What is Regenerative Technology?
Technology in Service to Life
Why Regenerative Technology?
Now is the moment for tech to align with life: to reorient technological innovation to be in service of ecosystemic health. Our technological marvels are pervasive, and have enabled incredible convenience and efficiency. But at what cost?
Today’s tech is fundamentally in service to power, profits, patriarchy, and furthering humanity’s separation from each other and the natural world.
New Technologies
Same Old Playbook
We’ve simply applied the old economic logic to digital.
PHYSICAL ECONOMY
-
- Mine natural resources without consent
- Use machines to scale efficiency, manufacture stuff
- Accelerate consumption, planned obsolesence
- Trash the planet
- Ignore environmental injustices
DIGITAL ECONOMY
-
- Mine behavioral resources (data) without consent
- Use algorithms to scale efficiency, manufacture fear
- Accelerate consumption, planned obsolescence
- Trash the planet more + e-waste
- Ignore the digital divide
Just like the physical economy,
our digital economy accelerates endless extraction to enrich the few at the expense of the many.
Why now?
Tech’s trajectory is only poised to continue this extractive playbook.
Meanwhile, Big Tech races to amass more information and power asymmetries.
This failure of imagination stifles tech’s potential, and humanity’s too.
Tech needs a new playbook.
Weaving Regeneration into Technology
Regeneration is the process of renewal, restoration, and regrowth. Our cells, our skin, trees, forests, grasslands, are all constantly regenerating. We can learn from 3.8B years of nature’s R&D to innovate our technologies. How can we align our tech to support business and economic innovations that restore more than they extract from the health of the whole?
It’s Time for Regenerative Tech
This is not about techno-solutionism. Our future does not only depend on technological advancement, but it depends on how we harness and integrate our tools in service to justice, ecological awareness, and future generations.
Regenerative technology is rooted in these principles and in the intention, investment, design, use and lifecycles of technology and data that support social and planetary thriving, and prosperity for all.
