The Sociotechnical Imaginary in Rutger Bregman’s Het Water Komt

Written by Melisse Vroegindeweij

Sheila Jasanoff (2015) introduces the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries in Dreamscapes of Modernity as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (4). These imaginaries of possible – desirable or fearful – futures are both products and instruments “of the coproduction of science, technology, and society in modernity” (19). The concept thus thinks together social belief systems in which technologies are situated and the role of technologies in stabilizing and destabilizing these belief systems. In figuring (un)desirable futures, imaginaries of how life should and could be are bound to “the hard stuff of past achievements” (22). Sociotechnical imaginaries frame possible futures in connection with a past that is in turn shaped by these imagined futures, and they consequently work to enable or constrict specific actions in the present.

How sociotechnical imaginaries are formed, stabilized, and disrupted, is in part linked to the relationship between collective imaginaries and individual visions. Some individual ideas about the future may gain traction in society while others do not. A recently publicized story that attempts to gain widespread attention and cause nationwide change is Journalist Rutger Bregman’s (2020) book Het Water Komt (The Water is Coming). On January 29th this year Bregman launched Het Water Komt through a campaign that allows the book to be downloaded or ordered in paperback form free of charge, through the support of the newspaper De Correspondent and the National Postcode Lottery. In the book, he writes a letter to all Dutch people: The major flood in the Netherlands in 1953 resulted in the deaths of  about 1800 people, while Johan van Veen, the engineer who designed the Delta Works, could have prevented this flood if he were taken seriously. Because Van Veen was not taken seriously, the Delta Works were only built after disaster struck. Bregman uses this story to argue that we should take seriously and ‘fight against’ the currently rising sea levels caused by the climate crisis, before another major flood occurs. He states that if we do nothing, the Netherlands will no longer exist; our histories will be lost and our children will not be Dutch. His letter works hard to motivate people into preventative action and is explicitly aimed to reach all Dutch people. And through the promotional efforts of De Correspondent, the National Postcode Lottery, and celebrity ambassadors, this book may actually do so. This book and its aim to reach and change the minds of all Dutch people makes me think: What kind of sociotechnical imaginaries of water are at play in the Netherlands today? What imaginaries of watery futures are dominant and stabilized? And, how does Bregman’s vision relate to them?

Het Water Komt imagines an undesirable future: parts of the Netherlands have been flooded, including the Randstad where its largest cities are built, and millions of people will have either died or been displaced. It constructs this image of the future based on the ‘largely ignored’ warnings and research findings of contemporary climate scientists, the mainly forgotten historical engineer Johan van Veen, and the Dutch history of floods, including the one in 1953. A specifically framed past is thus not only tied to but also projected as a potential future that we need to act against. In doing so, it imagines improvements of historical technologies as ways to prevent the imagined future. Since the Delta Works prevented floods like the one in 1953 to reoccur, bigger and stronger Delta Works could prevent the floods that will result from further rising sea levels. Other solutions that Bregman suggests are, for example, electric trains, a multitude of windmills, and widespread solar panels. This image of future technologies connects to, more than it disrupts, dominant and collective notions about sustainable technologies. Instead of fundamentally questioning our way of life, it suggests that our way of living can mostly go on the same way, though with slight adjustments. We would still make use of the same technologies, though they would draw from different energy sources. It does not question the capitalist international system of production that enables such inventions; and it does not address the human and environmental cost of this system. In this sense, the vision of Het Water Komt ties into dominant, naturalized sociotechnical imaginaries. The question then becomes: Will this be its undoing, i.e. produce no change at all? Or will Bregman’s vision through its overlap with dominant sociotechnical imaginaries resonate with Dutch people and motivate them to take some kind of collective action against the climate crisis?

References

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1-33. https://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001.

Bregman, Rutger. 2020. Het Water Komt: Een Brief aan Alle Nederlands. Accessible via https://decorrespondent.nl/hetwaterkomt.

This article is part of the graduate seminar series Urban Ecologies 2020.