I saw this quote via Dr. Genevieve Guenther. It's from an essay called "Growth Unlimited: The idea of infinite growth from fossil capitalism to green capitalism" by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil, published in a collection of essays called History of the Future of Economic Growth, edited by Iris Borowy and Matthias Schmelzer.
The steam engine made it possible to homogenize space, to ignore watercourses and gradients, and above all to relocate production where the balance of power was more favorable to capitalists than workers (Malm 2016). While fluctuations of horses, wind, and water required adjustments in accordance with a nature in flux, coal formed an energy store that could be accumulated and made it possible to smooth out production, to linearize time, and subject it to market imperatives. The continuous time of industrial capitalism, imposed on recalcitrant workers, was then projected onto cultural representations of the future, conceived as a continuous progress unfurling to the rhythm of productivity gains.
I'll be thinking about that for a long time.
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