Abstract

This article introduces the strategic epistemology of technoregionalism, which involves choosing to look at technology as regionally patterned. First, the concept of the technoregion—a geographic unit defined by common use of a given technology or technological assemblage—is recuperated by revisiting the ethical implications of “techné” and the spatial ordering principle of the “region.” Looking technoregionally illuminates how technology is patterned into networks that are more tightly or more loosely coupled; this clustering of nodes within networks constitutes hierarchies of systems and subsystems that structure technologies across space. The article argues that technoregionalism can help actors decide how to remake technoregions to make systems antifragile and shape technology to social purpose. Drawing insights from ethnographic work studying energy systems and wildfires in California, and employing disciplines including social ecology, virtue ethics, organizational theory, and actor-network theory, the article shows how technoregionalism points to the importance of decentralization in four domains: (1) infrastructural antifragility, (2) human-technological relations, (3) human-ecological relations, and (4) possibilities for insurrectional system change. First, distributed energy resources are used as a case study to demonstrate how technologies can be scaled out through loose coupling to capitalize on the emergent features of multi-scalar regional networks without sacrificing local needs to the benefit of centralized structures. Next, focusing on the regional patterning of technology is argued to help actors realize the humanistic, internal goods of decentralized technology, especially by bringing publics upstream in decision-making and implementation processes. Further, technological decentralization is argued to address the environmental problematique by making ecologies present in human culture. Finally, technoregionalism provides a roadmap for how to decentralize technoregions through modular and insurrectional change using dual power strategies and regional bootstrapping. Taken together, technoregionalism can assist in constructing better human, ecological, and infrastructural environments.