Gérard Dubey and Alain Gras, The Electric Servitude: From the Dream of Liberty to the Digital Prison, Éditions du Seuil, 2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18598
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2038-3460
18598
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Robert A. Williams
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Gérard Dubey and Alain Gras, La Servitude électrique: Du rêve de liberté à la prison numérique, Éditions du Seuil, 2021
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Book Reviews
2024-01-16
2023-12-06
2024-01-16
2024-01-16
143-146
TS
Robert A. Williams
2023
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18598
143
University of Akron
2038-3460
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146
Gérard Dubey and Alain Gras, La Servitude électrique: Du rêve de liberté à la prison numérique, Éditions du Seuil, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/18598/17034
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T/S                                                                                    BOOK REVIEWS



La Servitude électrique: Du rêve de liberté à la prison numérique
[The Electric Servitude: From the Dream of Liberty to the Digital Prison]
by Gérard Dubey and Alain Gras (2021) Paris, Éditions du Seuil, pp. 370.




Robert A. Williams
University of Akron


   During my participant observation with Ohio’s’ now-defunct Industrial Pollution Control
in 1979, I visited the Conemaugh power plant in western Pennsylvania. There, I saw the gener-
ation of electricity destined for New York City over 300 miles to the east, whilst fuel waste and
air pollution haunted Pennsylvania’s rivers and residents. Earlier I visited as a non-participant
to observe Ohio Edison’s Edgewater power plant in the northern Ohio city of Lorain. With
a dedicated turbine for the generation of electricity solely for Chicago over 300 miles to the
west, fuel waste and air pollution impacted Lake Erie’s south shore and Ohio residents. Over
several decades, residents of Pennsylvania and Ohio suffered the polluting effects of fossil fuels
in Conemaugh and Lorain to generate electric power for two major cities over 300 miles away.
   The challenge posed by sociologist Gérard Dubey and anthropologist Alain Gras is to view
cities as metaphorical parasitic entities siphoning fossil resources for electric power. This vis-
ualization of “cables on catenaries” (p. 186) sparked my recall of the above-mentioned cases. I
remember my immediate reaction then was that fuel waste and pollution were not innocent
by-products of resource extraction and electricity generation, but were driven by economic
forces beyond the control of locals. As such, these by-products were an expression of capital-
ism’s structural violence that were too long ignored by regulators.
   These 20th century cases are exemplary of the propensity for general populations in in-
dustrialised societies to overlook electric power’s dependency on these sources. Seeking to
understand this persistent social phenomenon, Dubey and Gras offer a unique enquiry into
the general public’s perception of fossil fuel-generated electricity power.
   Criticism of fossil fuel-generated electric power is not new to Science and Technology Stud-
ies (STS). Querying the generation of electricity and asking to what extent this production
affects our society and planet lies at the core of a realization that technology is seldom neutral,
especially in the digital age (see Ekhardt et al. 2017; Gerrie 2018; Timcke 2021). Dubey and
Gras nevertheless aver that critical histories of electric power consumption and its attendant
environmental and social impacts are not common in sociology, “even less in philosophy” (p.
9). The biggest reason the authors give for this alleged paucity is a general bias for electricity to
be seen as green whilst ignoring the massive exploitation of fossil fuels (coal, gas, petroleum)

CNOSIEZA
       T . tI alian Journal of Sciene      c & eT chnology tS udies   © The Author(s) 2023
        14(2) p. 1463- ISN 2038-46                                    Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
             DOI: 10.6092/issn./1859203-46                            www.tecnoscienza.net
Williams                                                                                        144

to generate it, which discourages a view not wider than partial. Employing the metaphor of
magic as an “Electricity Fairy” provides a window to challenge assumptions and allow readers
to grasp these technocultural dynamics. Yet, British cultural studies theorist Debra Benita
Shaw (2008) already noted that technology often appears to be magical in its operation and
application because the development of new technologies increasingly overtakes the ability
of lay persons to understand the principles of their functioning. Seeking to unmask the un-
der-theorised “Electricity Fairy” therefore is no easy feat, especially where the race for renew-
able energy places trust in electricity to save the world.
   Consequently, La Servitude électrique is an ambitious book in two parts – the first part is a
sociocultural survey on electricity and its context of rapid transformations, which is followed
by a second part, describing the transformation “from an electric cage to a digital enclosure”
(p. 209). The 13 chapters of Part 1 are nearly double the size of Part 2 and are Dubey and
Gras’s strongest as they set the table for the authors’ thesis that the origin of electric energy
remains very mysterious and “thus leaves a hint of the supernatural” (p. 10). Hoodwinked
observers not only treat electricity as a wonderful means of distributing power, but also as “a
self-creating power” (p. 10). Ignoring the attendant “ever-ascending march of the fossil” (p.
16) to generate electric power, green-washing hucksters call it sustainable development.
   The seven chapters in the second part explore the electricity fairy’s digital progeny and
the human problems that result from it. Itself a junior fairy arising from the creation and
maintenance of these environments that brutally deplete our planet’s resources and gradu-
ally renders the Earth effectively uninhabitable, the digital fairy seeks to hoodwink us into
self-confinement and the dwindling of direct human interaction. Although the consequenc-
es are more tangible in the junior fairy’s takeover, the electricity fairy’s increasing appetite
for fossil fuels nevertheless negatively impacts life on our planet, accompanied by the digital
fairy’s erosion of individual liberty in societies suffering increasing algorithmic interference.
The authors caution the fairies’ advances are already leading to putting life and social arrange-
ments under a glass in a kind of “lasting and anxiety-provoking semi-confinement” (p. 209).
Invoking Marcus Rafelsberger’s 2012 disaster thriller novel “Black-out: Tomorrow will be
too late”, written under his pen name of Marc Elsberg, the authors illustrate “the extraor-
dinary fragility of a society that not only put all its eggs in one basket’ of electric grids, but
whose basket is itself only ‘a mirage’” (p. 302).
   This book is ideal for undergraduate introductory courses in STS. The authors’ decision to
include illustrations is remarkable, and they complement their well-researched history of electric
power and its concealed unsustainability under the guise of a “Green New Deal”. Furthermore,
the book presents a three-fold “phenomenological” approach, incorporating Tocqueville’s law,
Bentham’s panopticon, and electricity’s elusive ability to evade capture, offering readers creative
metaphors to engage with the text. The authors explain that French social philosopher Alexis
de Tocqueville had affirmed that societies are always affected by the conditions which saw them
born. Subsequently, the industrial revolution’s choice of fire (fossil fuels) as the preferred means
of industrial development ensured the electrical phenomenon does not escape Tocqueville’s law.
Changes and shifts in certain socioeconomic patterns resulted from this ever-spreading reliance.
   Bentham’s panopticon is useful to understanding the form of existence dominated by
electricity today in terms of a technical macro-system governed by a centralized view of ex-
145                                                                           Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

changes. The authors’ last point is that electric current does not allow itself to be imprisoned.
Hence the never-ending search for a battery than can do just that. Commendably, the authors
proffer no simplistic solutions. Rather, they explain how the sustainability of human life and
the planet requires the unmasking of capitalist myths that perpetuate “concealment of the
materiality of [electricity’s] origin and fuel waste” (p. 14). South African social philosopher
Scott Timcke (2021) noted this unmasking project compels us to ask how the purposeful
construction of a subject might hide as much as it “might illuminate” (p. 22).
   The authors’ metaphorical window of electricity as a magical fairy is provocative, yet it
echoes the materiality concerns of previous critical contributions. For example, Canadian
philosopher James Gerrie (2018) noted that it might actually be less polluting to simply burn
the original fuel, such as oil in the form of gasoline, in a vehicle itself, “rather than in a power
plant” ( p. 164). Gerrie explained that if electric cars replaced cars powered by internal com-
bustion across the board, peak loads would significantly increase and this, in turn, would
prompt electricity plants to generate much higher levels of electricity simply to cover possible
peak loads even when people are not intensively consuming. In short, a substantial amount of
electricity generated by fossil fuel dependent power plants would be wasted.
   Despite the Epilogue’s strong claim that “green electricity will not become a reality” (p.
333), this book offers much more than can be covered in this review. For instance, Max Weber
(1978[1921]) introduced a famous and controversial idea about two types of rationality: one
based on values (Gemeinschaft) and the other on achieving specific ends (Gesellschaft). Howev-
er, in our modern society, we often prioritize a peculiar form of utilitarianism, centred on the
freedom to consume. In their collaborative work, social philosopher Felix Ekhardt, social an-
thropologist Christine Fassert, and sociologist Luigi Pellizzoni pointed out how our economic
system continually attracts consumers who buy more and new products, often without con-
sidering the production process or societal level (2017, 108). The transformation of formerly
magical mysteries into a technological electric servitude ultimately serve Gesellschaft aims.
   Further, we are reconfiguring our machines to be reproductive rather than productive. Rath-
er than investing in personal solar panels to begin an adventure of home solar energy-generated
electricity, many are more interested in whether a touchscreen phone that folds like flip phones
did twenty years ago is the next fad; or how many cameras the next iPhone will offer. The au-
thors aver the internet is the epitome of this hyperreality of reproducibility. As a result, an in-
cessant call for growth the GDP arbiter, baptized as progress, defines liberty in economic terms,
and “therefore mixes values and ends” (p. 179). As the authors conclude their exploration of
the digital electronic condition, “electric magic” (p. 338) takes a very unexpected turn, when the
vision of an object-world, reduced to the state of “inert scenery”, no longer talks to us (p. 339).


References
Ekhardt, Felix, Fassert, Christine and Pellizzoni, Luigi (2017) Sociocultural Environments: New Challenges
   for STS, in “Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies”, 8(1), pp. 103-128.
Elsberg, Marc (2012) Black-out: Tomorrow Will be Too Late, Houten, Van Holkema and Warendorf.
Gerrie, James (2018) Technology and Society: A Philosophical Guide, Peterborough, Broadview Press.
Williams                                                                                        146

Shaw, Debra Benita (2008) Technoculture: The Key Concepts, London, Routledge.
Timcke, Scott (2021) Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st Century American
   Life, Bristol, Bristol University Press.
Weber, Max (1978[1921]) Economy and Society, Berkeley, University of California Press.
