Presentation short abstract

Narratives about technology in capitalism. Agriculture and forestry in Uruguay. The Work aims to denaturalize the category of technology , to define it among capitalist context and the the social, planetary, and ecosystemic implications.

Presentation long abstract

The concept of technology involves an appropriation of the accumulation regime and the affective economy of predatory, extractivist capitalism. This technology, and the risks associated with it, which are subjects of controversy, are at the same time defined as producers of potential dangers and as means of protection. They are forms of the present and future structured from the global North, within the consensus of decarbonization and green colonialism, of a technocratic and increasingly denialist capitalism, anchored in current, digitized versions of scientific paradigms that assume human conquest over phenomena and species (both human and non-human), placing morality at the service of production and control. At the service of a societal model that focuses on wealth generation and production as objectives, patriarchal and Eurocentric.

As such, it is a paradigm that exploits and oppresses. It privatizes social and ecosystemic relationships, technologically mediated as part of what has been called technofeudalism or cannibalistic capitalism. The Work aims to denaturalize the category of technology and current technological transformations, to define them in their proper terms: one option among others and the social, planetary, and ecosystemic implications it shapes for certain worlds of work and subjectivities. It extracts natural goods massively and intensively for its own benefit, treating them as commodities. Examples of these narratives and tensions are presented through the analysis of discourses on risks in agriculture and in the pulp industry in Uruguay.