A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Notes

1. The term is borrowed from the title of Al Gore’s documentary film on climate change, released in 2006.

2. See Latour (2004), Whiteside (2002) and Norton (2005) for more detailed and nuanced elaboration of this point.

3. Such enduring marks of past mining operations can be seen for example in Cornwall, Cumbria and South Wales in the UK or in Colorado in the US. Africa provides many examples of the devastation and disruption caused by ongoing mining and oil-extraction operations.

4. See, for example, John Harrison’s various painstaking efforts to achieve this as narrated in Sobel (1995).

5. See, for example, Ferguson (1992).

6. As Latour (1988) notes (p. 90), these are the conditions on which science is able to get out of the laboratory and into application. The application of general principles often requires creation of a suitably controlled environment.

7. Walt Disney and Ray Krock, the founder of McDonald’s, both transferred their experience of military organization and regimentation to the world of private business. Multinational corporations can now relocate and replicate manufacturing plants around the world frequently ignoring not only the natural environment but also the local social impacts as on the border between the US and Mexico.

8. See, for example, Diamond (1999): “Archaeologists have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered more serious diseases, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers ...