Pope Francis links technological control to treating the world as formless.

Evidence

We can find an interesting parallel in comments by the prominent, if controversial, figure of Pope Francis in his recent encyclical, where he warned about the “technocratic paradigm,” criticizing a way of thinking about technology “as if the [technological] subject were to find itself in the presence of something [the world] formless, completely open to manipulation.” The result, he suggests, is to authorize a new and powerful subject “who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object” (Encyclical, 66). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 1211

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the epistemic extractivism critique and broader decolonial literature on treating the world as raw manipulable matter.
• SEED: Angle: The technocratic paradigm and data colonialism share an ontology of the world-as-formless-matter — an essay bridging Laudato Si and decolonial data critique.