Technojuggernaut sprayed green or technocivilizational greenwashing

I am thinking of the present technological civilization and many or most of its environment-protecting interventions as civilizational greenwashing—too little, too late. A figurative image that came to mind is a technological juggernaut that someone is trying to spray green. I asked Google Gemini to create an image for me and here it is:

I am not quite happy with the image, but it is perhaps tolerable as an idea. It is interesting how Gemini thinks of what a juggernaut is. 

Why technojuggernaut instead of technological juggernaut? Something happens psychologically when open syntactic construction turns into a single word, with fewer syllables. The phrase "technological juggernaut" (and the accompanying image) is well attested in use in the literature. I must have first met the phrase in Pirsig 1974 (Pirsig implausibly claims that technology is solving the eco-problems). A Czech translation could be "technický moloch" or "technologický moloch", but I have not found these phrases in Google Books.

What is civilizational greenwashing? Greenwashing usually refers to the practice of individual  corporations presenting themselves as more eco-friendly than they really are. I intend the term to point to the whole civilization acting like an agent presenting itself as caring about the environment and the terrestrial nature when in fact it does not care much (after us, deluge). The civilizational media run all the Gejammer and Geraunze (Popper), all the litany (Lomborg), all the complaining and wailing, about the evil civilization harming the environment, while not much is being done. From that perspective, I can understand that a young Swedish girl could feel distressed (whether she is a professional activist who does not like to do any real work is a separate question).

I apply the same trick to life, to speak of biojuggernaut. I can then create a rhetorical figure or image, of the biojuggernaut facing a menace, the technojuggernaut. I prefer this language over "life" vs. "technology", since these words do not evoke a juggernaut image and are ontologically opaque (intransparent).

Some of the environmentalist interventions:

• Electric cars: even if widely adopted, they will reduce the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by merely a fraction, while requiring additional mining of raw resources.
• Paper recycling: that is fine, but it does very little to make the whole economy circular. And paper, if burned, can easily become part of new trees (which pick CO2 from the air), which makes paper recycling stand in contrast to metal recycling, I think.
• Plastic recycling: a little different from the above. I am not convinced this is unequivocally a good thing, in the present implementation, but I don't know. 

Some of the fundamental sustainability problems:

• Energy: where to get the energy from once the fossil fuels are gone. Proposed solutions include solar, wind, hydro and nuclear.
• Recycling/circular economy: how to make sure man-made things get recycled. Recycling will be more energy demanding than mining and processing ores. And the objects/artifacts required to produce wind and solar also pose a recycling problem.
• Etc. 

The above does not mention the global climate change since it is epistemically less accessible/verifiable by relatively unaided intuition.

See also my article at Wikiversity, Technology as a threat or promise for life and its forms.

As an aside, I got some of these ideas when I saw in IKEA how they are presenting themselves as eco-friendly. I thought, well, if you want to save the environment, keep your old, not-so-well-looking furniture, and do not buy new items in IKEA. I have not noticed any messaging along these lines in IKEA. And, in IKEA, you could save the environment at least a little if you replaced your meatballs and mashed potatos with plain meat and plain potatoes since reducing the amount of processing would surely reduce the amount of energy needed. And then, IKEA presented something to the following effect: if we do nothing (as for eco), we will help nothing; but if we do a little, little by little, perhaps we change everything. Well, no! The first statement is true; the second is patently absurd. I found a related post in LinkedIn. These greenwashing corporations are a joke.

License: CC-BY-SA 4.0 International. Last update: 1 May 2026.