Green tech is a forum of capitalist expansion

Elizabeth Johnson Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham, UK Christian AndersonSchool of Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Washington, Bothell, WA.Becky MansfieldDepartment of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Culture and Politics Program, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.Julia Corwin Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.Scott Prudham University of Toronto, Department of Geography and Urban Planning, Toronto, ON, Canada. Department of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. “ Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2325548X.2020.1722485

We are delighted to introduce this forum on Jesse Goldstein’s Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism. Goldstein has written an engaging critique of the promise of clean tech and the constraints of capitalist production. Where as techno utopianists anticipate disruptions and the “coming singularity” with bated breath, Goldstein’s Planetary Improvement shows how, on the contrary, innovators are trained to conform to the narrative and ideological expectations of investors. Through a series of interviews with tech inventors and investors as well as richly detailed observations of board room pitch meetings, Goldstein describes how two prevailing forces constrain the aspirations of cleantech inventors. The first is the hegemonic logic of what Goldstein refers to as “planetary improvement.” This is the narrative of capitalist production that lauds efficiency and vilifies waste—a narrative so entrenched that it appears to Goldstein’s research subjects as simple common sense. Gold-stein describes how this sensibility the histories of colonial land enclosures in the sixteenth century to financial markets and spaces of innovation in the twenty-first century. It simultaneously links innovators and their products to the promise of the market as the means for effecting change. With vivid (and often humorous) detail, he describes breakfast pitch meetings and conversations in which the venture capitalists who bring would-be innovations to the market work to entrain innovatorsin practices akin to dressage, enfolding them within tightly constrained investment protocols. Goldstein there-fore paints a compelling portrait of the ways that highly conventional practices of business hem in the capacities ofinnovators.Goldstein’s text ultimately offers a sharp critique of clean-tech and the “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) of natural capitalism’s promises. The text also moves beyond critique, inviting reflection on what it might mean to createin—and as the products of—the end times of petromo-dernity. Weaving together the pluriversal politics of Mi-gnolo’s (2011) decolonial scholarship, the amateur experi-mentalism of Lewis Mumford, and feminist politics of care,Goldstein attempts to create a vocabulary of anticapitalistand anticolonial eco-innovation. Set against the sweep-ing futurist manifestos of accelerationism and “full luxury