I'm about to tweet a lot about @shannonmattern's talk Data Ecologies: A Green New Deal for Climate and Tech Reform. Get ready!
@shannonmattern 100 companies, mostly in energy industry, are responsible for most of world's greenhouse gas emissions. Changing our consumption isn't as impactful as transforming these companies.
Adopting a justice framework - design, digital, data -- connects to societal questions and histories of colonialism and capitalism.
Big companies might make energy efficient data centers while also partnering with big oil to facilitate data-driven extraction.
What are ecological aspects of tech reform? And tech aspects of green new deal?
The New Deal had conservation corps, book distribution projects, and was a site for debating fundamental questions about how citizens should relate to publics and the state.
Green New Deal: transparent inclusive consultation, collaboration with vulnerable communities, civil society groups, academics..."a call to redefine politics and establish a new social contract with America."
Land preservation, afforestation, public transit, smart grids, new manufacturing strategies, carbon storage, international exchange of idea on climate action in which Americans can still "be leaders"
Calls to share knowledge rather than hoarding patents.
Some propose smart grids, Alexa, and Nests as surveillant approaches to modifying our power consumption. But these have hazardous manufacturing processes, energy intensive data centers.
Lithium triangle, cobalt mines are all critical for the realization of the tech in the green new deal. We don't even have a responsible way of recycling these.
Do projects reduce carbon in atmosphere and increase human freedom?
Tech worker activism, anti-trust law, taxing data use by companies, and regulating AI are proposed tech forms.
Ananny and Crawford warn that transparency is like dumping a bunch of data on people without taking an ecological approach to understanding how people change technologies.
Noble calls for public interest versions of platforms.
Repair movements call for the right to repair and prolong lives of our tools.
Maybe we don't need to have data for everything. Maybe the city is not a computer placesjournal.org/article/a-city…
Tarnoff: To decarbonize, we need to decomputerize conversations.e-flux.com/t/to-decarboni…
Ruha Benjamin points to informed refusal: refusal of tech marginalized communities never asked for anyways
But why keep putting technologies out there to begin with.
Carework is just as essential to a green economy as new forms of engineering. Librarians, archivist, and other knowledge workers create social infrastructures.
Library workers are creating archives of climate data, especially in face of Trump administration destruction. And with climate change and certain areas being submerged, what is worth remembering, acquiring, keeping?
Social justice is fundamental to resilience. Libraries have often excluded black voices and perspectives. Community groups are creating practices that bring together social justice with climate justice. Tech workers can learn something from them.
Knowledge institutions and tech architects have much to learn from landscapers, architects, those who create built environments that weather change.
Much to learn from a Red Deal, tying indigenous liberation to climate justice: jacobinmag.com/2019/08/red-de…
Public libraries are one of the few trusted public institutions, maybe we can build and strengthen that institutions as a vehicle for social justice.
Detroit Digital Justice Coalition combines climate change and communication justice: alliedmedia.org/ddjc
The green new deal doesn't even touch land apportionment, indigenous justice questions. jacobinmag.com/2019/08/red-de…
GND is a national response, we could also have a planetary response, and the local response is important too. We can't launch ourselves off the planet, nor can we move fast enough to reformulate community to deal with limits we face at the scale of anthropocene -@banglab
@shannonmattern: but GND fight still has hope that we can change something with bigger thinking and immediate action.
