von Kilian Jörg featuring Alf Hornborg

“I am very happy to announce that – with the kind support of the Arts&Science Department of the University of Applied Arts and Im_flieger – I managed to invite a particularly interesting ecological polymath and thinker to Vienna. He is still mostly unknown in the germanophone world, but ever since I encountered him, I am thrilled with his concepts and am sure I will not be the only one. His way of understanding technology as a vehicle of (material and human) inequalities is extremely inspiring and helps to think of new politics that combine classically understood “leftist” agendas with “green” or “ecological” ones.

In Alf Hornborgs view technological progress is not so much a matter of ingenious and innocent breakthroughs in engineering as of devising new and profitable systems for displacing work and environmental pressures to other populations and geographical areas. The essential rationale of globalized technological systems is thus as inextricably connected to societal injustices as slavery or serfdom. Hornborg´s political scope enables to better understand how social and environmental problems are inherently connected.”

Kilian Jörg

“Machines as Machinations. Rethinking the Ontology of Technology,”
Lecture held on 24th of April 2017 at Depot Vienna

“Technological infrastructures developed in wealthier parts of the world are products of accumulation based on asymmetric global flows of biophysical resources from less affluent areas. Technological progress, in this view, is not so much a matter of ingenious and innocent breakthroughs in engineering as of devising new and profitable systems for displacing work and environmental pressures to other populations and geographical areas. This, I argue, is the essential rationale of globalized technological systems: rather than an index of generalized human progress – the pure, transcendent knowledge epitomized by the myth of Prometheus – technology since the Industrial Revolution is fundamentally an arrangement for redistributing resources in global society. Modern

technology requires not just ingenuity and specialized knowledge, but also global discrepancies in market prices. It is thus as inextricably connected to societal injustices as slavery or serfdom.”