Finding Our Way Back Forward
Foundations: Conceptual Frameworks
First, it is important to understand why climate change and technology must be analyzed and understood together. It is clear that human-created climate change and new technologies are currently tremendously changing our world. Though seemingly different, both technology and climate change have large, and often devastating impacts on people, and these harms are unequally and unjustly distributed. Further, though both have tremendous impacts on lived experiences, technology and climate change are sometimes viewed as topics relegated only to scientific fields. However, in order to reduce harms from both technologies and climate change, we must look outside of purely scientific fields to understand people’s lived experiences. Leah Thomas argues for a broader understanding of the harms of environmental degradation in The Intersectional Environmentalist, and describes that “the same systems of oppression that oppress people also oppress and degrade the planet. When a nation, such as one in the Global North, prioritizes extractive industries and profit over the planet, then it will likely also have interlinked social inequality”(Thomas 2022, 32). Thus we must understand environmental issues in connection with social justice issues, as their causes are the same. Though not explicitly discussing digital technologies, Thomas, in arguing for a holistic understanding of societal issues, would likely also agree that the social justice impacts of technology should be discussed alongside environmental issues.
It follows then that understanding the complex impacts of digital technologies on people is necessary in fully understanding our current moment. It is clear that digital technologies, as they operate today, encode value systems, upholding structural inequalities. Lina Dencik and Javier Sanchez-Monedero articulate these ideas clearly in Data justice (2022). In defining and describing data justice, the authors write that “Data-centric information systems are instrumental as systems of control, not just by increasing the potential for monitoring, but as sorting mechanisms… Data justice debates tend to understand how these sorting mechanisms work and what their relationship is to historical contexts, social structures and dominant agendas as not just a question of individual privacy, but one of justice”(Dencik 2022, 3). Data systems, including information technology like the internet, fundamentally enforce normative values onto the populations whose data is collected, allowing these populations to be evaluated and controlled. However, what data is collected and encoded, and how that data is subsequently understood, are choices that must be made consciously. As Ben Green argues in Data Science as Political Action (2021), “Data scientists must recognize themselves as political actors engaged in normative constructions of society”(Green 2021, 250). Thus, data scientists and other designers of technology also have an ability to choose to actively work towards justice. Technology then can be used as a tool for justice and political action, when it is used consciously and carefully with thorough consideration of the harms of digital and data technologies.
If technology is not the full answer to confronting the current climate and injustice crises, what other ways can we also use to bring about change? In this, Jeremy Rifkin in The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Resistance on a Rewilding Earth recommends recognizing biophilia, “a primal sense that we are of the family of life, and that our individual and collective well-being, in some felt way, is dependent on our deep relationship to everything that is alive”(Rifkin 2022, 239). In order to create societal change that will both improve people’s lives and not damage the environment, we need to understand that we are not separate from the environment, but rather a part of it. Reconnecting with nature thus serves an important purpose, in further allowing us to address current environmentally damaging systems and imagine ways of being that would allow the environment to thrive.
With these understandings of the duality of technology and the importance of biophilia, we are still left with the question of: how do we express the importance of these ideas? How can we reconnect to nature and ourselves, while simultaneously working towards justice-oriented solutions? As Bruce McConachie writes in “Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance,” an essay in Readings in Performance and Ecology that analyzes Deweyian ethics, “To remind people about the needs of their own and each others’ bodies and to model problem-solving as a potential solution to a painful future, Dewey recommended art” (McConachie 2012, 96). Art, particularly performance art, thus has the power to allow us to communicate these ideas, problem-solve, and reconnect, whether with nature or each other. Embodied art, meaning art that allows us to reconnect with the experiences and needs of our bodies, therefore is needed to address pressing societal issues.
Resources
Dencik, Lina, Sanchez-Monedero, Javier. “Data justice.” Internet Policy Review 11, no. 1 (2022): https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.1.1615.
Green, Ben. “Data Science as Political Action: Grounding Data Science in a Politics of Justice.” Journal of Social Computing 2, no. 3 (September 2021): https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2021.0029.
McConachie, Bruce. “Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance.” In Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, 91-100. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 2012.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Resistance on a Rewilding Earth. United States: St. Martin’s Press, 2022.
Thomas, Leah. The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet. New York: Voracious / Little, Brown and Company, 2022.