By Preston Gralla

This book argues that environmental and industrial regulations, in place since the early 19th century, weren’t devised to reign in environmental destruction or workplace dangers. 

Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 272 pp, Verso. Hardcover, $29.95

In the popular imagination, environmental and industrial regulation is a relatively new phenomenon, an enlightened mid-to-late twentieth century innovation responding to the laissez-faire policies of the Industrial Revolution and after that left us with a poisoned environment and dangerous workplaces.

In that view, we’ve been making the world and its workplaces safer and cleaner places. Every year we progress, and eventually if we just work hard enough, we’ll manage somehow to solve the climate crisis — or so the thinking goes.

But that’s not even close to the case, argues Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk. In his telling, environmental and industrial regulations, in place since the early 19th century, weren’t devised to reign in environmental destruction or workplace dangers. Instead, they were built from the beginning to legalize and legitimize them and give polluters and industrialists essentially a free pass to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profit.

To make its point the book examines actions taken in England and France during the Industrial Revolution. In France, Fressoz looks at what he calls “chemical capitalism,” primarily sulfuric acid and soda carbonate manufacturing. Originally, when the plants were relatively small, their regulation was in the hands of guilds, who were used to overseeing artisanal production rather than large-scale manufacturing. Local authorities policed them as well.

But neither guilds nor local police could keep up with the mass changes wrought by the industrial revolution, including new, innovative manufacturing techniques, and the much greater dangers to workers, people and the environment produced by them. So central governments took over the regulatory rules, with an eye on promoting industrialization rather than making sure it was done safely and without harming the environment. Pollution was legalized rather than controlled. Worker safety was ignored; workplace accidents and diseases were blamed on lazy or careless workers rather than on manufacturers.

Fressoz writes: “In France, the emergence of chemical capitalism was a decisive factor in the industrialization of the environment. In the 1800s, the chemical industries provided a historic meeting point between massive pollution, new production methods, a considerable volume of capital and the scientific and administrative elite that had emerged from the Revolution. This combination of innovation, profit and power made it possible to transform environmental regulations, as required by the development of manufacturing capitalism.”

The same thing, he says, happened across the Channel in England starting with alkali production and other industries. This same cycle, he says, continues today, and is the primary cause of the climate crisis. He says, “technology has shaped the modes of its regulation, far more than the other way around. Discussion of technology exists, but it only takes place after the first complaints or accidents, and therefore after technology has become a fait accompli.”

As long as this continues, he said, the climate crisis will get worse, not better.

Fressoz may have written the book in response to the climate crisis, but his same arguments can be mustered against the dangers of technology, particularly AI. The potential dangers of AI couldn’t be any clearer: job destruction on a massive scale, ever-growing tech monopolies, loss of privacy, intellectual property theft and the spread of misinformation. Some people even believe it’s an existential threat to humanity. As yet, though, it is entirely unregulated. Proponents of AI argue the technology is still too new to regulate, or that regulation should be minimal, that we first must let it develop on its own and flourish. Only then should we consider taking action of some kind.

That’s precisely what led to the climate crisis, as Fressoz shows so clearly in this book. Today’s early days of AI are precisely when regulations need to be put into place, though. If they’re not, it will never be brought under control. And no one, not even AI itself, can know where that may lead us.

Preston Gralla has won a Massachusetts Arts Council Fiction Fellowship and had his short stories published in a number of literary magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review and Pangyrus. His journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, USA Today, and Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, among others, and he’s published nearly 50 books of nonfiction which have been translated into 20 languages.