ARPA-E: Gadget Porn for Greens?

One of America’s great virtues, and one of our tragic downfalls, is our belief in technology.

Whatever the problem, we can build something to fix it: locked up in that sentiment is frontier self-reliance, immigrant work ethic and the elbow-grease egalitarian ingenuity of a million garages and basement workshops. We’ve made robots to wash our dishes, fixed blown-out hearts and turned desert to garden.

But technology also satisfies our darker sensibilities. We crave dominance and control; we’re reluctant to confront problems at their root, in all their uncomfortable complexity. We’re lazy and short-sighted, and love shiny objects. So we make those dishes from toxic plastic, blow out our hearts by eating so badly, and turn desert to garden with water that someone else needs to drink.

Which brings us to ARPA-E, the Department of Energy’s new skunkworks, and the darling of green techies everywhere.

Now, I don’t intend to disparage the intentions of ARPA-E. We need those algae fuels and ultracapacitor batteries and carbon-gobbling goo. Anyone who doesn’t think Mad Max looked like fun knows that change is needed, and the agency’s $400 million budget is the federal equivalent of a third-grader’s diorama spending. It deserves a hundred times more.

But something about the agency and all the gee-whiz adulation makes me uncomfortable. I wonder about what’s not being funded, at what’s overlooked because it it doesn’t fit in our hands or look nice on film or let us keep living exactly as we are now, but with new gas stations. After all, it’s not just energy’s technological infrastructure that needs to be replaced. It’s social infrastructure, too. That seems like it’s being ignored in the federal push for sustainability. It’s a shame, possibly a tragic one.

I ran that hypothesis by Gil Friend, the CEO of environmental consultancy Natural Logic, and sustainable design strategist Jeremy Faludi.

“We’re culturally oriented to seeing things, not pattern,” wrote Friend in an email. “And we’re economically oriented to IP-protectable things, which is why we see venture capitalists pouring capital into the latest solar gadget, but not into urban planning & zoning, design for access, etc.”

Faludi opined that “it’d be great to have a behavioral/infrastructure ARPA, too.” But the absence is understandable, especially in a governmentally-funded project.

“It’s a lot easier to objectively measure and repeat the success of tech than the success of social experiments. Hence the bias,” he wrote. “And it won’t only be gadgets” that emerge from ARPA-E — ”remember, the original ARPA invented the internet.”

Faludi added that ARPA-E is asking for feedback on what to fund. “If you have suggestions, tell them,” he said.

Image: Come As You Are Cooperative

Posted by Brandon Keim (Web/Twitter).