The impression that the federal government had been arguing “for months about heat pumps” is wrong. At least that’s how Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (44; FDP) sees it. Rather, it was necessary to make the heating law “technology-neutral, economically sensible and physically feasible,” he explained in a recent interview with the “Handelsblatt”. There it was again, the openness to technology, argumentative power tool of our time when it comes to decisions on direction and prioritization.
Where determining too early could mean forsaking the potential of future solutions, openness to technology keeps all options open and only the best available. Why settle for the bird in the hand when jet shoes powered by green hydrogen could soon bring us that much closer to the pigeon on the roof?
Nothing against good nozzle shoes. But it will not deliver the openness to technology that is so often invoked at the moment. The term has lost all progressiveness. What remains is a pseudo-argument, an empty shell, a means of refusing discourse. As early as 2020, Carsten Pfeiffer, Head of Strategy & Politics at the Federal Association of New Energy Sectors, wrote: “Openness to technology has clearly become a dogma in recent years and is carried like a monstrance by a number of lobbyists in front of politicians.” And further: “Constricted in this way, the dogma prevents the prioritization required from a certain point in time and becomes synonymous with the inability to implement a strategy, which makes the necessary prioritization decision more difficult, delayed or even prevented.”
One person’s criticism is another’s credo, from phasing out combustion engines to the GEG debate about correct heating and wherever the imperative of a “turnaround” is in the room: i.e. in mobility, heat, energy. The fact that even numerous automobile manufacturers consider the practical value of e-fuels for private transport to be null and void does not matter when it comes to overturning a new regulation that would have a disadvantageous effect. In the multiverse of openness to technology, there are two or three worlds in which everything is fine and e-fuel is efficient – and technology solves our problems without politicians having to actively do anything about it.
Following this logic of argument, every other political failure could also be glorified as openness to technology. The catastrophic state of broadband expansion? Gives us a head start on possible future transmission technologies. The groaning health system? Everything will be fine when the AI doctor comes. The digitalization of the administration slowed down in the 2024 budget? Let’s talk about a Heinzelmann strategy. The saved in the ground Deutsche Bahn and the ailing public transport? Not good, but soon we’ll be taking the Hyperloop to Franz-Josef Strauss Airport in ten minutes anyway.
In the best-case scenario, the concept of openness to technology, as it is currently used primarily by members of the opposition, both with and without government participation, stands for a fear of decisions and responsibility. For the opposite of a constructive narrative of the future by constructing a future that does not require any active creative will.
Unfortunately, with every repetition of the term, the worst case seems more likely: the advocates of openness seem to be well aware of the emptiness of their motto. The future they claim for themselves doesn’t seem to matter to them at all. The only important thing is that their argument makes it possible to declare every design claim to be an ideologically motivated attack on high reason that is open to technology. That one can harm the political opponent with it. What is important is the total use of finite discourse and attention resources to the detriment of critical and unpopular topics.
Consciously or unconsciously, this strategy comes dangerously close to Steve Bannon’s (69) approach of “flooding the zone with shit”, which dissolves every orientation between gaslighting, half-truth, rhetoric and fact. After all, the only message that still promises stability is that of stopping change, of persevering, of returning to better times. However, like Lindner’s “Your impression is wrong”, it is simply illusion.