Non-disruptive Disruptions: Cleantech and the New Green Spirit of Capitalism
After overviewing the history of cleantech, Chapter One introduces the core contradiction investigated throughout the text: while the professionals I met were excited about “disruptive” technologies that might radically transform society, when it came to actually finding (and funding) commercially viable projects, disruption quickly gave way to incremental gains in already established markets. Building off of Boltanski and Chiappello’s New Spirit of Capitalism, I argue that planetary improvement represents a new, green spirit of capitalism that mobilizes a seemingly radical, anti-systemic critique of capitalism in order to provide moral legitimacy for proposals to create a better, greener version of the modern industrial economy. As a term, planetary improvement references the discourse of agricultural improvement that helped legitimize enclosure and colonial land grabs in the first centuries of capitalism’s ascent. Agricultural improvement targeted ‘inefficient’ forms of agricultural production – from those practiced by European commoners to a wide range of indigenous agricultural practices throughout the colonized world. In a similar way, planetary improvement recasts ‘dirty’ or ‘wasteful’ forms of industrial production and consumer-driven lifestyles as a terrain of potential improvement. Instead of inefficient commoners or inefficient laborers, here it is capital itself that is guilty of being wasteful.