Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence

Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence. By Joost Van Loon. London, New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp ix + 234, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. The Classical Italians warned that knowledge too hastily acquired is not on guard. This sage monition applies as much today as ever and finds within the field of technoscience a particularly snug and foreboding fit. A growing body of literature is investigating just how our mode of technoscientific "progress," rather than embodying control, is instead ushering in an ever-expanding domain of uncertainty and instability. We are coming to discover that each attempt to avert or contain risks through technoscience is responsible for producing further, and even less containable, contingencies. Today, the elephant in the room is at once the bull in the china shop. As nuclear material, non-renewable resources, and virulent pathogens now line the shelves of this proverbial shop, it is becoming apparent just how little difference it makes if the bullwhip is cracked by ill- or well-meaning state agents, non-state agents, or nature herself.