The Power of the Machine: Global Inequality

This episode offers excerpts from Alf Hornborg's book, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment, which presents a critical, transdisciplinary analysis of global capitalism. Hornborg integrates perspectives from anthropology, economics, and thermodynamics to challenge conventional economic theories, particularly the notion of sustainable growth, by arguing that industrial technology and capital accumulation rely on unequal exchange and the net appropriation of physical resources (exergy) from the global periphery. A central theme is "machine fetishism," the ideological illusion that machines are autonomous sources of productivity rather than reifications of global power structures and asymmetric resource flows. The work also explores the cultural and semiotic dimensions of modernity, contrasting the abstract, disembedded nature of money and global identity with localized, contextualized forms of social and ecological knowledge, using case studies like the Mi’kmaq struggle against a quarry to illustrate the tensions between local resistance and global systems.