Progress must give people more freedom:

We want technological development to make life better. We want less exhausting work, greater independence for people who need assistance, and the knowledge to repair the environments that sustain us. These are possibilities worth pursuing. We refuse to accept a society in which an invention that could relieve human hardship becomes a threat to the people who should benefit from it.

Techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism will fail to deliver that future. Techno-utopianism expects technical advancement to produce a just society without establishing who will control its benefits. Neo-Luddism, understood here as a politics of resisting technological development itself, mistakes withdrawal from technical power for freedom from the people who wield it. We reject both. Neither gives us a sufficient account of how people gain authority over the conditions of their lives.

Our position is technorealism: the deliberate development and democratic direction of technology toward human flourishing and ecological responsibility. Technology includes the tools, techniques, and organized systems through which we put knowledge to work. A water treatment plant and a communication network belong within the same broad question as artificial intelligence. What should our knowledge enable us to do, and how do we make those capacities serve the people whose lives they affect?

Technorealism answers through a commitment to inquiry, public power, and useful development. We intend to improve our material conditions and to govern that improvement. Our future should be shaped by what people need and what we can responsibly accomplish together. Neither a company’s promise nor a movement’s anxiety deserves the authority to decide it for us.

Techno-utopianism cannot turn capacity into justice:

Imagine a society that doubles its food production while leaving an owner free to deny food to anyone unable to pay. More food exists. The hungry person still has no enforceable claim to a meal. The machinery has improved without resolving the injustice. To end that injustice, people must change the rules governing access and acquire the power to uphold those changes.

Techno-utopianism evades this distinction. It treats an increase in what we can produce as a promise about how we will treat one another. A faster computer, a more capable machine, or a cheaper manufacturing process does not establish anyone’s right to the benefit. The promise of abundance leaves the decisive question unanswered whenever someone else retains the authority to withhold it.

Under capitalism, private owners control major productive resources and direct them toward profit. Their return depends on what an enterprise earns after paying its own costs. Damage borne by workers, neighboring communities, or the living world can disappear from that calculation. An investment can succeed on its owner’s terms while worsening the conditions under which others live. Technological advancement does not dissolve this conflict. Without a change in power, it gives the owner new ways to pursue the same priorities.

Waiting for enough innovation to make domination disappear is political surrender. Those who control necessities possess power because other people need them. Producing necessities more efficiently does not require their owners to give that power away. A philosophy that leaves liberation dependent on the generosity of the powerful has failed to explain how liberation will be secured.

Technological solutionism makes the same error when it treats questions of justice as engineering problems. Technological solutionism is the unproven belief that all complex social, political, and human problems can be neatly fixed or optimized through digital technology, software, or algorithms. An algorithm, a procedure for carrying out a task, can apply an allocation rule consistently. It cannot justify the rule. A housing system that excludes people unable to pay remains unjust when its decisions become faster and more precise. Technical competence can improve the execution of a purpose; moral and political judgment must establish whether that purpose deserves to be carried out.

Techno-utopianism will fail as a politics of liberation because the freedom it promises does not follow from the improvements it celebrates. Even a future described as socialist leaves people subordinate if its abundance is administered by officials they cannot challenge. Expertise deserves to be heard. It gives no one a right to govern others without answering to them.

Neo-Luddism mistakes refusal for liberation:

Neo-Luddism directs resistance toward technological development when the task is to identify and overcome the relationships producing the harm. Its central mistake is to move from the claim that a technology is being used against people to the conclusion that the technology should be condemned. That conclusion needs an argument. Exploitation explains why we must challenge the arrangement through which a tool is deployed. It does not establish that the capacity the tool provides is itself an evil.

Consider a worker whose employer introduces a machine that can perform the same work in less time. The worker faces the loss of an income. The neo-Luddite answer makes preserving the old task a defense of the worker. But the worker’s deeper vulnerability is that survival depends on remaining useful to someone who controls the workplace. Removing the machine leaves that dependence intact. It preserves the work the person must perform to earn permission to live securely.

We want to end that dependence. If necessary work can be done with less human effort, the people who once performed it should gain time and security. To defend avoidable toil because society distributes its relief unjustly is to accommodate the injustice. It allows the existing ownership arrangement to dictate the limits of our imagination. We should be fighting for the benefits of our capabilities, including the power to decide how work changes and who receives the gains.

The retreat into simplicity becomes especially indefensible when it makes an ideal of life that other people cannot inhabit. An assistive device can give someone the ability to communicate. Reliable infrastructure can make independent living possible. A philosophy of freedom has to account for those lives. It cannot measure liberation by how easily an able-bodied person can dispense with the systems that others need.

Primitivism takes the retreat further by presenting a return to substantially simpler forms of society as the remedy for modern domination. Nature supplies no such moral guarantee. Human beings remain part of nature when we develop medicine or build a water system, and an older way of living does not become just through its age. The relevant question is what a way of life enables people to do and what it demands that they endure.

Neo-Luddism will fail to establish liberation because refusing a capacity does not redistribute it, abolish an owner’s authority, or secure anyone’s access to necessities. A movement must explain how people will live and govern themselves after its acts of refusal. Denunciation cannot perform that work. We reject a politics that makes resistance to development its substitute for a constructive account of freedom.

Anxiety does not establish a moral verdict:

Tech anxiety has understandable subjects. A livelihood can become insecure. A decision affecting someone’s life can be passed to a system they cannot question. Constant connectivity can make people feel that their attention is never their own. We describe the resulting loss of confidence in one’s place and future as existential dislocation. Agency, the practical ability to understand and influence one’s situation, is threatened when dependence grows while control shrinks.

The experience is real. The conclusion drawn from it still has to be examined. Anxiety tells us that a person fears a loss; it cannot establish what caused that loss, whether a proposed technology will produce it, or which response will repair it. Those questions require reasons. Treating fear as a final authority prevents us from distinguishing a serious warning from a mistaken association.

Technophobia is fear or aversion directed toward technology. It becomes a political doctrine when that aversion is treated as sufficient grounds for condemnation. Unfamiliarity becomes danger, discomfort becomes wrongdoing, and those who find a use for the technology become suspect. This is a failure of judgment. Personal dislike cannot establish that other people should be denied a capacity that helps them live.

Artificial intelligence makes this dispute especially visible. AI systems are computational systems developed for tasks such as recognizing patterns, generating language, or making predictions. A moral judgment about them must identify what is being done, how it works, and what consequences follow. The mere fact that AI was involved proves none of the accusations that might be made about its use. Deception requires an account of the deception. Exploitation requires an account of who is being exploited and through what relationship.

Purity culture abandons that examination when it assigns moral standing according to who has avoided contact with a disfavored technology. Suspicion becomes a way to demonstrate allegiance. People are judged through association while the ownership of infrastructure and the distribution of its costs escape the same scrutiny. We oppose this conduct because it replaces an argument about harm with a demand for conformity.

A person remains free to choose the tools they use. Turning that preference into a public condemnation carries a different burden. Others do not owe us the surrender of a useful capacity simply because we find it unsettling. We owe one another reasons that can survive examination. A movement that cannot supply them has no basis for claiming that its aversion is a moral obligation.

Moral opposition is a judgment about what technology does:

Technorealism does not confuse the existence of an invention with a reason to adopt it. Our commitment is to improving life. That commitment supplies the grounds for deciding what belongs in the future we are building. A reasoned prohibition follows from those grounds without borrowing anything from the belief that technology is inherently corrupting.

Nuclear weapons make the distinction clear. We seek their abolition because their capacity for mass destruction and their use as threats place human populations at the disposal of military and political power. The moral objection concerns what these weapons are built to enable. Our opposition would remain even if no one found them unfamiliar or frightening. Human lives must not become expendable instruments of coercion.

The defense of deterrence, preventing an attack by threatening retaliation, does not dissolve that objection. It makes the threatened devastation part of the proposed security arrangement. We reject a conception of security that rests on a credible willingness to inflict mass destruction. The people exposed to that threat retain their moral worth regardless of which government claims to be protecting itself through it.

Abolishing nuclear weapons does not condemn nuclear science as a whole. Different applications have different purposes and consequences, which require their own judgment. The wrong we have identified supplies a reason to end a destructive use. It supplies no reason to denounce every technology bearing a related name. That is precisely the discipline that technophobia abandons.

The same discipline governs less dramatic decisions. A community need not replace dependable equipment with an expensive system that serves no unmet need. It can improve a design that wastes resources or build an alternative that protects privacy. These judgments require an account of the purpose, the costs, and the available means of meeting it. Declining a particular proposal does not establish a presumption against technological development.

Agreement about a decision is not agreement about its justification. A technorealist prohibition follows from a moral judgment about an identified wrong. Neo-Luddite refusal makes resistance to technology do the work that moral reasoning should perform. Confusing the two gives aversion a legitimacy it has not earned. We will not grant it that shortcut.

Technorealism stands beyond the false choice:

We promote technorealism because it gives human beings responsibility for the powers they develop. It asks us to acquire knowledge, make our purposes defensible, and build institutions through which the people affected can govern the result. Its ambition is constructive. We want better systems of provision, wider access to useful capabilities, and more time in which to live freely.

Our position is not centrist. Centrism, in the sense at issue here, would seek a moderate distance between technological enthusiasm and rejection. That would allow the two positions we oppose to keep deciding the terms of the debate. We owe neither of them a share of our conclusion. Our standards come from human dignity, ecological responsibility, and the right of people to govern their common life.

A pyramid expresses the relationship more accurately. Techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism occupy the two lower points, organized around the promises of technological salvation and technological refusal. Technorealism occupies the apex because it moves beyond that opposition to the task both leave unresolved: consciously governing our technical capacities. It takes development seriously enough to direct it and freedom seriously enough to demand the power to do so.

The reasoning establishes why that advance is necessary. Greater capacity does not distribute its benefits, so public authority must determine how those benefits are secured. Fear does not establish wrongdoing, so criticism must identify the wrong and show why its conclusion follows. Human life depends on material conditions, so ecological costs belong inside the decision. These are obligations of responsible judgment. Splitting the difference between confidence and suspicion answers none of them.

Technorealism also rejects the excuse that technology is neutral and only its owner matters. A device designed to transmit intimate information without a usable private mode creates a dependence through its design. Transferring ownership leaves that feature in place. Public control must reach into what systems are built to do, how people use them, and whether those people can alter them. Democratic direction is the work of changing the arrangement, including the machinery, wherever its purpose requires change.

Human worth cannot depend on usefulness:

Our technorealism grows from Viadescioism, our spiritual and philosophical tradition, which understands existence as relational and sacred. We become ourselves through a living world and through relationships no one creates alone. To call existence sacred is to recognize a worth that exceeds what can be owned or extracted from it. That conviction gives us reasons to cultivate life and oppose its degradation.

A person’s dignity does not decline when a machine becomes better at their job. Productivity measures what an activity yields; it cannot measure someone’s claim to food, care, or a life of their own. An economy that treats people as disposable once their labor loses market value has exposed a moral failure in its own organization. The person has lost none of their worth.

Our dependence on others makes this question unavoidable. Autonomy, the ability to direct one’s own life, often requires care, infrastructure, and material support. Someone who needs assistance still has a right to decide how they live. Domination begins when another person can turn that dependence into an unchallengeable power to command. Freedom requires relationships in which people can receive support without surrendering themselves.

We call the effort to sustain such relationships living in right relation. It binds concern for each person to responsibility for the wider world. A community cannot justify sacrificing someone’s dignity by invoking a collective benefit that excludes them from consideration. The whole is made of lives that matter. Its flourishing must reach the people within it.

Communalism gives this commitment a political form through popular self-government and social ownership. People govern their shared conditions, and the productive resources on which they depend are held for common benefit under their effective control. Social ownership concerns the power to command production and provision. It gives no assembly ownership of anyone’s body, conscience, private relationships, or personal belongings. Its purpose is to end the use of essential resources as a means of ruling other people’s lives.

Ecological responsibility means changing how we produce:

Social ecology examines the connection between social power and our treatment of the living world. Whoever controls production helps decide which resources are consumed, where pollution goes, and whose objections count. A community forced to bear another community’s waste has suffered a political wrong as well as an ecological injury. Better consumer habits cannot repair an arrangement that leaves those decisions beyond its control.

Technology belongs within our response to that problem. We should develop the means to reduce waste, restore damaged environments, and meet needs with fewer destructive demands. Romanticizing hardship contributes nothing to ecological repair. The purpose is to sustain life through practices that preserve the conditions life requires. That is what sustainability demands from production.

Every system has a material existence. Construction, operation, maintenance, and disposal all belong in the account, including the work and extraction that happen far from the final user. A new owner cannot vote those requirements away. Greater efficiency reduces the resources needed for a given result, but total consumption still depends on the scale of activity. A society that expands every activity without regard to the whole can exhaust the savings its improvements make possible.

Consider a proposed data center, a facility housing computers that store and process information. The proposal calls for land, electricity, and, depending on the design, water for cooling. The community has to determine what useful work the facility will support, what supplying it will require, and who will meet those obligations. An operator’s desire to compete does not give it a claim on public resources that outranks everyone else’s needs.

Democratic development puts those decisions within public authority. Residents must be able to shape the design and terms of a project, direct investment toward better provision, and enforce the obligations that made the proposal defensible. Describing a project as innovative cannot excuse imposing its costs on people who had no power over it. Equally, disliking the industry cannot substitute for examining the proposal. The community’s responsibility is to make a reasoned decision and possess the means to carry it out.

Public control must be real:

People govern a common service only if they can change its direction and hold its administrators accountable. An invitation to express dissatisfaction does not provide that power. Our institutions must give residents authority over the infrastructure through which their daily lives are organized.

The municipality, the territorial community of local residents, is our political starting point. Through resident assemblies, people deliberate on common matters, make decisions, and oversee their administration. Libertarian municipalism develops this form of self-government against unaccountable rule. Participation requires time, accessible information, and support for those whose work or care responsibilities would otherwise exclude them. A formally open meeting is inadequate when only a privileged few can attend.

Majority rule allows a deliberating community to act despite disagreement. Requiring unanimity would give each participant a veto over everyone else. Majority decisions remain bounded by protected rights and procedures for challenging abuse. No vote gives a majority ownership of someone’s body or conscience. Nor can a vote make an unsupported factual assertion true. Public authority must answer to both the dignity of the people governed and the reality its decisions affect.

Responsibilities extend beyond municipal boundaries. A shared river cannot be governed justly by allowing an upstream community to impose its wishes on everyone below it. Democratic confederalism joins municipalities to make decisions about such common conditions. Delegates carry mandates, specific instructions from those they represent, and remain subject to recall. Shared authority follows shared responsibilities without turning delegates into a class entitled to govern on its own behalf.

Technical expertise belongs within this public life. Engineers need room to design, and researchers need room to investigate. An assembly does not have to calculate every component of a water system to decide that everyone should have reliable access and that its operation must protect the river. Experts explain what a proposal requires and make it workable. The people affected retain authority over its public purpose and the burdens they are asked to bear. Expertise is strengthened by being answerable; expertise used as a claim to rule abandons that relationship.

Our digital commons extends the same principle to software, knowledge, and communication infrastructure. A commons is a resource sustained through shared rules and responsibilities for common benefit. Open-source software makes its code available for inspection, modification, and sharing. Open-source hardware applies comparable permissions to physical designs. These practices become effective forms of common power when people also have the resources and knowledge to maintain what they use.

A system that works with others, a quality called interoperability, reduces dependence on a single provider. Equipment people can repair remains useful beyond a manufacturer’s preferred replacement schedule. Privacy allows participation without surrendering one’s life to inspection. Accessible alternatives keep a public service available to people who cannot use a particular device. These features matter because common ownership must become an ability people can exercise, not a description attached to systems they still cannot influence.

Solarpunk gives this ambition a form we can inhabit:

Solarpunk imagines a sustainable, cooperative future and gives that imagination practical direction. Its importance reaches beyond an appealing picture of greenery and advanced machinery. It helps us describe a life in which scientific knowledge supports ecological care and communities possess the time and resources to maintain their relationships.

Renewable energy, supplied through replenishing processes such as sunlight, wind, water, and nuclear, can support homes and public services designed to waste less. Advanced equipment belongs alongside buildings that use shade and ventilation well, gardens people tend together, and workshops where useful things are repaired. The combination follows the needs of a place. Complexity earns its place through what it makes possible; simplicity earns its place through how well it serves life.

Our solarpunk is anti-primitivist because it welcomes science and engineering as means of improving the world we inhabit. It also opposes transhumanist promises that make liberation depend on escaping embodied life. Transhumanism seeks technological transformation beyond existing biological limitations. Such transformation does not answer the political question. A being with enhanced capacities would still need material support and still face the question of who controls it. Purchasing an enhancement cannot abolish the power that makes security available only to those who can pay.

Respect for embodied life includes bodily autonomy. Healthcare, assistive devices, prosthetics, and freely chosen changes belong within people’s efforts to live according to their needs. We reject compulsory enhancement and the demand that an unmodified body determine someone’s worth. Our concern is the freedom of the person living through the body. Their dignity does not depend on either technological conformity or technological abstinence.

A solarpunk society must make its promise visible in accessible homes, dependable transport, common spaces, and infrastructure people can govern. Green architecture cannot redeem displacement. Solar panels cannot make exploitative ownership democratic. The people who produce, maintain, and dispose of the equipment belong within the account of its success. Communalist technorealism supplies the direction that turns this vision into a political project: develop useful capacities, make their benefits common, and remain responsible for the world that sustains them.

The future requires our participation:

Technological determinism treats technology as the force that fixes society’s destination. Its optimistic version promises inevitable progress; its pessimistic version predicts inevitable ruin. Both obscure the decisions through which institutions are built and maintained. Owners choose investments. Public bodies authorize infrastructure. Workers and residents organize or remain excluded. Unequal power constrains what people can do, which makes changing that power essential.

Our metamodernism combines constructive commitment with continuing criticism. We can pursue a better society without pretending that history guarantees it. We can expose mistakes without making permanent suspicion our way of life. A conviction earns trust by surviving examination and changing when its grounds fail. Public records, protected dissent, and independent scrutiny give that commitment practical consequences. Correction must be able to alter a decision, including one made in the name of our own philosophy.

Our post-leftism expresses the same independence from inherited loyalties. A familiar left-wing label does not settle who should govern or what rights people retain. Opposition to capitalism does not make every proposal offered in its name sound. We reject domination and cruelty even when they come from people who claim to share our enemies. Political judgment must follow the society a movement is building and the means through which it expects to get there.

Social revolution changes the ownership and authority through which daily life is organized. Worker organization, municipal struggles over infrastructure, and publicly governed services give that change material form. Mutual aid, organized cooperation through which people meet one another’s needs, sustains lives that cannot wait for a future settlement. Joined through confederation and a common program, these efforts can develop dual power: popular institutions that meet needs and exercise public capacities while contesting the institutions that currently monopolize them. An association cannot appoint itself everyone’s government. Public authority requires democratic authorization and accountability to those governed. The means must develop the freedom the end promises.

We defend technorealism as the only coherent way forward because a free technological society cannot evade the responsibilities it identifies. Someone must decide what we build, how its benefits are shared, and who answers for its effects. Leaving those decisions to the momentum of investment abandons freedom to owners. Letting aversion settle them abandons judgment to fear. People must exercise informed, democratic authority over the capacities that shape their lives.

Our goal is eutopia, a good place made real through institutions people can sustain and correct. We want lives with less involuntary toil and more room for care, discovery, and self-direction. We want invention to relieve hardship without turning its relief into a new means of command. Techno-utopianism will not secure that freedom for us. Neo-Luddism will not recover it through refusal. We have to build it, and technorealism gives that work its direction.