| Abstract |
Massive Change, a museum exhibition with accompanying book that has traveled widely in North America, consists of demonstrations and displays of the role of design in dealing with various complexities of modern life. Exhibits and displays show renewable resources and energy, ecologically friendly buildings, energy-efficient trains and recyclable cars, efficient transportation systems, and leading-edge agriculture, medicine, and biotechnology. There is an implicit promise that a well-meaning, technologically based Utopia can and will end poverty, destitution, and environmental despoliation. Embedded within that promise is the assumption that technological innovation rests on global capitalism as the engine that will end poverty and war and turn our planet green. While one might well enjoy the aesthetics of the show and hope for the promised Utopia, one cannot help but notice that the exhibition is a celebration of the wonders of technology, technological logic, and ownership of property as the key to the production of wealth. Its major function is ideological. Like many other such exhibits since the Crystal Palace and technology museums, it is part of a long history in which capitalist technologies promise the good life. But capitalism, by definition, must seek surplus value and it depends on externalization of costs. While there have indeed been `` massive changes'' in the nature of capitalism over the past two centuries, these have always rested on contradictions evident in alienation, poverty, and immiseration, and capitalism always depended on various expressions of ideology to mask its contradictions and instill "willing assent'' to its domination. |