Elsevier

Space Policy

Volume 47, February 2019, Pages 107-116
Space Policy

Technological Expectations and Global Politics: Three Waves of Enthusiasm in NonGovernmental Remote Sensing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spacepol.2018.08.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Media, industry, and academia frequently depict the commercialization of satellite imagery as geospatial revolution with transformational effects on global politics. In doing so, they follow an understanding that isolates technology from politics. While this division is still prevalent in international relations, recent scholarship has promoted the intricate relationship of technology with politics as socio-material. Adding to this literature, I draw on the sociology of expectations to propose an alternative reading of nongovernmental remote sensing. For this purpose, the notion of technopolitical barriers is introduced to trace controversies about technological expectations of satellite imagery. Based on expert interviews and document analysis, I identify three waves of enthusiasm, which are characterized by particularly salient expectations and techno-political barriers. The first wave is fueled by an enthusiasm about the general benefits of visual transparency as opposed to Cold War secrecy. The second wave turns toward nongovernmental imagery intelligence for human security. In the third wave, satellite imagery joins multiple data streams to support political and business decisions. Taken together, the three-wave model distorts the linear understanding of a revolutionary development but reveals the political and controversial nature of the ongoing commercialization of satellite imagery. As a part of this, nongovernmental remote sensing has experienced a focus shift from visual transparency toward geospatial big data. Moreover, the three-wave model highlights the persistence of expectations and techno-political barriers in the nongovernmental sector with important implications for policymaking and the global impact of commercial satellite imagery.

Introduction

The commercialization of satellite imagery has been met with mixed reactions from great enthusiasm to critical reservation. Most perspectives, however, agree on the transformational character of emerging nongovernmental remote sensing that opens up commercial satellite imagery to a variety of nonstate actors including NGOs, universities, think tanks, and the media: The commercialization of satellite imagery has an impact on global politics across a variety of domains from humanitarian action, human rights, environmental politics, and international security. In other words, the scope of this development is understood as nothing short of a geospatial revolution because “[g]eospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community” [1], [2], [3], [4]. Optimists take satellite imagery as a ready-to-use solution to revolutionize the economy “[n]o matter your industry or goal” [5] and altogether “how we see the world” [6]. A more pessimist follower of the revolution thesis would add terrorism, military interventions, and global surveillance of citizens to the list of applications.

This understanding of technology as revolutionary contains two central flaws: First, the revolution terminology offers an empirically sanitized and misleading account of the commercialization of satellite imagery that disregards the temporal context and alteration of technological expectations. Second, the geospatial revolution ascribes technology a linear force of changing social order. As a result, it obscures the politics of the commercialization of satellite imagery and ignores the ongoing controversies, which are characterized by various actors, interests, expectations, and practices.

Drawing on insights from the sociology of expectations, I pursue two objectives in this article: First, to distort the linear vision of commercial satellite imagery as a neutral agent of global change. Focusing on technological expectations in their historical context, I propose an alternative reading of the commercialization of Earth observation in the United States, which captures the techno-political controversies in three more or less distinct waves of enthusiasm. As such, this does not constitute another history of commercial remote sensing but rather a reconstruction of future expectations over time. Second, this approach complements a growing literature in International Relations (IR) that deals with the mutual relationship between governance and technological projects. More specifically, it adds the sociology of expectations to the theoretical debate on techno-political visions. In doing so, it offers a theoretical starting point for empirically grounded discussions on the role of emerging technologies in (future) world politics.

The following section briefly reviews how IR scholarship deals with the difficult question of future impacts of technologies. Next, I outline the central claims of the sociology of expectations and lay out my analytical approach. The main part of the article presents the three waves of enthusiasm that characterize the commercialization of satellite imagery. Finally, I discuss several insights from the empirical findings and conclude with a brief summary, limitations of the chosen approach, and policy implications.

The different answers to how IR copes with potentially transformational technologies can be organized with respect to their conceptions of technology and how they deal with the futurity problem of speculative effects. With this in mind, I identify three modes of technological futures related to the respective technology understandings in IR scholarship: instrumental, deterministic, and socio-material. Although a large share of mainstream IR theorizing is attuned to technological developments, it stops short of conceptual engagement with technology which often renders it a residual variable that is exogenous to politics [7], [8], [9]. There are two notions of technology which have dominated much common sense and IR thinking, i.e. an instrumentalist and a deterministic version [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16]. Both notions arguably come with a specific understanding of technological futures that is rarely discussed. In addition, I insert a socio-material understanding of technology as a third option, which has recently gained popularity in IR and more prominently considers the future as a concept. Almost by definition, such categorizations do not do justice to the breadth and nuances of the research cited as representatives of either category. Sometimes, it contains traces of all of the above. However, it is useful to briefly spell out these broader figures of thought to situate the analysis and introduce differing conceptions of technological futures implicit in IR.

  • (1)

    Instrumentalism knows no fixed technological futures but takes technologies as neutral means that are subject to the values and intentions of human agents. They are tools indifferent to the ends they are used to and can easily be transferred across political, temporal, and cultural contexts without losing their specific functionality [11]. The instrumentalist views on technology cuts across theoretical divides in IR and security studies [12]. In this sense, regardless of the rhetoric of revolutions in military affairs (RMAs) or network-centric warfare, it is politics and strategy that dictate technology and not vice versa [17]: In this line of thinking, it becomes strategically justifiable to, at once, tolerate nuclear weapons or lethal drones in the hands of some actors and condemn it in those of others [18,19]. Instrumentalists are firmly rooted in the present because technology has no stand-alone effect on the fundamental rules of war, political regime, society, or governance. In this sense, Colin Gray [20] argues that Clausewitz's credo of war as the continuation of politics still applies no matter the technological means of warfare. Yet another textbook case of the instrumental notion of technology is put forward by James Rosenau [21] who contends that information technologies are initially free of value. Value is only determined in their use: “the neutrality of information technologies is permissive because it enables the democrat as well as the authoritarian to use information in whatever way he or she sees fit.” In short, the use of neutral technologies does not predetermine future outcomes of global politics.

  • (2)

    Determinist notions of technology in IR scholarship often come down to an extrapolation of pessimism or optimism about the future trajectory of technological development [14]. No matter the goals or values of human agents, determinists attribute “an autonomous cultural force to technology that overrides all traditional or competing values” [11,[22], [23], [24]. In contrast to instrumentalism, technology is not a mere tool but has a significant impact on its own on the organization of global politics [8,15]. In structure-oriented IR theories, technologies affect the distribution of power [25] or reduce transaction costs to facilitate international cooperation [26]. Using determinist arguments, nuclear weapons or lethal drones are attributed uniform effects on politics regardless of who possesses them. Similarly, the dawning development of lethal autonomous weapons inspires the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots—a consortium of various NGOs—to lobby governments for their immediate ban. Coinciding with the first meeting of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems, the Campaign released the video of a fatalistic vision [27]: Private companies offer autonomous swarms of micro drones for sale which can kill human beings following a predefined set of characteristics such as age, uniform, or ethnicity.1 The only escape from technologically determinist futures, then, is “a return to tradition or simplicity” that forsakes technological development [11].

  • (3)

    More recently, socio-material understandings of technology are proliferating in IR which criticize both instrumental and determinist accounts for their unitary conceptions of technology. Drawing on work in science and technology studies, they highlight the inextricable relationship between politics and their material environment. Two approaches stand out in this literature: Some scholars draw on actor-network theory (ANT) [28] to empirically trace socio-material relations and examine how humans and technologies co-constitute governance practices [29], [30], [31]. However, the strong focus on immanence and contingency renders the future an overly elusive concept. Such studies frequently reconstruct bygone controversies and then-anticipated futures during technology development. On the other hand, the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries [32,33] more decidedly engages with the co-productive relationship between politics and technology in technological futures but hitherto found a limited resonance in IR scholarship – with a few exceptions [34,35]. Sheila Jasanoff [36] defines sociotechnical imaginaries “as collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.” In this sense, sociotechnical imaginaries cast a wide net that includes visions of alternative modes of governance, social order, and technological infrastructures [37].

Similar to ANT and socio-technical imaginaries, this article follows a socio-material understanding of technology. Instrumentalism cannot capture the force of materiality, whereas determinism comes close to a submission to technology. In light of the focused research objectives to reconstruct techno-political expectations of nongovernmental remote sensing in their historical context, the article adds the sociology of expectations to the IR literature on technological futures. It is situated between ANT's micro focus on tracing socio-material relations and the macro view of socio-technical imaginaries. The following section outlines the foundations of the sociology of expectations and the analytical framework that builds on them.

Section snippets

Central claims

The essence of the sociology of expectations can be sketched out in four central claims. First, expectations are collective. In contrast to psychological interests in individual beliefs, the sociology of expectations is concerned with the practices, objects, and articulations that more or less publicly enact the future [37]. In doing so, it takes the future as an analytical object that groups of people create and shape in the present [38]. Second, expectations are performative. Multiple authors

Three waves of enthusiasm

This section outlines three waves of enthusiasm as an alternative to the narrative of a unitary geospatial revolution. In light of the research objectives, I decided against choosing major events of the commercialization to classify distinct periods. This would neglect the politics, alteration and persistence of expectations over time and uphold the illusion of closure represented by specific policy decisions or technological achievements. In contrast, the image of the wave illustrates the

A techno-political project in the making

The empirical analysis of the changing expectations of the commercialization of satellite imagery draws a different picture than the unitary narrative of a geospatial revolution. By comparing the individual waves, this section further elaborates on the central findings and teases out a number of additional observations.

First, the commercialization of satellite imagery is an ongoing political process. The shifting expectations and varying enthusiasm across time contradict determinist

Conclusion

In this paper I have challenged the linear technological vision that depicts the commercialization of satellite imagery as the source of a geospatial revolution that will “create important new opportunities for the public at large” [4]. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, I have identified three waves of enthusiasm, which are characterized by particularly salient technological expectations and techno-political barriers. They distort determinist ideas of a linear development but reveal the

Declaration of interest

None.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all interviewees for having shared their views and experiences as well as the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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