This book examines our understanding of technology and suggests that machines are counterfeit organisms that seem to replace human bodies but are ultimately means of displacing workloads and environmental loads beyond our horizon. It emphasises that technology is not the politically neutral revelation of natural principles that we tend to think, but largely a means of accumulating, through physically asymmetric exchange, the material means of harnessing natural forces to reinforce social relations of power. Alf Hornborg reflects on how our cultural illusions about technology appeared in history and how they continue to stand in the way of visions for an equal and sustainable world. He argues for a critical reconceptualisation of modern technology as an institution for redistributing human time, resources, and risks in world society. The book highlights a need to think of world trade in other terms than money and raises fundamental questions about the role of human-artifact relations in organising human societies. It will be of interest to a range of scholars working in anthropology, sociology, economics, development studies, and the philosophy of technology. *CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2023* "Alf Hornborg here adds further weight to his formidable oeuvre . He demonstrates with elan that our various technologies, both past and present, are direct mechanisms for ensuring social inequality and uneven ecological extraction. Hornborg systematically dispatches both friends and foes, in the process articulating a novel and profound perspective on the many things we both celebrate and fetishise as technologies. His argument cuts to the heart of the question ‘what is progress?’ in an era when war, disease, disaster and death are as prevalent as in any past period. Never has the term tour de force been more fitting." - Noel Castree , Professor of Geography, University of Manchester and co-author of David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to His Thinking "The anthropologist and world systems historian Alf Hornborg is a pioneer critic of ecologically unequal trade, and of the fetishism of technology and money. The praise for new technologies by authors from the right and the left forgets the reliance of modern technology (including industrial solar energy) on asymmetrical global resource flows orchestrated by money and the fictive reciprocity of market prices. Technology is not neutral. On the contrary, together with general-purpose money and the price system, it explains the dynamic of the socio-economic system towards increasing social inequality and destruction of the environment. The perspectives from mainstream economists, environmental modernists, ecological economists and Marxists are summarized and criticised in this original novel synthesis of Hornborg’s empirical and theoretical contributions over three decades. This is an essential book for anthropologists, historians, environmental social scientists but also for engineers, biologists and climate scientists." - Joan Martínez-Alier , Professor of Economics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and author of The Environmentalism of the Poor "One of the few social theorists to combine a critique of capitalist exploitation with an original analysis of ecological crisis, Alf Hornborg has for many years developed and refined a powerful theoretical edifice drawing on Marxism, ecology and thermodynamics, engaging anthropology, history and archaeology. This book reveals capitalism as a global system for the production of inequality and ecological destruction via the blackboxing magic of machines. This is a very major achievement and an extremely important book in a world of escalating environmental destruction and mounting inequality." - Thomas Hylland Eriksen , Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo and author of Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change "This book shakes up debates about the role of technology in world history by showing how, since the Industrial Revolution, symbiosis between specific forms of technology and economy have driven and engineered extreme exploitation leading to both glorious wealth and devastating destruction. Material flows analyses document the global scale of ecologically unequal exchange unique to this period, while calculations of human time and natural space required to produce and transport commodities illuminate flows of embodied resources obscured by commodity prices. Hornborg interprets blindness about these realities as a fetishism that construes technology as inspired, even magical, objects, whose existence and value is independent of the unjust and unsustainable socio-environmental processes through which they are produced." - Susan Paulson , Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Florida and co-author of The Case for Degrowth "In response to the ecological hole we’re in, the ecomodernists’ mantra is ‘design new tools, keep digging!’ What makes Hornborg’s thesis radical a