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My motivation for joining the Anthropocene Campus comes from a convergence of perspectives. I have experience as a technologist, as an artist, and as an educator (both in higher education and as a workshop leader). I’ve worked closely with journalists, and my projects are anchored by a sense of ethical responsibility—sometimes under the banner of “activism” or “advocacy” (what I regard as a baseline expression of civic participation). I would like to offer this mix of perspectives at the Campus and inflect it with ideas from other participants coming from the humanities, arts, and design.
Where I come from (I grew up in California), computer nerds have been emboldened by financial capital to assume a kind of extra-political control over our collective destinies. Rich technologists from America’s coasts are extending their relative dominance over the Technosphere to encompass aspects of the Biosphere, re-forming the “natural world” through massive air conditioned data centers and extractive industries. Silicon Valley seems confident that we can “innovate our way out” of the climate crisis through green tech entrepreneurism. I certainly welcome these efforts—I appreciate what Elon Musk, et al. have been up to on this front—but I also find a disappointing myopia within those technology circles. There’s an underlying incuriosity about who else might inform this approach to the Disruption of All Known Things (in the start-up’s sense of economic “disruption”).
For my own sake, I’d like to hear how my own projects are understood differently from those in other fields. I’d also enjoy offering my own set of perspectives on other people’s research. In 2014 I was fortunate enough to participate in a seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl in Wadern Germany. A diverse group of computer science researchers, media theorists, and economists came together to discuss various aspects of DIY computer networks. That experience has made me eager to pursue more cross-disciplinary approaches. I’m interested in hearing contrasting views from academics and non-academics, researchers and professionals.
If we’re considering how we might extend the Anthropocene, to avoid ceding our dominance over the world, I don’t see how we can get there without something like the Internet. But another likely precondition is a massive re-forming of our economic and political structures. We should ask how the current crop of tools and technologies support (or don’t support) a means of building solidarity, of finding a politics of survival. As one who builds online (and offline) communication tools I am thinking about what proactive steps I can take to make existing power structures more legible and pliable. How can we organize collective action beyond the realm of social media trending hashtags?
Collectively, those of us alive and thinking about the state of things must hear and understand each other. We need new digital tools to extend where politics are conducted, past our 18th Century Era Democracy, to find better ways of reaching political decisions. My work is mainly expressed through hardware and software, by creating new contexts for social exchange. If there’s a plausible articulation of a “Better Anthropocene,” I hope to help build the supportive technologies that will let us have a discussion about it.