Do you know the origin of the QWERTY (and AZERTY) arrangement of letters on the keyboards that we all use? For the answer, you have to go back to the time of the old typewriters that used a scrolling ink ribbon struck by metal blocks placed at the end of slender stems. The layout of the letters has a very precise function, thought out by the engineers of the time: it keeps the rhythm of the stems as constant as possible so that they do not get tangled. So some of the most common letters in the English language were given to weaker fingers to type in order to homogenize the strike rhythm.1
Today, flat digital keyboards no longer need such precautions. Some engineers have invented a new type of keyboard, much faster and more powerful than QWERTY: DVORAK. But who uses a DVORAK keyboard? Nobody. So we find ourselves in an absurd situation where the old typewriters have disappeared but where everyone still uses the old technical system that came with them, though it is less efficient for our own times.
In a completely different field, it has now been clearly demonstrated that alternative farming systems, such as agroecology, permaculture and bio-intensive micro-agriculture,2 can produce – with much less energy – yields per hectare comparable with or even superior to industrial agriculture over smaller surfaces, while restoring soils and ecosystems by reducing the impact on the climate and by restructuring peasant communities.3 The Grupo de Agricultura Orgánica (GAO) of Cuba received the alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award) in 1999 for demonstrating this in a concrete, large-scale way.4 Today, agroecology is even recognized and promoted by the UN5 and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).6 So why haven’t these powerful and credible alternatives taken off? Why are we still ‘prisoners’ of industrial agriculture?
The answer lies in the very structure of our system of innovation. In fact, when a new and more efficient technology makes its appearance, it does not automatically become the norm – far from it. Indeed, it is often very difficult to change systems because of a phenomenon that historians and sociologists of innovation call sociotechnical ‘lock-in’.
We all stop at the petrol station to fill our tanks because our ancestors (some of them) decided at a certain point to generalize the use of the thermal engine, the car and oil. We are stuck in the technological choices of these ancestors. Current technological trajectories are therefore largely determined by our past and, quite often, technological innovations are just trying to solve the problems caused by previous ones. This ‘path-dependent’ evolution can, in many ways, lead to ‘technological dead-ends’, trapping us in increasingly counterproductive choices.
Let’s take two other examples, the electric system and car transport.7 In the first case, when one or several thermal electric power plants are installed in a region, this triggers a self-reinforcing cycle. The government, through economic incentives or favourable legislation, perpetuates the system of electricity production by allowing investors to develop it and therefore predict the generation of later and more efficient power plants. Gradually, the growth of this technical system generates economies of scale and lower costs which, in turn, increase the availability of the system for a greater number of users. In so doing, the electric system becomes part of consumers’ habits, and the price of electricity, which has become affordable, promotes not only its expansion but also fosters a growing consumption of energy. Then this sociotechnical system becomes widespread and gives rise to a multitude of secondary innovations that improve it and consolidate it. Finally, as demand grows, the government take measures favourable to its expansion and so on, thus increasing the dominance of the electric system. Lock-in appears when new technical niches, for example alternative and more efficient energy systems, can no longer emerge because the dominant energy system leaves no space for diversity.
For car transport, a similar cycle has been established. By promoting ever-denser road infrastructures, governments are increasing the use already made of them by drivers (because they can always go farther and faster), and allow new users to benefit from these infrastructures. The increasing use of the road system promotes investment and public support. Tax revenue grows steadily, allowing the system to expand and even to destroy other more efficient transport systems, as in the United States with the destruction of the tram system in the early twentieth century by General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone, with the help of the government.8
The self-referential side of this process is fundamental. The more this dominant system becomes entrenched, the more it has the means to maintain its dominance. It swallows up all the available resources and ‘mechanically’ prevents the emergence of alternatives, whereas it is precisely in its early stages that an innovation needs support and investment. In other words, the ‘small shoots’ are not able to compete with the big tree that provides them with shade. The tragedy is that, by preventing small systems on the margins from blossoming, we deprive ourselves of potential solutions for the future.
Lock-in mechanisms are numerous and very various. First, there are the purely technical aspects. For example, a dominant system can decide on the compatibility (or not) of objects introduced to the market by small emerging competitors, as is often the case in the field of computing.
There are also psychological aspects. For example, a research team from the University of Indiana has shown that investments in innovative technology design depended more on the trajectories of the past than on desires for the future.9 Investors are not as reckless as we might think: they tend to prefer investing in what already works and what engineers can improve, rather than in an unknown system that has not yet won its spurs. This could explain, incidentally, why we find it so difficult to try out new and truly innovative political systems … In the same spirit, one very important psychological obstacle is related to the inertia of individual behaviour and the reluctance of individuals to change. When a system is implanted, it creates habits that we have trouble getting rid of: plastic bags in supermarkets, the 70 mph maximum speed limit on motorways, and so on.
There are also institutional mechanisms, such as legal and regulatory frameworks, that prevent the emergence of new ‘sociotechnical niches’: these include the regulation of agricultural pesticides, blocking the development of natural products, and the seed laws that stifle innovative seed techniques in peasant communities. Then there is the difficulty governments have in abandoning major grant programmes. At the global level, for example, the total grants awarded to fossil fuels came to US$550 billion in 2013 (against US$120 billion for renewable energies).10 The institutional inertia of a system is also reflected in the construction of large ecologically destructive and economically useless projects, where huge investments are committed on the basis of decisions dating back to a time when conditions (economic, social and environmental) were not the same as today. Finally, another institutional lock-in mechanism is simply the existence of very heavy infrastructures related to a source of energy. Indeed, the recycling of nuclear power plants and oil refineries is no easy matter! Changing energy type is like giving up everything that institutions have invested in and built up in the past, and which still has economic and social consequences for the present and the future. In social psychology, this ‘hidden trap’ mechanism11 refers to the tendency of individuals to persevere in an action, even when this becomes unreasonably expensive or no longer achieves its objectives. In terms of emotional life, for example, it’s the tendency to stay with a partner we no longer love, as ‘we can’t have gone through all those years for nothing’.
But, some will retort, isn’t the raison d’être of an institution precisely to preserve an accumulated heritage, a sociotechnical trajectory, a certain social order? Certainly: but the problem is that it is precisely the institutions dedicated to innovation (public and private research) which are monopolized by the dominant sociotechnical system. In the agronomic sciences, for example, a PhD student in agroecology will find his or her path strewn with far more obstacles and yielding far fewer credits than a PhD student in agrochemistry or genetic engineering12 – let alone the fact that it will be much harder to publish in ‘prestigious’ scientific journals, making it more difficult to make a career in research. This leads Jean Gadrey, former professor of economics at the University of Lille, to protest: ‘Try entrusting [the agriculture of the future] to an academy of “best experts” at the INRA [the French National Institute for Agricultural Research] where, out of nine thousand positions, there are only thirty-five jobs in full-time equivalent posts in research on organic farming!’13
Lock-in mechanisms can also be identified in the principles of collective action. For example, citizens involved in the fight against global heating and in building a ‘post-carbon’ world can be counted in the tens of millions (we can see this in consciousness-raising campaigns, demonstrations, petitions and debates), but they are scattered and uncoordinated (not to mention the fact that, like everyone, they use fossil fuels to live). Conversely, far fewer people are engaged in producing energy from fossil fuels. The Total group, for example, has a hundred thousand employees (some of whom are probably convinced that we must fight against global heating) who are much better organized and can draw on considerable funds (a gross figure of 22.4 billion euros’ worth of investment in 2013). In short, an established technical system provides itself with the means to resist change.
Let’s not be naive. The lock-in is not just ‘mechanical’, it is also the result of intense lobbying campaigns. In France, for example, in order to be able to ‘evacuate’ nuclear generation of electricity (which is very difficult to store), some entrepreneurs still suggest installing electric heating in the new constructions, even though this makes no thermodynamic sense. (Since electricity is a ‘noble’ energy, it can be used for many things other than just heat.) These campaigns can even transgress the legal framework. In 1968, General Electric practised aggressive marketing to impose this same type of heating on real-estate developers, ‘even threatening the promoters that they would not connect their housing lots if they supplied any other sources of energy’.14 The development of solar energy in the United States in those years was therefore stifled even though it constituted a better technical solution. In the same way, to push the peasant world into the system of pesticides (the so-called ‘green revolution’), agro-chemical firms had to deploy considerable energy and spend insane amounts of money,15 as evidenced by the images of entomologists who went so far as to drink DDT in front of the sceptics to prove it wasn’t toxic!16
However, as these last examples prove, some lock-ins sooner or later break down. In fact, they often merely delay transitions.17 The problem today is that we can no longer allow ourselves to wait, and the lock-ins have become immense.
Where the problem becomes serious is that the globalization, interconnection and homogenization of the economy have tightened the lock-in by radically intensifying the power of the systems already in place. According to archaeologist Joseph Tainter, this apparently inexorable tendency of societies to move towards greater levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control is even one of the major causes of the collapse of societies.18 Indeed, over time, societies gradually turn towards natural resources that become increasingly expensive as they are more difficult to exploit (the easiest being exhausted first), thereby reducing their energy benefits at the very same time as they are increasing their bureaucracy, social control spending at home and military budgets simply in order to maintain the status quo. Locked in by all this complexity, the metabolism of a society reaches a threshold of diminishing returns that makes it more and more vulnerable to collapse.
By becoming globalized, our industrial society has reached extreme levels of complexity; indeed, as we saw earlier, it is entering a phase of diminishing returns. But above all, it has dangerously extended its sociotechnical lock-ins. Indeed, once a system is established in a region or a country, it becomes economically very competitive or even technically efficient and spreads rapidly to other countries through knock-on effects. The effectiveness of the systems in place then makes it difficult to break out of this paradigm, especially when competition between all countries becomes the rule. This ‘global lock-in’19 can be illustrated by three examples: the financial system; the energy system based on carbon; and growth.
In recent years, finance has been concentrated in a small number of huge financial institutions.20 In Great Britain, for example, the market share of the three largest banks rose from 50 per cent in 1997 to almost 80 per cent in 2008. This phenomenon of concentration has obliged states to give implicit bank guarantees, which has eroded market discipline and encouraged banks to take excessive risks; besides this, the links between these institutions and governments are now ‘very close’. That’s how some financial institutions and multinationals21 have become ‘too big to fail’ or ‘too big to jail’.
The history of carbon and its techno-industrial complex is probably the biggest lock-in in history. ‘The “initial conditions”, the abundance of coal and oil, but also political decisions encouraging one source of energy rather than another [have determined] technological trajectories over a very long period.’22 Today, if we take away oil, gas and coal, there is not much left of our thermo-industrial civilization. Almost everything we are familiar with depends on it: transport, food, clothing, heating, and so on. The economic and political power of oil and gas majors has become disproportionate, to such an extent that 90 global companies have alone been responsible for 63 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide since 1751.23 Worse, proponents of the energy transition (towards renewables) need this thermal power to build an alternative energy system. This produces a somewhat droll paradox: if it can hope to survive, our civilization must fight against the sources of its own power and stability, thereby shooting itself in the foot! When the survival of civilization totally depends on a dominant technical system, it’s the ultimate lock-in.
Locking in growth follows the same logic. The stability of the debt system rests entirely on this growth: the world economic system cannot abandon it if it wants to carry on working. This means that we need growth to continue to repay credits, to pay pensions and even to prevent the rise of unemployment.24 In fact, none of our institutions is adapted to a world without growth because they were designed for and by growth. It’s like trying to slow down a rocket on the way up, bringing it back down and landing it gently…. If we are deprived of growth for too long, the economic system implodes under mountains of debt that will never be repaid. But, as with carbon, for the global economic system to be transformed with flexibility and agility, it needs to work optimally, i.e., with strong growth. Then you can savour this other paradox: it is therefore difficult to envisage a controlled contraction of the global economic system. And the corollary: what the transition needs to be able to deploy quickly is strong economic growth.
The intensity and ubiquity of these sociotechnical lock-ins have made the people who depend on them – us! – extremely heterogeneous, that is to say, we lack the ability to pull the plug or simply to try and find a few islands of autonomy. The political world too, structurally oriented towards short-term choices, has little room for manoeuvre. As Barack Obama admits, ‘I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.’25
We (especially our ancestors) have created gigantic and monstrous systems that have become indispensable for maintaining the living conditions of billions of people. Not only do these systems prevent any transition, they cannot even afford to let themselves be tampered with in case they collapse. Since the system is self-referential, it is obvious that we will not be able to find solutions within the dominant system. We must cultivate innovations on the margins. That’s the whole purpose of a transition. But are there any margins left?
To sum up, we have very quickly climbed the ladder of technical progress and complexity in what could be considered a self-perpetuating headlong flight. Today, while the height of the ladder of progress may make us feel giddy, many people are realizing – with horror – that its bottom rungs have disappeared and that the ascent is continuing inexorably nonetheless. It’s no longer possible to stop this upwards movement and come down quietly to find a less complex lifestyle on terra firma – unless we jump off the ladder, which will involve a shock for the person jumping or indeed trigger a major systemic shock if lots of people fall off the ladder at the same time.26 Those who understand this are filled with anxiety that the further their ascent continues, the more painful will be their fall.