absence of a medical tool that made populations vulnerable, but the concrete impossibility of protecting themselves. People in precarious employment are less likely to have sick leave, more likely to struggle to isolate, more likely to live in overcrowded housing, more directly dependent on daily income, and more exposed to work environments where distancing is difficult or impossible. Paremoer, Nandi, Serag, and Baum show, for example, again in Covid-19 pandemic and the social determinants of health, how precarious workers, migrants, women in poorly paid frontline jobs, and certain racialized groups accumulated greater risks in the face of COVID. In other words, the pandemic did not simply call for a medical innovation; it laid bare a society unequally distributed in its very capacity to comply with health guidance.
A society in which individuals cannot quarantine without losing their means of subsistence, in which access to care depends on solvency, in which public health is fragmented, in which ventilation infrastructure is deficient, and in which exposed work is concentrated among already vulnerable populations, is not a society that can be “saved” by biomedicine alone. Pharmaceutical tools remain indispensable, but they operate within an institutional environment that strongly conditions their effects. That is why Paremoer, Nandi, Serag, and Baum conclude, in Covid-19 pandemic and the social determinants of health, by calling for the rebuilding of social protection and solidarity, while also reminding us that democratically accountable governments are best placed to act on the social and economic determinants of health. Their critique goes even further. They warn against forms of health governance that give disproportionate weight to private actors, or actors not subject to democratic control, in defining priorities and solutions.
The article by Pablo Paniagua and Veeshan Rayamajhee, A polycentric approach for pandemic governance: nested externalities and co-production challenges, adds another piece that helps connect the pandemic to climate. The authors argue that pandemics, like climate change, should be understood as problems of nested externalities organized across multiple scales. Above all, they insist on a point that touches the very core of solutionism. Preventive measures such as social distancing are processes of co-production. They cannot be provided by governments alone. They require contributions from public authorities, citizens, associations, firms, local communities — in short, from a plurality of centres of action. In that sense, the pandemic belongs neither to pure sanitary centralism nor to simple behavioural individualism. It belongs to a distributed, nested, irreducibly relational form of collective action.
Paniagua and Rayamajhee write, indeed, in A polycentric approach for pandemic governance, that no amount of social distancing can be produced by government alone if citizens’ contributions are missing. Without participation from the beneficiaries themselves, public authorities run into major problems of information, monitoring, and implementation. The authors add that a policy that fails to take this dimension seriously tends to overestimate the competence of central authorities and underestimate the risk of major errors. Further on, they emphasize that durable solutions to complex phenomena such as pandemics must reconcile multiple value systems and points of view. This means, quite simply, that crisis management cannot be reduced to a problem of technical execution. It requires legitimation, discussion, institutional adjustment, and trust.
We readily admire spectacular, concentrated, patentable, technologically visible solutions. We have far more difficulty investing symbolically in slower, more dispersed, organizational, social, and redistributive solutions. The vaccine is immediately recognizable as a feat. A system of paid sick leave, properly ventilated schools, accessible health coverage, protection for precarious workers, legitimate and adaptable local policy, trustworthy public information: much less so. Yet everything suggests that without this second set of arrangements, the first loses part of its power. These three texts show that technology does not dispense us from the collective, since it is effective only within it.
The example of the COVID pandemic shows that the problem is not simply excessive trust in one innovation or another. The problem is more general. We seem to live in societies in which we would often rather expect a great deal from a clearly identified technology than politically assume the institutional, social, and democratic density that real responses to crises require. In that sense, the vaccine was not only a medical tool. At times, it also functioned as a kind of imaginary shortcut. It made thinkable an exit from crisis simpler than the one actually imposed by social inequalities, institutional fragilities, and the difficulty of governing together. If the technological promise is so attractive, that may be not only because it is brilliant, rapid, or profitable. It may also be because it saves us from having to go on believing in the capacity of institutions, the state, local authorities, and citizens to carry out durable transformations.
Technophilia, political powerlessness, and the crisis of the collective
If the technological promise is so attractive, it is not only because it is brilliant, efficient, visible, or profitable. It is also because it makes it possible to bypass a deeper difficulty, namely that of collective power. Governing climate seriously, as governing a pandemic seriously, requires redistributing costs, imposing constraints, prioritizing uses, building legitimacy, accepting conflict, financing infrastructures, and supporting the most vulnerable — in short, doing politics in the full sense of the term. Yet our societies seem increasingly tempted by another path, a kind of middle way. They often prefer to hope for a solution that will come from innovation rather than to assume the social and institutional conditions of a durable transformation. Contemporary technophilia perhaps says less about excessive confidence in science than about weakened confidence in our ability to act together.
This is where the detour through The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway becomes particularly illuminating. Their argument is not merely that the market has been overvalued. It is that this valorization was historically constructed as a genuine political myth, the myth of the “magic of the market,” presented as the best, or even the only, way to meet our needs without threatening freedom. They show how this narrative gradually imposed the idea that the state could only interfere with, disrupt, or “distort” the market, even though classical liberal tradition recognized essential functions for government, whether infrastructure, banking regulation, or public goods. Further on, they also show how this belief in the market as a spontaneous solution extended to environmental issues, feeding the conviction that climate change would be better handled through market innovation than through organized public action.
Technology can thus play an almost providential role in the political imagination today. If, for decades, we have learned to mistrust the state, planning, regulation, public services, and collective decision-making, then private innovation almost mechanically appears as the most reassuring horizon. It allows us to keep believing in change without having to rehabilitate the instruments of government. It becomes the acceptable form of intervention in a world that no longer much likes the word intervention itself. This point matters all the more because Oreskes and Conway also show how historically constructed, propagated, funded, and narrated this vision is. It has nothing natural about it. It is a patiently built political imaginary. And it is precisely this narrative that Mariana Mazzucato sets out to overturn in The Entrepreneurial State. The state, she argues, did not merely correct market failures; it often created markets themselves. More than that, it played a central role in the most radical forms of risk-taking, precisely where the private sector was too cautious, too impatient, or too focused on rapid returns. Mazzucato insists that the public sector did not merely fund basic research. It formulated visions, invested early, supported several trajectories at once, created networks between science, finance, and industry, and carried innovations whose benefits were later largely captured by private actors. She even argues that, from aviation to the internet, and from biotechnology to green technologies, it was the state, not the private sector, that often served as the initial engine of technological change.
The problem is not technology. The problem is the narrative surrounding it. When we are told that only private innovation will save the climate, we forget not only that innovation is almost always socially and politically organized, but also that it depends on institutions, public funding, strategic choices, regulation, procurement, networks, and collective infrastructures. In other words, we naturalize what is in fact politically produced. Mazzucato also reminds us that the entrepreneurial state does not merely “correct” after the fact. It acts upstream. It specifies problems, shapes directions, accepts uncertainty, and takes risks that others refuse. The real question, then, is not whether to choose between state and innovation, or between the collective and technology. It is to ask which institutional framework allows innovation to be oriented toward socially debated ends rather than toward profitability alone or toward preserving existing structures.
Contemporary technophilia glorifies technology while making the collective conditions of its production invisible. It hopes for decisive innovations while often devaluing the institutions that make them possible. It wants spectacular solutions, but without rehabilitating public power, rethinking the distribution of costs, or reinserting invention into a common strategy. This paradox no doubt explains part of our contemporary malaise — mine, at least. We admire technical prowess, but we no longer much like the political forms of coordination, constraint, and solidarity that make it effective at scale.
The recent article by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, In tech we trust: A history of technophilia in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate mitigation expertise, allows us to go even further. What he shows is not merely that technical solutions occupy too prominent a place in climate expertise. It is that this technocentric bias is structural. It comes from the way the scientific field works, valorizing novelty and innovation; from funding mechanisms that favour collaboration with industrial R&D; and from the institutional position of the IPCC itself, expected to be both “policy relevant” and politically cautious. In this framework, spectacular technologies are overrepresented, whereas notions such as sufficiency, reduction, or prohibition remain marginal. Fressoz even argues that maintaining the illusion of a technological “net zero” feeds false optimism, legitimizes support for speculative technologies, narrows the range of legitimate political options, and delays the structural transformations that are needed. This diagnosis converges, by another path, with Benjamin Pajot’s in Le solutionnisme technologique. In his work too, techno-solutionism appears as a way of replacing conflicts over power, redistribution, and ends with supposedly neutral technical answers. The interest of this convergence is that it allows us to describe more precisely the nature of the current crisis. We are not simply faced with societies that are “too technophilic.” We are faced with societies in which the horizon of acceptable change is increasingly reduced to forms of change that are technically administrable. Whatever exceeds that framework — whether sobriety, caps, renunciation, prohibition, redistribution, or the dismantling of certain activities — becomes much harder to think publicly.
As I suggested earlier, the real questions should be these: Who should pay for the transition? Who must give up certain rents? Which uses must be limited? Which forms of consumption must decline? What level of inequality makes any climate or health policy untenable? Which sectors should be protected, which should be converted, which should be shut down? All of these are collective, conflictual, distributive questions. They require credible institutions, legitimate procedures, compromises, and, at times, rupture. Next to them, the technological promise has one incomparable advantage: it lets us hope that change will be possible without too much cutting and deciding. Contemporary technophilia does not merely express a love of machines. It also expresses a discomfort with the democratic governance of transformation. In a world where collective action appears heavy, divided, slow, and contested, technology offers an image of efficiency without dispute, repair without redistribution, salvation without conflict. But that image is misleading. Neither climate nor pandemics are problems that can be “solved” by the mere addition of innovations. They are problems that force us to articulate knowledge, institutions, infrastructures, social protections, justice-based arbitrations, and capacities for legitimate constraint. In that sense, technology is never a substitute for the collective. It is powerful only within a collective capable of governing it.
Not less technology, but more politics
At the risk of repeating myself, I have the feeling that the problem is that our societies often want to believe that technology will spare them the need to transform themselves politically. In the case of climate, this temptation takes the form of a wager on carbon removal, on accounting-based “net zero,” or on innovations capable of absorbing tomorrow what we were unwilling to reduce today. In the case of the COVID pandemic, it took the form of an imaginary exit from crisis centred on the biomedical response, at the risk of relegating to the background the social determinants of health, infrastructures, social protection, and public trust. In both cases, innovation is indispensable. In both cases, too, it becomes dangerous when it serves to postpone the politically costliest decisions. The point, then, is not to oppose technology and politics in some naive way, which would be sterile. It is rather to refuse to let the former neutralize the latter. The real line of division is not between innovation and sobriety, nor between science and the collective. It lies between two ways of inhabiting technology. Either we treat it as one tool among others, embedded in democratic choices, oriented by explicit ends, and framed by institutions capable of redistributing costs and assuming conflict. Or we turn it into a consoling fable, a promise of salvation that makes it possible not to reopen the hardest questions.
References
Adler-Bolton, Beatrice (2022), “Mask Off”, The New Inquiry.
Brad, Alina, Schneider, Etienne (2023), “Carbon dioxide removal and mitigation deterrence in EU climate policy: Towards a research approach”, Environmental Science & Policy, 150, article 103591.
Buck, Holly Jean (2019), After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, London, Verso.
Carton, Wim, Hougaard, Inge-Merete, Markusson, Nils, Lund, Jens Friis (2023), “Is carbon removal delaying emission reductions?”, WIREs Climate Change, 14(4), e826.
Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste (2025), “In tech we trust: A history of technophilia in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate mitigation expertise”, Energy Research & Social Science, 127, article 104280.
Grant, Neil, Hawkes, Adam, Mittal, Shivika, Gambhir, Ajay (2021), “Confronting mitigation deterrence in low-carbon scenarios”, Environmental Research Letters, 16, article 064099.
Lamb, William F., Mattioli, Giulio, Levi, Sebastian, Roberts, J. Timmons, Capstick, Stuart, Creutzig, Felix, Minx, Jan C., Müller-Hansen, Finn, Culhane, Trevor, Steinberger, Julia K. (2020), “Discourses of climate delay”, Global Sustainability, 3, e17.
Lazarus, Jeffrey V., Romero, Diana, Kopka, Christopher J., Abdool Karim, Salim, Abu-Raddad, Laith J., Almeida, Gisele, Baptista-Leite, Ricardo, Barocas, Joshua A., Barreto, Mauricio L., Bar-Yam, Yaneer, Bassat, Quique, Batista, Carolina, Bazilian, Morgan, Chiou, Shu-Ti, del Rio, Carlos, Dore, Gregory J., Gao, George F., Gostin, Lawrence O., Hellard, Margaret, Jimenez, Jose L., Kang, Gagandeep, Lee, Nancy, Matičič, Mojca, McKee, Martin, Nsanzimana, Sabin, Oliu-Barton, Miquel, Pradelski, Bary, Pyzik, Oksana, Rabin, Kenneth, Raina, Sunil, Rashid, Sabina Faiz, Rathe, Magdalena, Saenz, Rocio, Singh, Sudhvir, Trock-Hempler, Malene, Villapol, Sonia, Yap, Peiling, Binagwaho, Agnes, Kamarulzaman, Adeeba, El-Mohandes, Ayman, et The COVID-19 Consensus Statement Panel (2022), “A multinational Delphi consensus to end the COVID-19 public health threat”, Nature, 611, 332-339.
Malm, Andreas, Carton, Wim (2024), Overshoot, London, Verso.
Markusson, Nils, McLaren, Duncan, Tyfield, David (2018), “Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence by negative emissions technologies (NETs)”, Global Sustainability, 1, e10.
Mazzucato, Mariana (2011), The Entrepreneurial State, London, Demos.
Morozov, Evgeny (2013), To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, New York, PublicAffairs.
Oreskes, Naomi, Conway, Erik M. (2023), The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, New York, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Pajot, Benjamin (2025), Le solutionnisme technologique : vrais problèmes, fausses solutions ?, Paris, Ifri, “Études de l’Ifri”, mars.
Paniagua, Pablo, Rayamajhee, Veeshan (2022), “A polycentric approach for pandemic governance: nested externalities and co-production challenges”, Journal of Institutional Economics, 18, 537-552.
Paremoer, Lauren, Nandi, Sushmita, Serag, Hani, Baum, Fran (2021), “Covid-19 pandemic and the social determinants of health”, BMJ, 372, n129.
Shue, Henry (2023), “Unseen urgency: Delay as the new denial”, WIREs Climate Change, 14(1), e809.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Arthur Charpentier (April 19, 2026). Will Technology Save Us? Freakonometrics. Retrieved May 9, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1639s