Chapter 1 introduces the concept of transformative novel technologies in the context of the contemporary global environmental crisis. It discusses how technology is central to the crisis as well as its potential resolution, although its status is frequently ambiguous and contested. The chapter makes the case that governance solutions, including at the international level, are indispensable in order to capitalize on the potential benefits of transformative novel technologies, to avoid their various potential downsides, or both. The empirical case studies of the book are then previewed: biotechnology, specifically novel methods for large-scale biological control as well as the utilization of digital sequence information in research, development and innovation; climate engineering, a series of proposed methods for large-scale intervention into the climate system; and mining beyond national jurisdictions, where various technological developments increasingly enable the extraction of metals critical to a global sustainability transition from areas that were previously inaccessible.

Chapter 9 examines a second necessary extension of the analysis of social influence to a consideration of the effects of designed artefacts in social relations. The chapter starts with an elaboration of the notion of inter-objectivity: designed hardware permeates human social relations as infrastructure, tools, gadgets and instruments. How is different hardware used to implement modalities of social influence? Crowds have historically used barricades to enhance their power. People easily recognise the fait accompli, for example as a wall, installed in a collective effort of construction. Such installations provide boundaries and parameters of attitudes and behaviour afforded by design, but do so without prior consent. Legitimation is achieved post-hoc by cognitive dissonance in analogy to forced-compliance. Resistance to such faits accompli is introduced as a hitherto unrecognised modality of social influence. It functions to evaluate and to redesign hardware and systems in ways that correct the initial designs; resistance potentially innovates on the 'innovation'.