 Hello everybody. Welcome to our second session of making sense of the digital society running in its sixth year. Let me start with a little anecdote of last week. Some of you may know we had the Berlin Art Week here in Berlin. A lot of galleries showing their works, a lot of openings, a lot of central exhibitions, fringe exhibitions and so forth. Big deal for the art world. The art world is of course a big deal in Berlin. And I was at the opening in Hau, Hebel am Ufer, a theater where we sometimes are with the series or have been in the past six years. It was staged by Mariana Simnet, who is a very famous artist from the UK living in Berlin in the art world. And she did something between performing arts, fine arts, music, for flutists on stage and very heavily trained artificial intelligence. That sort of shape-shifted between different species and her image. So they put a lot of effort and money into training that artificial intelligence. You know I come from the theater field actually and I'm used to interdisciplinary art. Theater is sort of a paradigm for interdisciplinary art, right? And it was spectacular what you saw there at Hau, but it didn't really fit together. It didn't come together. We could neither show nor tell what it was about. But the respective fields were spectacular to look at. This made me think in light of today's session, actually, when we talk about interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary fields of art, which seem or may seem familiar to all of you, but which is still something very hard, I think, to achieve, to bring all those things together. It might sound old, even because you've heard those terms so often in the last 20 years, if you've worked in a school or university, and you've worked especially in ICT. But this may be the night, I hope, where we can relearn somehow how important interdisciplinary discourse is. Because you want to discuss very broadly speaking for now the relationship between ICT, information and communication technologies, and sustainability, two very different fields, of course. How they interact, where digital tools help in reducing carbon emissions, and where and why they do not. Or if that model of thinking, tools here, emissions there, may not be reducing emissions, but possibilities of thinking altogether. So, hello everyone again. This is seen from very far the conceptual frame of our event tonight. My name is Tobi Mueller, and I'm the moderator of this series. It is a joint venture, as you may know, between the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the Federal Agency for Civic Education, two very different fields actually to begin with. Also, that sort of brings together the series so successfully in the past sixth year. So after this intro here, we're going to have two speakers tonight, as you probably already know, signing up for this event. We're going to have the first speaker, then I'll introduce the second one, followed by a conversation by three men tonight for once here on stage. But of course, there are also participatory tools on the streaming websites of the institutes here, also on AlexTV. Welcome to everyone who's watching this on your devices. There's also two microphones here that can circulate, so we can take questions here on site and digitally as well. I always forget to say that we actually have finger food at the end, so this may be important also. So after mostly, say, roughly two hours, there's going to be something to nibble on for all of you and have a drink. So let's get started. My name is McGuire and an Irish anthropologist working in Copenhagen will speak second and explore on the notion of a digital anthropocene, a concept that may help us go beyond the concept of what is sometimes called solutionism. I will introduce him more properly after our first speaker. And here's a few words about our first speaker. He's a professor of informatics at the University of Zurich and I can't believe it took us so long to invite somebody from Zurich, which is my hometown but don't be afraid, we're not going to speak Swiss German on stage, so we're trying not to see where this goes. He did research in Hamburg on environmental information processing and in St. Gallen on economics and ecology. Everybody in Switzerland knows what EMPA is, the Eidgenössische Material Prüfungs- und Forschungsanstalt Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials, Science and Technology. Because EMPA tested and decided, for example, whether certain materials are safe or not, say even parts in a transformer of a model railway, for example, I think very important for young girls and boys at the time when I grew up. Everybody knew EMPA is the institute that sort of decides on your past time hobbies. However, from 2000 to 2010, he was responsible for the development and management of the Department of Technology and Society at EMPA before taking on a full professorship in Zurich as a computer scientist, apart from visiting professorships in Vienna and Stockholm. An influential report by Laura Marks and others, I read in preparation for this evening, on the Carton Footprint of Streaming Media recently stated that there are three types of engineers and scientists. Those who overestimate ICT's impact on climate change, then there are those who underestimate it. The third party is the moderates who differentiate. The report then states right away the name of our speaker traveling to Berlin by train, of course, today. Please welcome him, Lorenz Hilty. Thank you for the nice introduction. Thank you all for being here and especially Thomas and Lena for having me tonight. Digitizing the environmental paradigm. When I heard this topic of this evening, I thought okay, digitizing the environmental paradigm. Maybe that's what I've been doing for years and I'm just using different terminology maybe, such as ICT for sustainability. In my talk, I would like to examine this topic by taking a critical look at the narratives that keep appearing in the media since the media discovered the nexus between environment and digitization as a topic. But first, what is the environmental paradigm? The version you see here is based on the concept of ecosystem services. As humans, we are both capable of innovation but still fully dependent on the natural ecosystems in our environment. The ecosystems provide us with free services such as food, raw materials, fresh water, and they do a lot of system regulation for us. They regulate the climate, for example. So these are the ecosystem services we get for free from nature. Over-exploiting the ecosystem services leads to environmental degradation and is not sustainable in the original sense of this word, sustainability. Just last week we could read in Science Advances that six of nine of the so-called planetary boundaries are now clearly exceeded by humanity. My question for tonight is what is the nexus between digital technology and environment? What part does or should digital technology play in our relationship to nature? In research, this question is not new. These are the proceedings of a symposium held in Washington D.C. in 1970. No, I didn't attend this symposium. By the way, I was 11 and went to school in Switzerland. I later bought this book on Amazon for $2 as a used book. The title of the symposium was Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Ecology in 1970. Some of you may be surprised to hear that something called AI existed back then. Yes, and this term was, by the way, coined in 1956, Artificial Intelligence. But even more surprising is the nexus with ecology. The keynote given by Sefford Beer made it clear that ecological ecology in this book title and symposium title refers to the environmental crisis and the environmental paradigm that's just introduced. At this symposium, in 1970, it was proposed to build a computer-based information system that automatically monitors all types of pollution of environmental pollution, especially air pollution, and would automatically take action in real time on pollution sources. For example, in an urban setting, if air quality becomes too bad, then the system would automatically sort of restrict car traffic or industrial production in the urban area. This was all based on real-time information systems and implementation of legal codes. While this was technically feasible 50 years ago, it seems never to have been politically feasible, otherwise we would know of such systems. And for this reason, actually, I could now stop my talk and go home, because my background is a technical one, and this all seems to be about politics. But then I had this idea that I could talk about what the media are saying and take a critical look at the media stories or narratives. We are reading today about digitalization and sustainability or digitalization and environment. I see two main narratives. One, I call smart decoupling, and the other one, dirty IT. Smart decoupling tells us that we can decouple economic growth from increasing resource use and pollution, in particular CO2 emissions today, with the help of digital technologies. In the ideal case, this will happen by dematerializing value creation, especially with industry 4.0. Additional buzzwords connected to this narrative are fourth industrial revolution, similar to industry 4.0, Internet of Things, or the twin transition. Dirty IT, on the right side, is the narrative that tells us that the material and energy footprint of IT or ICT is larger than we thought, and it is growing fast. All of our devices are manufactured using scarce resources that are mined under socially and environmentally unacceptable conditions. The energy hunger of the Internet, data centers, and end-user devices is insatiable, especially when it comes to video streaming, cryptocurrencies, or deep learning in AI. This narrative is often combined with ideas to make IT cleaner. The buzzwords are green IT, green data centers, green software engineering, sustainable AI, and others. It's important to understand that the two narratives talk about different things. Dirty IT is about what we call first-order effects in research, or direct effects, and smart decoupling is about what we call second-order effects, the so-called enabling effects, or third-order effects when it comes to structural change that is induced by digital technologies. So the two narratives could both be true. There is no logical contradiction between them. But they have some other weaknesses, as we will see. Let's first look at the smart decoupling narrative. It assumes first that decoupling is needed and that digital technology is the key to decoupling. So let's briefly examine these two questions. Why is decoupling needed? A working group of the International Resource Panel of UNEP has clarified decoupling in the following way. Decoupling economic activity from resource use, that means from mining, fishing, farming, logging, etc. Second, decoupling economic activity from environmental impact, roughly from pollution. And a third case is also mentioned, which is interesting, decoupling human well-being from economic activity. This is a nice triad, I would say. And we can use it as a lens to look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals on the right here, SDGs. In many cases, the SDGs are conflicting goals. Some of the SDGs are geared towards well-being and prosperity, such as number one, no poverty, number three, good health and well-being, or number eight, decent work and economic growth. Some are geared towards reducing pressure on the environment, namely climate, life below water and life on land. If we want to reduce the conflict between these goals, decoupling is needed. So decoupling is nothing else than a solution approach to the hidden conflicting goals or hidden dilemmas behind the idea of sustainable development. Now, how could digital technology help in decoupling? Let's first assume that we live in an economy of pipeline businesses. In this idealized and simplified case, energy, water and material resources are taken from nature, transformed in a linear chain of activities to products sold to consumers, finally treated as waste and released back into nature then. The idea of the smartly coupling narrative here is that with data, information and intelligence, we can optimize the energy and resource efficiency of the activities or replace material goods with less resource-intensive services. Okay, we call this optimization and substitution effects both belong to the enabling effect. If we assume that we are in a circular business world, again idealized, then additional opportunities arise. For the upper part it's the same as before, but in the lower part you can imagine make recycling and reuse as intelligent as production. This, by the way, requires that there is plenty of renewable energy because material recycling is energy-intensive by basic physical reasons such as second law of thermodynamics. In such a world we could even view circular businesses as learning systems if we have enough energy to do that. Production, reuse and recycling are mutually exchanging data and the whole system is learning automatically from that data making the circle more materials and energy efficient. AI will first play an important role in this vision, so one could conclude let's take eye to the dump where it can do something really useful for humanity. Now the third case, yes, in such a world, in a platform business world we could even use, sorry, what happens here? Platforms have become very popular and powerful. A hotel, for example, is a pipeline business and Airbnb is a platform business. The same for taxi and Uber. In a platform business there is a platform owner who defines the roles of interaction, a platform provider that provides the network members with the physical interface of the platform and the network of producers and consumers. While a pipeline business is based on controlling resources over a sequence of activities the platform only orchestrates and that's an interesting metaphor orchestrates the transactions between its members and it is them, the members who own and contribute the resources the apartments or the cars, whatever. In this sense the platform business seems to be almost fully dematerialized or decoupled, but this only holds for the platform owner. What happens between the users in the network may or may not be more or less decoupled compared to the corresponding pipeline business. The platform is based on resource sharing sometimes then it may have some potential for decoupling. So if we do sharing with platforms there is a potential for decoupling but not automatically. Such systems are, today by the way, called ecosystems which is a strange metaphor actually. I prefer this metaphor of an orchestra because orchestration makes clear that it is the piece of music that is played that decides what happens. Okay, let's take an interim conclusion. By optimizing pipeline businesses or create immaterial substitutes for the goods consumed or by supporting circularity in an intelligent way or by replacing pipeline business by platform business if we consider the sharing economy as a special case of it there is a potential for digitalization to really contribute to decoupling. But please note now that in all these cases we are talking about potentials, only potentials for decoupling. We don't really know to what extent these potentials are realized. Is there empirical evidence that smart decoupling is underway? A recent study about the EU says for this case clearly no. Empirically there is, for each 1% increase in a nation's GDP per capita there is a 1.08% increase in material flows. So it looks like perfect coupling. No signs of ICT-induced dematerialization of economic activity could be found. Similar results were published for energy decoupling by Lange Paul and Centaurius in 2021. Let me take some water. This leads to a question which is never asked in this type of narrative namely the question what would have to change to unleash the power of digitalization for decoupling. This is of course a big political question. Let's now turn to the second narrative, Dirty IT. We will see how the efficiency of digital technologies has developed and then ask the question how did we end up making this technology an energy and material demand issue. You see here on a logarithmic scale how many computations a computer can do per unit of energy. From the first electronic computers in the 40s to the first microcomputers this number has increased by a factor of one million time. So for one kilowatt hour you can get one million more computations and from that time to today we got the factor of improvement of another hundred millions. So that sounds a bit crazy, yes? So what does it mean? If you want to spend one kilowatt hour today which costs you 45 cents here in Berlin you can either cook 500 grams of pasta or get 100 million billion computations. So a hundred times a million of a billion computations for one kilowatt hour. If we extrapolate this we will hit some physical limits around 2040 if quantum computer takes off everything will change again by the way. So no one could say that we haven't tried making digital technology more energy efficient. Let's look at the material efficiency. The indicator is now computing power per kilogram hardware. Computing power is computations per second so this is actually about computations per second per kilogram. Sounds strange but it's an interesting indicator. You see on the left a supercomputer from the 70s, the Cray 1 which had a weight of 5.5 tons. You have the same computing power today on a microcontroller not heavier than this paper clip. This is even heavier, I didn't found small enough one from the hotel. So maybe you understand now why I'm asking this question. How did we end up making this technology and energy and material flow issue? And here is the answer. We increased our demand for computation slightly faster than by a factor of 100 million in 50 years. Slightly faster than 100 million in 50 years. This sounds crazy again doesn't it? And the important drivers for that were the number of users the internet as ubiquitous infrastructure the transition from text to picture to streaming video to streaming high definition video from another thing is monitoring the users also called data harvesting and nudging the user's behavior with machine learning based recommender systems and the like deep learning cryptocurrencies the internet of things with all the machine to machine communications that comes with it. So the whole thing is a sort of rebound effect. A rebound effect is when increasing efficiency stimulates demand which then offsets the theoretical savings potential. In this case the rebound effect is over 100% this is also called backfire effect from an economic point of view. This is absolutely not surprising. This is just how things work. But there's a second part of the answer that has received less attention so far. The role of software has shifted from a reason to keep hardware to a reason to replace hardware. That means that the software platforms drive the hardware pipelines. Platforms seem to be the perfect means to keep consumers in a steady state of dissatisfaction. And without these explanations for the growth of energy material demand the dirty IT narrative is blind for the economic patterns that are the real cause of the problem and they continue to work against solutions, sustainable solutions. So let's have a last look for this narrative by zooming into the material flows. What you see here is that over 60 elements find their way into electronic devices. Even under ideal conditions and this is not as well known as the first fact typically less than 20% of them are recovered from electronic waste and this is already a very optimistic figure, 20%. The geological and geopolitical supply risks for some of these metals are very high. It is always a good idea to slow down the hardware pipeline. Let me summarize. Decoupling opportunities only exist as potentials. There is no evidence that these potentials are realized under the given economic conditions. The ICT sector shows that rebound effects overcompensate for gains in energy or materials efficiency. The same could happen to the enabling effects of digitalization that we only know as potentials so far. The IT sector demonstrates also how platform business can be used to accelerate pipeline business. For example, of hardware pipeline business can we ensure that this pattern is not repeated by promising platforms for sharing of circularity? And the last one. IT is not necessarily dirty. If we were able to increase our demand for computation only a little bit slower or at least not faster when energy and materials efficiency is increasing the environmental impact of IT would be shrinking. So it seems quite obvious that a deeper change is needed if we seriously want to solve the ecological crisis with digital technology. But it is not impossible. Thank you for your attention. Thank you so much, Lawrence Hilty for this very insightful talk. Just how deep the needed change will have to be or where to drill for depth so to speak to use another metaphor from the age of extraction we will be discussing after our next speaker. Or maybe drilling my metaphor here points in the wrong direction altogether. Maybe we see more possible change from an opposite point of view from very far away from satellites for example or from the history of mankind even from an anthropological point of view. This I think is where our second guest will be heading in a minute. He is an anthropologist and associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Among many things he is also part of the Center for Climate IT there whose ambition it is I quote here to bring together different perspectives on the roles of digital technologies in relation to climate change sustainability and green transitions. We engage private and public partners on various climate problems and their solutions building on their recognition that climate change cannot be addressed without imaginative, critical, reflexive and productive ways of engaging with digital technologies and processes of digitalization. So this really fits in perfectly of what we have in mind tonight. I might add myself poetic ways of engaging with the relationship of climate and computation. That's partly why I was playing around with the metaphors you know drilling for truth or shooting up in the sky for clairvoyance for example to give you a glimpse of his work. A guest writes about the cloud metaphor for storage and Chuck's deposes this with the materiality of data centers that he enters and describes actually quite poetically if you allow me to quote another one. You write, humming, an acoustics of alternating current buzzing through the endless racks of server stacks piled tightly one against another, one over another, codant. This is from the latest book he co-edited in 2023 this year reclaiming technology a poetic scientific vocabulary. So the stable distinction between the soft cloud and hard hardware and the data center sort of collapses there and if you allow it feels as if digital phenomena become second nature but before I get carried away here in deep holes or lofty heights let's hear it from our guest who has traveled from Copenhagen to Berlin please welcome James McGuire. Good evening everybody and it's so lovely to be here. Let me start by thanking Thomas and Lena and all of the folks at the institute for inviting me to Toby for moderating and for the lovely words and of course to all of you guys here. Before I get going I just want to say that a lot of what I'm going to say today is based on close cooperative work with two colleagues from Denmark Rachel Douglas Jones also from the IT University and Astral Anderson from Ulbo University. Of course I'd like to also thank Lorenz for setting the scene with his interesting talk and following on from that what I'd like to do is just broaden the canvas out just a little bit by talking to you a little bit about what I'm calling the digital Anthropocene. I really appreciate the title of this lecture series but I wonder about the concepts that we have at our disposal for making sense of digital environmental relationships and particularly in light of the troubling climate effects that we are experiencing and witnessing all through the summer and ongoing in some parts of the world. Part of what I like about Lorenz's talk is how he kind of zooms in and decoupling as a central concept that governs how we think about climate and IT. But it's not hard to be very critical of this concept as Lorenz is and particularly a lot of the work that it's been put to and yet despite that it still remains the predominant policy and governance response to the climate emergency. I am myself part of a new ERC funded project coincidentally called Decoupling IT where we ethnographically explore the IT industry as a critical mediator in the climate emergency. IT of course not only has to account for its own emissions but it's also tasked with helping other industries to be that mediator to decouple their growth from their climate consequences. And here decoupling is again the kind of main sense making tool we have to ward off the worst effects of the climate emergency. In many ways we're banking on the IT industry to come up with the technological forms to fix the problem. But of course the term fix is most likely part of the problem itself and I won't surprise any of you here to know that the term decoupling is part and parcel of a more techno solutionist rationality that very much predominates policy discourses and governance discourses and which when we open up to include the concept of the digital we end up asking how it is that the digital can service the climate agenda. Of course what's often times forgotten and as Lorenz points to is the fact that the digital is itself an issue for the climate. But this is just one let's call it short-sightedness that the predominant solutionist cultural form pushes us towards. Trying to make sense of digital environmental relations brings out a far wider array of issues that can be accounted for through either one, seeing the digital as servicing the climate agenda or two, seeing the digital itself as a climate problem. From my perspective this relationship opens up for questions about new modes of sensing, new modes of knowing, governing and doing politics. And when we get to the end of the talk I'll introduce you to two particular empirical examples which I hope can exemplify this. Here I want to try and open up this relationship beyond the shackles of solutionism which I feel decoupling is very much embedded within. So one way to help make more sense of this relationship is to take their interconnectedness a little bit more seriously. But how do we do that? What I'm proposing here is a type of double vision. And the first move here is to situate digitalization as an anthropogenic phenomena. Maybe an easier way to say this is that we need to take a more geological approach to the digital. Take the digital's undersea world, the submerged data highways that run along our ocean floors. And this is a much more materially and geologically inflected way of thinking about the digital. Much more than, for example, the dominant cloud metaphor would lead us to believe. And as we all know, this is very much connected to the digital, the vast amounts of precious earth minerals, metals and materials that it takes to build, energize and maintain digital life. And there simply isn't enough of these environmental resources to satisfy the needs of decoupling at current population and consumption levels. And they extract, as we all know, things like this silicon for our computer chips and this aluminium that gives our devices that sleek and lightweight look and feel. But we also extract a lot of this, the trillions of electronic components within our digital artifacts and architectures and, of course, a panoply of other environmental resources, not least water. The extraction of cheap labour around the world that assembles our digital artifacts and, of course, the vast mountains of waste that they create. And, of course, there's energy production. And while we talk a lot and coming from Denmark, we really talk a lot about this type of energy when, in fact, the vast majority comes from this type of energy. And this is a type of energy, as we all know, that's been sedimenting for hundreds of millions of years. Media theorist Yusie Parekha's Geology of Media is one book, kind of an instrumental book, advocated for this intriguing idea to think about the digital more geologically. And his work, along with other media scholars, represents a move to understand digitalisation through its material and geologic forms. And there's also been a wave of work in anthropology, kind of like my home territory, and science and technology studies, our STS, which take a much more materialist and geological approach to the same phenomenon. So what I take from this type of work is a series of questions about extractive practices, their economies, bodies and modes of governance, while also stimulating a set of critical reflections on the runaway and let's face it, oftentimes, saviour-infused discourse and the claims that are made on behalf of data, machine learning and AI as revolutionary sites of climate intervention. And conversely, the second move in this double vision is to situate the Anthropocene as a digitally mediated phenomena. Think of the extensive simulation and modelling techniques of the IPCC's reporting system or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and these are produced through a planetary-wide array of digital sensors, devices and computational technologies. And as many scholars will know, such modelling plays a central role in enacting that which we come to call the climate. Our various possible futures and the different modes of intervention that are available to us to limit negative planetary effects. And these technologies have also become enrolled in various forms of environmental politics. Sociologist Jennifer Gubriese has for some time now been paying attention to these types of questions. In particular, focusing on the increasing intensification of computational technologies and ecosystems, as well as how citizens' movements have begun using sensor technologies to intervene in environmental situations. Gubriese has done great work pointing out the entanglements between on the one hand digitalisation and on the other environmental sensing and politics. What this work clearly shows us, I think, is the extent to which digital interventions play a role in ecosystems. One could say that the uncertainties that characterise anthropocenic worlds are being increasingly apprehended through return to computation, automation and digitalisation. Media scholar Wendy Chun characterises this as a tense relationship between on the one hand uncertainty and on the other programmability. And despite her call to disentangle knowledge and action from the knot of programmability, the role of the digital and ecosystems continues to intensify. And I'll just take a drink of water too. And I think for me this relationship between uncertainty and programmability is at the heart of what I'm calling the digital anthropocene. For Chun, climate action doesn't only consist of the array of structural and individual changes that are needed to reform society. For her, climate action is deeply computational. And not only does she mean the building of sensors and devices, models and simulations that construct our climate knowledge infrastructures, but also the rise of new forms of expertise, subjectivities and power relations that are influenced through computational practices and forms. And given the relationship between how these models anticipate the future and the range of possible interventions they offer us, even our very understanding of science as an empirically testable proposition is at stake according to Chun. So for me this type of work helps to foreground the relationship between the uncertainty of the planet and the intensification of digitalization. And that turns I think our attention towards new forms of sensing, knowledge, expertise and governance. And with this comes an eye, or an analytical eye I should say, towards new relations, subjectivities and politics as well. So the conjunction of the digital and the anthropocene is for me an opportunity to see differently. It draws our attention to a multitude of interfaces that are oftentimes under articulated in independent approaches to either the anthropocene or digitalization. And while this is not to suggest that these studies are short-sighted, in fact many of them are long-sighted, what it does suggest is that seeing the one through the other generates a series of possibilities. What these possibilities are for me is very much an empirical question. So think of this as an invitation of sorts to empirically examine the various articulations of what you could call digital anthropocene. To scholars whose work engages empirically or conceptually with the anthropocene, this is an invitation to ask if and how the digital in its various manifestations is meaningfully implicated in your work. It could be articulated or mediated through algorithms, devices, sets of data practices or infrastructures, modes of knowing and forms of expertise, or even a framing device, solutionism for example. Equally to those scholars whose work is primarily engaged with the many questions arising around what we call the digital, this is an invitation to ask if and how the anthropocene is meaningfully implicated in your work. It could appear as the various extractions that materialize the digital, so the minerals and metals and labour that I mentioned, the energies and flows that maintain its circulations, the wastes and pollutants that accompany its generation, other bodies and collectivities that perpetuate its life cycles. But the digital anthropocene is not a new or neologism and neither would I claim it to be. In their incisive piece against firsting, Max Liberion writes that firsting is the process through which a scholar presents an act or circumstance or phenomena generated by man to have occurred for the first time. Liberion asked their students, why is being first a mark of good research? To which they reliably answered, it marks my territory. The reminder of the territorial dynamics of the anthropocene, the reminder of the territorial dynamics of knowledge-making is appropriate for a term such as the anthropocene, critiqued for its own firsting of the way its epoch-defining hubris already contains a lot of erasures. The anthropocene, Roy Davison taught, the universalizing project, elsewhere it appears as a spectacle, an age not of anthropos, but of corporate activities, or even shifted to a new status as an organizing concept, Neil Addison and Payne provide so much-needed humility to the concept and the humility that they're talking about is the offering of an anthropogenic table of elements as a way to explain our current environmental and planetary conditions. Indeed, the proliferating array of counter-logisms for want of a better expression, capitalocene, plantationocene, cthulocene, that's the tricky one to say. Anthroponocene, necrocene, military-industrialocene and proliterocene, they all evidence the many erasures resident within the term anthropocene. And while each of these counter-terms is situated within its own particular history of critique, what they do share is a desire to recenter a particular type of absence or religion, be it the logics of extraction, the institution of slavery, multi-species interconnectivity, mass extinction, or even the industrial war machine. So, my aim here is not to find a critical perch from which to rename the problematic term anthropocene, but neither is it to vivify the conjunction with the digital, hence the choice of the term situated. This is not a hedge, but a refusal to claim the conjunction as new territory or ground. Instead, situating signals a tentative means of charting the difficult course through termological histories and erasures. It's an effort to grapple with the troubling questions of how to juxtapose planetary concerns alongside localised and differentiated planetary effects. For me, this is a question of scale and politics. Of course, and it's of how we bring these concerns and effects into view simultaneously, while being more sensitive to emerging forms of politics that may otherwise be obscured by the term anthropocene. So, what I want to point out in the last five minutes of this talk is that situating the digital anthropocene is ultimately aimed at bringing another kind of politics into view. Not only the various form of data practices that are embedded within contemporary environmental issues or the geologic politics embedded within digital infrastructures and technologies, but more extensively the forms of politics that are both revealed and generated at specific digital environmental junctures. So, in this vein, I don't want to suggest that there's a cartography of themes or terrains that could be referred to as the digital anthropocene. Instead, what I'm offering here is some sort of a field-making exercise that has the potential to offer some insights on the forms of politics that we're starting to encounter. So, to close, I'm going to give you two admittedly fast and apologies if I speed up. Two examples of such emerging politics. And the idea is to think about what type of politics can generate at these specific sites. And what I'm going to show you now is part of an upcoming special issue on the topic of the digital anthropocene that should be, I suppose, published sometime before Christmas. The first one, in a beautiful visual meditation, Chicago scholar Sadie Amiraz brings us into the remotely sensed images of some of the most conflicted landscapes in the US-led war in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2014. Taking us through a sequence of sound-based data that are translated or what she calls transduced into images, she traces some of the clear problems between the use of sensing technologies for archaeologists and glaciologists in climate research and how they are appropriated for the war machine. But when these images are computationally mediated in new ways, she claims, they open up a space for storytelling that's a little bit different in these war and torn landscapes. So while she does, of course, draw our attention to the colonious legacies of remote sensing technologies, Mirza also shows how an ethnographic sensibility to computation, digital cartography and modeling also allows room for counter narratives. What we get from this piece is how sensing technologies not only afford new ways of seeing and knowing these landscapes, they also provoke a type of proto-politics, which in essence is how to rethink or redo or at least intervene in the colonial military legacies and make them otherwise. In the second example, Berkeley scholar Sarah Vaughn brings us into the world of digital databases used for climate governance in the Caribbean. Here she points out how colonial legacies in the Caribbean have created a set of limits to computational growth. This can be, for example, missing data or missing data due to lack of instruments or an over-attention to getting data from the wrong sites, so collecting data for weather at airports rather than other probably more beneficial scientific spots in the sea, but also how donor funding cycles continue to lead to problems in maintaining data sets. She talks very nicely about how IT experts and programmers end up having to shrink their data sets so that they become manageable and aren't actually overexposed or subject to the whims of the next international round of donations by donor nations. These islands are, of course, seeking to overcome these limits in order to provide effective climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. Vaughn suggests a type of limit politics that's in play here. In this sense, for her, limits don't automatically inspire paralysis. They can also inspire forms of action. So what I think is revealed here in each of these examples is a particular legacy of a colonial infrastructure that was saturated in forms of technological inequality and injustice also affords a counter-political reimagining through digital mediations. So I think my time is probably about up now, so I hope just that these two final examples are suggestive enough of the possibilities that lie in holding a double vision on this thing called a digital Anthropocene. Thank you. Thank you so much, James, for this very rich talk with many suggestions. I'm sure we... Is this on? I don't hear a lot from the monitor. It's on. Okay. Thank you. We can discuss now what I would like to start with Lawrence Forrest as a response to what James just talked about. I'm not sure. Sometimes I thought that the idea of what you call double vision, James, or the digital Anthropocene, was sort of... That Lawrence's talk was informed by a similar concept, actually, although it wasn't called like that. And I wanted to ask Lawrence, would you agree with that notion or would you see what James called a double vision or the digital Anthropocene of part of the bigger change you called for at the end of your talk? Sounds a little bit abstract to me, I must say. That's a question. Well, you called for a bigger change. Would you say that those new modes of seeing, sensing, gathering data, as we saw in the last example, is part of the deep change you called for at the end of your talks that come together there or no? Maybe not, if I'm honest. I think that we have... If we continue gathering more data and build more on this paradigm of big data and machine learning, et cetera, this will exactly not help to have this deeper change we need. That would be my will. Did I misunderstand maybe both of you? I was just thinking of the concept of double vision to explore a little bit more on that concept. The concept I think is both informed by the materiality of things, of course, going deep down, looking at the cables, looking from very afar to what happened to the landscapes that is, of course, digitally mediated if that is part of the change of looking for new possibilities to frame that whole problem. Of course, it's a very conceptual take. I thought it was a very conceptual talk to begin with if that is something you can relate to in your work. Still, it sounds very abstract to me. Maybe we have different languages from our background disciplines, and I think that's also something that is normal in interdisciplinary projects that we have to work for finding a common language also. Somehow, maybe we are not yet at that point here on this podium. Well, I started out like that, right? It's very hard to bring together different disciplines. When we have an interdisciplinary evening, language is always a big barrier. But let me ask a little bit more concretely then, I hope, James, when you showed that beautiful example of the satellite pictures of Afghanistan during the war, during the American occupation or war, whatever you want to call it, you said that this was opening up new possibilities for counter-narratives. Can you explore a little bit more on that, because you didn't have really much time at the end of your talk, what those counter-narratives would consist of and how they could help actually to reframe the relationship between climate and ICT? Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Talbi, for that question. I think part of this is trying to think of all the different types of ways in which sensing technologies or their ilk are kind of enrolled already in particular types of scenarios, like, for example, colonialism. And the idea that climate science is kind of like the good science, and climate science is a science that is almost like ahistorical, and it's kind of like, and somehow differentiated and distinct from kind of the grizzly work of industry. But I mean, I think what this example shows is that, you know, even kind of really well-intentioned sensing technologies used in climate sciences are oftentimes in these situations where you appropriate it. And then I think the argument that Mirza puts forth is trying to talk about, I mean, in what way can computational digital mediations open up for new stories? And so that's the kind of techniques that are involved in that kind of, actually kind of very sophisticated. I mean, it's way beyond my ken. But the types of techniques that are available to them to redo those maps, right? So what she was really talking about is the idea that, you know, these are sonar-based maps which are transused into images. Sometimes they come from compressed data from, you know, maybe 100 different images over many years and they give you one kind of set of variables. And then those other things about showing, you know, you could actually, by using that type of imaging technique, you could trace pathways that insurgent fighters were using to kind of outflank the Americans. So there's like some very obvious kind of things that she draws on, like very kind of clear, oh, wow. There's a way of seeing, you know, the actual insurgent bodies in here. And then other times it's more kind of, abstract and analytical, where she's talking about the spaces in between the data as such, right? So how is it that you actually make sound data into image data and what does that do, that form of transduction? So for her, that's a moment to kind of rethink data and in that moment then to rethink the consequences of data, which in this sense is the kind of the appropriation of certain technologies. And it's very kind of blatant, right? By the war machine. But it serves a very interesting point, I think. Let me ask you another thing about your talk before I come back to Lawrence and decoupling. You also, you know, brought that example of the Anthropocene as fully digitally mediated and you were talking about the extensive simulation and modeling techniques of the IPCC, reporting system, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Now, I'm wondering, is this sort of a techno deterministic take in some ways, that would you say if I break it down harshly now that we need different tools to get different results? Well, I don't think I said fully digitally mediated. I think, I mean, it's very hard to say that the Anthropocene is a fully digitally mediated phenomena given the lived experiences of people in parts of the world, right? So it's not to say that it's fully digitally mediated. The fully was my stress, yeah. No, no, great. And an important one to discount, I think. What was the rest of the question? Sorry, the question was, if you think that if we change the tools to gather the data, that we get different results and results that may open up new possibilities regarding the relationship of climate and computation. Yeah, I think that that's part of the point of that, right? I mean, a big part of it is what is this thing that we call climate that, you know, we, the idea that it's such a kind of a vastly distributed hyper-object as Timothy Morton calls it, right? But that the computational technologies in play, the simulation models, the modeling, in fact, very, very, I mean, they open up a whole new series of questions, ways of seeing and knowing and so forth. And then in my head, at least, that always will open up to a new type of politics. The question is like, what is that, empirically? Let's talk about uncertainty for a little bit, because you ended on that notion I think also, Lawrence, when you said that decoupling opportunities only exist as potentials so far, right? There's no evidence that these potentials are realized under the given economic conditions. Now, also in this series, we've talked a lot about uncertainties, because that's something algorithms have notorious difficulty of computing because they're about probability and not uncertainty usually, and it's very hard to kind of build in uncertainty into this machine. But you say that those potentials cannot be realized under given economic conditions. What would have to change how that these potentials could be realized? Yes, let me say first something about uncertainty. I think whenever we do simulation models or any type of models or any type of structure to thinking about the future it's maybe not the uncertainty that makes it special but the conditionality so we can only model scenarios, so we can only give forecasts that are bound to some conditions. This is different from tomorrow's weather forecast, because you cannot influence now the weather of tomorrow, so you say it is a forecast, but everything else we do almost everything else is a scenario, so we always say if this and this and this what I'm assuming is true, then that will happen. And sometimes especially also when it comes to talking about future potentials of the AI or so, there is a tendency to say well it's just we do not yet exactly know what will happen, but that's not the question of exactly or less exactly knowing something, it's not about uncertainty, certainly not about probability it's about understanding the causal connections between the conditions we create today and the future and this is of course the core of the whole thing. So now I lost the thread of what I wanted to answer. One would have to change exactly. If you want to understand what let's say political, economical conditions we would have to create today that we create through decoupling and not just yes, imagined decoupling of our economy from the productivity from the environmental energy and material flows if you want to understand what this would be, we would need models we would need scenarios that describe this in any form it doesn't have to be computational, it's some idea of causality that would give us this answer, yes and I think one problem is that all the different disciplines that would have to take part in such a modelling endeavour especially economics they cannot really cooperate. So I had quite some projects with interdisciplinary settings and it is extremely extremely difficult as I already said I think to find a common language to really give your assumptions, the assumptions of each discipline a commensurable form one thing you did mention forgive me the term now as a possible solution is circularity that you explored how circularity can actually change the picture there considerably if it was regulated in any way or the question was how to regulate that actually, what kind of regulation would be needed to enforce circularity what would you think whenever we had in history we had circular material flows that worked, that were functioning with not many technology, yes just they were functioning it was a reaction to scarcity so what we would need is actually this is not a good a good message of course we would have to wait for more scarcity of other resources that still seem to be abundant today and then we will of course invent circularity that's clear but that may be too late, yes so the question is how can we anticipate all these crises that will still are still to follow the climate crisis to do the right thing now and this seems to be politically impossible that's just my view uncertainty takes on quite a different role in your talk James, I thought if I'm not mistaken when you quoted the media scholar Wendy Chun that basically said of breaking it down again that there should not be an antagonism so to speak between uncertainty and programmability right in other words we do not see possibilities when uncertainty is framed as a problem computation might solve or not solve so can you give us another example where uncertainty actually opened up new possibilities of seeing this whole problem I think Chun says you know it's a cry it's a battle cry to disentangle uncertainty from programmability right so to not approach all of our troubled the vast array of troubles we have through the idea of computation or programmability so it's to move away from a formalization a proceduralization of social life in general at least as I read it that's the point that she's trying to make yeah I was trying to same thing I'm saying it doesn't have to be an antagonism that's how I framed it uncertainty doesn't have to be a problem that has to be solved my question would be what would that entail then how could uncertainty actually lead to new ways of seeing or to enhance that what you call double vision yeah that's a good question I mean I think there is no way of raising uncertainty I mean it's simply a part of being alive and therefore the question is not to try and solve it but the question is to try and how to kind of like live in meaningful ways with all of the uncertainties we have so I think her I was going to say her response to that but I think it's it's kind of a cry to to not consistently think that there's a kind of a computational form that can fix this to kind of to that disentanglement what is the disentanglement of the not of programmability I mean that's a great question and I don't really have a kind of an obvious answer to that but I mean I think that for her I mean just I mean her very kind of rich and provocative claim that you know empirical science is under threat because I mean what science is doing today is modeling and simulating future scenarios which we need to intervene in if we don't want to have planetary catastrophe or we are having planetary catastrophe but if we don't to see get worse then we can't ever verifiably test those models as such in the classic empirical science sense so that type of uncertainty there is bringing about a kind of a new modus for science and that's a very very you know that's a huge proposition let's get back to decoupling before we open this up a little bit here on site and also with the tool decoupling, smart decoupling others have called it green growth basically right we do not know at the moment if this is going to work as you well stated Lawrence you know but the rebound effects are hard to overcome with growth and consumption exceeding the energy saved by more efficient digital tools right so what if decoupling the energy networks now actually will not work at all because consumption just will rise exceedingly as we have sometimes see with mobile plans right I mean they start with 20 gigabyte and at 100 gigabyte a month or something something that was totally unconceivable like five years ago even so we see this almost exponential curve actually skyrocketing right now and yet there is hope that like it could be or could be a part of what you call smart decoupling or green growth what if it doesn't work well that's a good example because the 5G networks that are built up now can be shown to have sort of already embedded rebound effect yes we did a study on 5G in Switzerland by 2030 and we knew the plans of what capacities will be built yes and for the idealized assumption that in 2030 everything will only be 5G and not the mix with less energy efficient 4G and 3G under this condition we can say per gigabyte that is translated over the mobile network usually into the internet then per gigabyte we only need one seventh of the energy compared to today or no it's not it was not about energy it was about CO2 but it's okay that's not the point the point is that this assumption only holds under this result it's only true under the assumption that the capacities are well utilized that are built and the capacities are built for nine times more traffic so this is something like a built in rebound effect this is not an effect as a completely unforeseeable market reaction that destroys our wonderful visions no it is already built in and this is very interesting it's an effect that's being wished for in other words yes it's how things work today or maybe always how to counter that James slowing down the hardware line sorry I was going to say I was going to applaud that actually I think you know when efficiency is baked into technology then I mean it leads to that path but I mean it reminded me I teach an intro to science and technology studies courses that we opened up the semester a few weeks ago and there's a great phrase by John Love people know John Love and Web Biker in a very early book where they say we get the technologies we deserve and I was just thinking when you were talking we get the concepts that we deserve too I mean I think you could categorize decoupling as one of those what is it about that concept that we're so enamored with like why do we keep treading it when it's clearly there is no decoupling I mean there's relative decoupling there's momentary temporal decoupling there's spatial decoupling but there isn't at least from the studies I'm reading actual absolute decoupling so what's going on here I think that's part of what I'm trying to get at is that the you know I think where decoupling is leading us and I'm sorry this is not a question that you asked me I mean it's such a state of not just historical planetary injustice but future planetary injustice because there just simply isn't enough of these metals to kind of like redeem our faith in decoupling and what we will end up doing is as we always do extract from parts of the world and then dump back into them so there will be future oriented injustices to latch onto the historical ones where these countries haven't been emitting CO2 so I think that there's something I think the question for me is like exploring like it's for me it's not super interesting to ask if decoupling is working but it's to ask why we're why do we deserve that concept I don't think there's any party in German Parliament who does not believe in decoupling at least not the Dynamo of not even the Green Party isn't I think yeah it depends on which Green Party I suppose but there's an interesting kind of like eruption of Green Parties in the Danish context which I'm much more familiar with and there are some of them who of course advocate for post growth or post capitalism or more desirable economics on sweet so there are some of them but you're right the kind of more centralized Green Parties very much are embedded with green growth or decoupling I talked to another guest we've had here in the series the other day and he told me well there are the certain people who do not believe in green growth but they're all over the parliamentary parties you cannot find them only in the Green Parties they're always minorities you can find them anywhere you can find them at CDU you can find them at FTP you can find them at Lincoln you can find them everywhere but they're just they will stay or they have stayed so it's not even about Green Party or not Green Party this is just something that really worries me greatly justifiably so okay but I can't vote in Germany anyway so that's not my problem and let's open this up now I think we'll start here with the floor right there's two microphones here before we look at the participatory tools there's somebody right in the back there or did you see someone before that I don't see that much yes well first of all thank you for the talks they were very impressive very eye-opening lots of food for thought but the first thing that came to mind just listening to the answer to the last questions was like what was there ever economic growth that did not have an ecological impact was there ever a time in human era that there was this example so that there was this decoupling is it even possible is it even conceivable given or is it part of the human nature of production and domination of nature in favor of creating culture that is something that is just an illusion I think we have to invent this to say something optimistic we would for the first time to have invented a type of growth that is not increasing the pressure on the natural ecosystems we have no other chance we must believe in that somehow but we must be realistic in the sense that we see we are not making progress so far towards that vision James what's your take there green growth or degrowth say again green growth or degrowth I mean absolutely yes I'm sorry for laughing but like it's hard for you to comprehend of course not green growth there is no green growth I don't think but I'm reminded of Jason Hickle if anyone knows that name he's an economic anthropologist in the vein of David Graber and he has kind of become quite a popular source of inspiration for post-growth economics and he's oftentimes been as an anthropologist been accused of idealizing particular cultural groups over time and you know there's been many occasions when people have lived in sync with nature and so forth and there's a lot of interesting debates back and forth about that but I mean I think the point is that from the 1800s and from the steam engine forward we see a kind of a transformation like the spike as a person who's not all fair with graphs I mean even I can understand this graph because it goes like that I was listening to a podcast about the hockey stick and they were saying you know that it took 250,000 years to get to 1 billion and the last 1 billion that's been added on to the planet took 11 years so I think that's the kind of the anthropocynic naming moment of the combustion engine in the 1800s so yeah I think there's a lot to be said about other relationships to nature and other forms of ontologies that go with those relationships but it's hard to get rid of the steam engine zontology unfortunately anybody else from the floor or shall we switch to the digital sphere so to speak questions or comments somebody in the middle were you first? ok right there and then the gentleman in the middle ok microphones right there thank you so much for a lot of food with thought I'm not sure I understood everything but I wondered about the first talk if is it not the elephant in the room that decoupling is the one concept that avoids questioning the growth paradigm so isn't that like the obvious message that we can take from your talk that if we want real change then we need to question that paradigm and yeah what would that look like in your positive vision into the second talk what I found really interesting and I stumbled across that wording a little bit is you talked of new modes of knowing and I would wonder what those are that didn't become obvious for me like what are the new modes of knowing understood what you said about new ways of modeling like how we predict into the future while we can never really test these hypotheses is that what you mean or did you speak about something else thank you Lawrence do you want to go first yes the growth paradigm I think it must be a question especially this growth paradigm we are used to today and I think it's not maybe so important to differentiate between a new paradigm that is no longer called growth or that is still called growth but different from today's growth paradigm it's just the fact that we must of course find ways to grow in a way that is less material yes to grow our intellectual our spiritual whatsoever spaces more than the physical ones I'm not saying that I'm talking for some of my some of the computer scientists think of transhumanism that we can then upload our brains into some computers that's not what I mean glad to hear that Lawrence but I think yes we must modify our growth maybe we don't have to call it growth then the problem is that the existing growth paradigm is also it's always connected to the idea of infinite and even exponential growth that can go on forever and this is a stupid idea of course nothing can grow exponentially forever in a finite world that's quite clear so we should have an idea of growth that maybe more follows an S curve that we plan also for having stability at some point and then growing something else and such ideas yes call it sufficiency or the words are not so important but it must be clear that we do not continue with this basic idea that whatever we do can be expanded to infinitely thank you James would you like to answer any questions? thanks for the question it's a great one one example there's lots of work been done about algorithmic intervention into the biosphere using drones and algorithms to study bees for example of which there are many other examples but in that sense then a very particular proceduralized way of knowing what a bee is and what it does which gives rise to a kind of alternate form of bee expertise and so in that sense the sensing technologies we have and in the Sadia Mirza example of Afghanistan it's that the ways in which you can manipulate these kind of like digital cartographies allows you to see very differently then it changes your relationship to the object on your question and so therefore the way of knowing that object can also change the kind of next step would be to say with modes of knowing go modes of doing politics and that's a very kind of like science and technology way of talking about epistemology it will be interesting in the future what happens to AI generated imagery actually and pictures when it comes to that because that's a whole other realm that's opening up there right whose other mode of seeing then it's actually meant or brought into the discourse then but that's another session probably there's a gentleman in the middle who's holding the microphone already so we're ready for your questions and comments please connected I would also like to hear some more positive messages from the first lecture you said that there is a potential for decoupling and we have some vast growth in efficiency over the last decades in computing and at the beginning you mentioned it's rather a political problem and in a way that's without disagreeing it's in a way the easy way out and you were already asked what needs to change and I think the reply was scarcity would be a driver for this change and not that positive so I was wondering if you could tell us some concrete cases where you think this needs to change in order to enable decoupling further just to have something concrete where we have the feeling okay we change this it's going to pass coming back to the environmental paradigm with all these ecosystem services I think it's a political task to really put limits on how much we consume from this or the economic system is consuming from this free ecosystem services we must put limits there and this is a problem of collective action on this planet yes but if we would solve this problem then it would be very natural or logical that we would use our best technology to create circularity for example and it would just be the only way then to still grow some things we want to grow because the ecosystem services are limited but there must be some international conventions much more of them, many more of them than what we have today there are very few cases where there were some conventions that worked to solve some problem like the ozone layer problem, the ozone hole that worked with the Montreal protocol but if we would have the same on primary forests, on the oceans on water, on everything yes but there is nothing there so it's no surprise that there is always someone and usually everyone roughly over utilizing, over exploiting what is there the doomvert there is probably scarcity right, I'm glad you brought that in there what does have to happen before new modes of production and consumption are actually going to try it out, scarcity nowadays implies turmoil right, I mean try to regulate traffic for example you see what's happening in Germany now with last generation on the streets people are going absolutely wild we are in a culture war because of this and nothing has happened yet nothing, I mean to absolute no effect there has been no regulation on that whatsoever and people are going absolutely mad over this this might be very decisive in the next elections or we are going to have because scarcity is just in the room somewhere, the elephant you call it scarcity, oh I cannot use my car for 50,000 kilometers a year anymore and somebody is going to say I won't be able to but I think that's maybe where we see the connection between saying that it's political because scarcity is a political concept I mean one could argue that in economics I mean it's a foundational concept and maybe there is no scarcity I mean there's plenty of resources to distribute things differently just not at the consumption levels that we have in Germany or in Denmark or in the US for example so again I think when you say it's political I think you're right that concept is political and it's how do we dislodge that, that's the real challenge for the post-growth movement as such like how can you dislodge that thinking it's I mean the edifice that it builds is very strong you kind of reverse the roles now right, you're the guy for the positive message just now while Lawrence actually was much more skeptical in his answer so we got some movement here in this evening apparently but let's look at the digital sphere there's questions from there, please can you read it or read them to us in their panel there were a couple of questions online most of which were already answered by the prior questions but what remains and I think this goes to James McGuire they ask if you could explain further how new interfaces can be located in your approach or concept of the digital Anthropocene thank you for the great and difficult question you know that's a kind of a claim I suppose and I would argue that what I'm trying to do I mean for those of you who know Donna Harroway you will know that she talks about situated knowledge and she talks about double visions and so forth and that was a moment when she was really really fighting the battle against patriarchal science and I think this is in all modesty there is something happening now that's not super dissimilar so for me like the question of the whole situatedness paradigm is about empirical science in many senses inferentially and it's super hard now to think about situatedness with planetary problems so that interface is a kind of a way it's just a way of trying to navigate attention to specific junctures not just the kind of Anthropocene as this monster concept or digitalization as this equally monster concept but the very kind of in my world ethnographic specificity of finding something where that intersection that interface reveals new things so for me the reason why I cite those two articles is because what I really enjoy about them is that they change my way of thinking because of the idea that you know how to think about colonial infrastructures in relation to data I mean there's a lot of work in decolonial thinking, feminist thinking but that was a kind of help me a little bit so also the other kind of computational mediations about the role of science climate science in particular and the war machine so for me I found those articles super helpful to kind of like create a kind of specific moment or something specific the site and the concerns around that site around which to think which helps move forward I think and that's kind of like the message that I want to give with new interfaces maybe new is the wrong word at least interfaces because we did get the reminder if we've forgotten all of our cybernetics history that you know these discourses have been around for a long time so even my claim to be field making is of course a little bit absurd it's just in the generic moment we find ourselves in I want to point attention at these specificities Thank you Is there another question or the other have been answered already as you pointed out at the beginning very much for scanning those questions for us and putting them to our panel maybe second to last question would be a rather pragmatic kind of day-to-day questions to many users to all of us is you know the big Shakespearean question to stream or not to stream we talk about classic rebound effects I think roughly you could say at least that was the case with audio I did a little bit of research on that I wrote a book on a small tech sociology on pop music and if you stream it once with audio you are on the safe side compared to a CD or to vinyl or to a cassette tape let radio on the side if you stream it twice or three times you're doomed so to speak the energy consumption exceeds what you would have used with a physical with a physical data trigger data carrier I just lost that and again I mentioned the mobile plans that just go up and up and up and up and if we talk about regulation we always talk about regulation here in Europe and the series sort of tries to take a European look on things that are usually decided elsewhere at least when we talk about big platforms of course streaming platforms that provide us that highly skyrocketing consumption be it Netflix or Spotify of course which is more of an American company than a Swedish company by now by the way do you see any way of regulating that because people are streaming all day may I say something provoking so I don't think the streaming or the increase in streaming would be a problem if it would just be a little bit slower than the increase in efficiency it's actually very small it's a very small problem we are actually talking about that's the funny thing we are always just a little bit faster in growing our demand that this wonderful technology is growing its efficiency and that's so strange if it would be at the same level the energy and material consumption would go down but we have found ways to be so crazy to be even faster growing our demands with everything than the efficiency is growing is this really necessary can we make a little correction I don't know what political means that we only grow within the framework of efficiency increase which is in IT so incredible that nobody would notice the difference so it is a decoupling model you are advocating there it's your take there James I'm not sure I have one I mean what's interesting as well is there's no scarcity here it's all about abundance right the super abundance is the problem and not just super abundance of what you call the data carrying very elegant English term I couldn't think of it I think there's a super abundance of expectation there's a super abundance of desire so I mean of course capitalism as a socio-economic system produces desire and so I don't think you can tackle these things it's kind of singular things like how do you regulate Netflix I don't think you can as such a lot you could do you could make sure that they weren't buying carbon credits on a bad carbon market they're not doing offsetting projects in Indonesia you can make sure that they're not just buying renewable energy certificates you could actually make sure that when they say they're 100% green I think Apple and Microsoft are saying that now that they actually are giving green energy to the grid so there's things within the decoupling model that you really could do that would make a difference but I don't know how to disentangle or I absolutely don't have to decouple the production, the abundant production of desire from capital maybe that's a cultural question you know how to make it cool not to stream or to buy vinyl which of course is also about social injustice because vinyl is so expensive but the funny thing would happen with Netflix I remember at the beginning of the pandemic everybody was going wild Netflix was going absolutely crazy Netflix had problems streaming in HD in high quality and big problems I mean you know you got your pixels back right there it only lasted for about a month or two I think but people didn't seem to mind that much they just dreamed less for a couple of weeks it was a very narrow window I think that opened up there as soon as scarcity hit it wasn't that much of a problem that was something that sort of I think is a positive notion we might end this session I mean there's a lot to be said for harnessing the concept of constraint and I think that's what the limit politics I was trying to get a little bit earlier I mean I have good colleagues in the computer science department who are all about talking about the creativity of constraints within computing but their beef if you could say is that it's nowhere in the curriculum the curriculum has an aesthetics attached to it which is driven by efficiency which is driven by does it work right which is driven by you know kind of particular standards but there's an abandonment of constraint and so that requires some sort of pedagogical kind of maneuver I think right in the heart of computer science as just one example is there any last questions from the floor oh there is okay if we get three make them quick you know what we'll just get all three right now together and then we'll try to answer them as one do you see where the hands went up with the microphones I'm a little bit blinded by the lights I can see you who's got the microphone I have the power I have the mic thanks I'm losing it I was wondering if, thank you very much very informative, challenging discussion I was wondering if you could offer us some modest responses to the young people who are sitting on a highway in the Netherlands in order to stop fossil fuel subsidies and to the brave school children in Sweden, Scandinavia Germany who are striking for the climate and as they do they use their smartphones in order to mobilize and organize and so this kind of complicit tension is there what would you say to them they're out on the road now being water cannon I was just wondering this is the theme of this generation I'll be really interested and you don't need to feel that you have to give a trite answer I'm just really curious James let us just gather all the questions now and then wrap them up here on stage thank you very much for this question the complicitness of the climate strikes sorry that's not what I meant no sorry I have to correct you I was asking what would you say given the tensions that you've highlighted to the climate strikers and the young people who are actually taking action now I'm sure James got it sorry sorry, second one for the argument just now increasing our our demand within the boundaries of efficiency increase I was wondering if this isn't an idealized argument if I keep my computer for five years efficiency increases but that doesn't really affect my usage because I still have my computer five years ago so isn't that presupposing that we are replacing our devices in the moment efficiency increases sorry really concrete I was just wondering okay one last question there in the back I will try to answer them all thank you for the talks just a quick problematic question for the second speaker I'm just wondering whether talking about new forms of politics with talking about new form of politics is the risk of blending traditional politics which seems to be mostly needed now which is really bad for aesthetic stimulation doesn't make for good installations but it's about regulating and also stopping things thank you I beg you the first one if you can take the second one okay thank you that's a super good question I think it's really important to bring up the reason why myself and Lorenz were very excessively early to this event was because I really didn't know how I was going to run into the people who were gluing themselves in the street and the taxis and so forth but I think it's a great again I always come back to so many times I have these discussions with colleagues and family members and friends very commonly it's about well are they really benefiting anyone by disrupting us and so forth but what I would say to them and what I would advocate for is kind of a twisting or an inversion of the narrative like what they are trying to do is dismantle a super destructive infrastructure so I see actually that their efforts as very positive very creative contributions to the future and if I could I'm part of Scientist Rebellion in Denmark and we as a Nordic Scientist Rebellion and we have done some teachings and so forth but that's the type of conceptual change we need and if I could just can I just skip the second question and jump to the third and I think it connects nicely to it it's like I totally agree that we need like traditional politics of I mean what do you want to call it ecological socialism or the especially the rights questions that all of this brings up right and so the kind of the desire to kind of point towards new forms of politics is not an evasion of traditional politics at all I mean it's more about and what I really like is the idea that you know you guys have typified that sense of limit politics it's just it's very nicely represented in that discussion about constraints so there's something to be learned there about constraints that goes into the heart of how we teach so that's not separate from traditional politics in fact the pedagogies like the concepts that come into our pedagogy are super important so I don't see them as two different things I see them as actually been able to kind of mutually reinforce one another please yes the second question was very concrete thank you for that then this is a very frequent idea that when technology is making progress in energy or materials efficiency that especially in energy efficiency then I would have to replace it very often in small steps to use this efficiency progress but this is not the case so if you wait for 5 years or 10 years to replace your computer you will make an even larger step then when you replace it in efficiency and the problem is that software will force you before already before it is unfunctional you will be forced by software to replace it which is a very crazy mechanism but of course the energy and the materials that go into production of all these devices all the equipment, all the infrastructure we need this must go into the equation and then you can exactly say what is the optimum would be the theoretically optimum point to replace it by something new and that's usually quite a longer period than what we are doing today Thank you very concrete answer at the beginning at the end I was going to say and I hope that what I actually posed as a problem right at the beginning how hard it is to bring multidisciplinary questions together sort of evolved during this evening during this conversation also with your help from the floor actually the questions really brought that together opened that up again I'm really glad for that thanks for the turnout there's something to drink outside come home safely wherever you're obstructed or not on the way by bike, by car on foot have a good time and we'll see you again in November we don't know exactly when I don't think we're going to talk about uploading your brain to a computer I think Elon Musk said no we didn't want to come so we're not going to work on that but there's going to be a third session of the year definitely here in Berlin in November coming out thank you Lawrence Hilty James McGuire