The last few posts I’ve written have leaned a little lighter, trying to make complicated or uncomfortable topics feel more digestible, maybe even a little funny. But for some topics, no amount of humor or clever phrasing can soften them. Sometimes the only honest response is to step back and sit with the discomfort, especially if, even in a small way, you’re part of the problem.
The systems we move through every day, and the infrastructure and standards they’re built on, aren’t neutral. In fact, much of what we call “progress” in the West comes with consequences that are unevenly distributed, quietly externalized, and easy to ignore when they’re not happening to you.
As Science, Technology & Society researcher Paul Edwards explains, Western infrastructures are “the connective tissues and the circulatory systems of modernity… reside[ing] in a naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt” (185). They operate as an invisible background and shape how we live while rarely being questioned, which is part of what allows these consequences to persist.
I’m going to make a bit of a jump here, but stay with me because it comes back to this idea of consequences. During the Industrial Revolution, coal-burning steam engines became increasingly more efficient. The assumption that followed was if engines required less coal to run, then overall coal consumption should decrease. But the opposite happened: humans “used more coal… As the price falls for that service or that energy, you’re actually able to use more of it productively.” Increased efficiency didn’t reduce consumption: it expanded it. This phenomenon is known as the Jevons Paradox.
And I think something similar is happening with what we call “progress” in the West. The word progress itself carries a built-in assumption; it means to “advance or develop toward a better, more complete, or more modern state.” Embedded in that definition is the belief that better, faster, and cheaper systems should lead to an overall increase in quality of life, improved health, and ultimately fewer consequences.
Take a look at the environment: “the whole world is supposedly striving to reach net-zero emissions” because we now have the technology to achieve it. In theory, increased efficiency in production, progress, and innovation should mean LESS overall consumption and LESS global harm.
But instead, it often just increases the scale of use, of dependence, and of the consequences that come with it, especially for people who aren’t the ones benefiting most. For the environment, that looked like the rise of “energy-related global CO2 emissions…yet again, in 2023, to more than thirty-seven billion metric tons.”
So the paradox I’m trying to name here is meant to mirror Jevons directly: The West creates technology claiming it will help advancement or “improve lives,” and that technology gets globally adopted, often unevenly, sometimes coercively, and embedded into social, economic, and infrastructural frameworks. But when the West moves on (when something newer comes out, or cheaper, or more profitable), others are left carrying the costs. And that’s the core tension: the same system that claims to solve problems continuously produces new dependencies and inequalities. And these systems become so embedded in everyday life that opting out is costly.
As Vincent Kyere, owner of a Ghanaian e-waste scrap yard, expressed, “Should I sit down and not eat, because if I bend, somebody will die? If I don’t bend, I will also die.” Participation in these systems may cause harm somewhere else, but non-participation isn’t some clean moral alternative; it often comes with its own form of harm, exclusion, or survival tradeoffs. So you’re left navigating a system where both choices carry consequences, and neither one is entirely yours to make.
A clear example of this paradox shows up in the history of Chinese characters and modern technology. Systems like the telegraph, typewriter, and computer were all built with alphabetic languages in mind, operating on the assumption that the alphabet was universal, efficient, and inherently modern. Against that framework, the Chinese writing system, with its 75,000+ characters, was initially “considered incompatible with modern technology,” too complex to mechanize. So instead of technology adapting to culture and language, China had to bend its language to fit Western systems.
This example expands the paradox beyond environmental consequences into cultural and epistemological ones: infrastructure does not just distribute resources unevenly, it also determines whose systems of knowledge are considered “compatible” with the notion of modernity that Edwards describes.
Another place this shows up is in e-waste. We tend to think a lot about where products come from, how they’re made, and what they cost, but rarely about where they go when we’re done with them. Globally, we produce around 50 million tons of e-waste every year, and only about 20% is formally recycled. The rest ends up in landfills or is processed informally in places like Accra, the capital of Ghana. When we throw something “away,” what even is “away”? For a lot of people, it’s home. So the “progress” that gives us constant upgrades, faster devices, and cheaper technology doesn’t disappear when we’re done with it; it just gets displaced. And once again, the costs are carried by people who had little to no role in creating the system in the first place. Progress does not eliminate harm: it redistributes it.
So where does that leave us? As Edwards explains, “Analysts should always determine…whether users are active agents of technological change” (201). Because if we’re not, then we’re just being carried along by systems that feel too large to question. Just like escaping the Jevons Paradox would require energy reduction to outpace new applications for that energy, escaping this version of the paradox would mean progress has to outpace our disregard for its consequences. In other words, the challenge is not simply to innovate faster, but to rethink the infrastructures that determine how innovation scales and who absorbs its costs.
There are examples of response and accountability, such as companies being pushed to rethink or founders having to answer for impact, but they’re uneven and often reactive. And, we fixate on things like search queries or AI use, when in reality, an activity like watching TV consumes over 100 times more energy for the average American than a handful of searches. Or take something as ordinary as a single hamburger, which requires around 660 gallons of water to produce, compared to a fraction of that for even 1,000 AI queries.
My global footprint. Calculate your global footprint here.
None of this is to say individual choices solve systemic problems, but it does complicate where we place responsibility. There’s “the sense that infrastructures are beyond the control of individuals, small groups, or even perhaps of any form of social action, and that they exert power of their own” (221). And maybe that’s the hardest part: trying to figure out how to act within systems that feel both inescapable and, at the same time, still shaped by what we choose to do.