 My name is Katrin, I am going to moderate this panel and we are going to talk about just and sustainable digital futures with really amazing panelists that I'm going to introduce in a bit. Why are we here or why are these panelists here? In the program we thought we really want some people who are already working on these just and sustainable digital futures so that are actually showing that another world is possible and that there are already some projects and approaches that we can maybe build upon that give us some hope to actually making these sustainable and just futures so I'm super happy that you're all here. Before I start I want to briefly introduce the topic. The idea behind this panel is that we are in a world where there's a lot of emerging technologies that come with a lot of promises and narratives such as bringing freedom, bringing equality or bringing sustainability yet a lot of people all around the world have also learned that these technologies also can cause harms both socially or environmentally and that it needs a critical assessment of these technologies as well. So for example when we're thinking about AI or machine learning solutions that can maybe help understand the climate crisis better or data can help understand the climate crisis better it also comes with a downside of producing CO2 emissions or causing other other harms and also with green technology what I think Amara is going to talk a bit about this drive to green technology and to smart devices and that often comes with the downside that there is a lot of mining of rare earths of lithium etc and that really affects indigenous land so it's really needs a basic understanding and different perspectives on these topics and that's why all these panelists today are here so I'm super happy and I would actually like to start with a question how you imagine just and sustainable digital technologies or the internet whatever you feel like to all the panelists just to kind of understand what your angle is and also to start with a bold vision so no pressure but yeah that would be my first question and I'm going to start with you Julia introducing you Julia Klauwa she is the co-founder and executive executive director of super lab it's a feminist think tank would you say civil society organization in based in Berlin and they have done amazing work on feminism and tech such as the feminist tech principles but also a gathering on just and sustainable digital futures which was also the inspiration for this panel so I'm also curious to hear more about this and Julia also initiated a lot of other projects such as code for Germany and prototype fund yeah so welcome Julia and my question would be what is your bold vision to kick off this panel thanks Katrin I was actually in the preparation of this panel I was a bit struggling with like what is my bold vision I think five years ago I would have probably given you like a set of civic tech tools that we really need in order to increase transparency in order to work towards more sustainable cities but since I'm the first one speaking I want to open up the discourse a bit more because I would claim that there is no just internet in an unjust world that it is so tempting to look at the quick tech fixes without going a layer deeper without looking at the systemic problems the root causes of social injustice of injustices in our society such as racism such as social injustices authoritarianism and I think it's also important to acknowledge when we talk about tech that all of these things did not come into this world because of technology that also means that they cannot be resolved with technology alone and I think this is something that's super important to keep in the back of our mind when we're discussing this also at this conference where we're trying to bring different topics together we know that a lot of injustices get amplified by technology like the usage of artificial intelligence and recruiting processes at our borders in scoring systems of insurance companies and while it's important to mitigate these harms and to understand them better this is not enough a just internet or just digital tools start with a society that fights racism that fights discrimination that fights hate a society that stands up for human rights that stands in solidarity with the women in Iran that are fighting for freedom that centers around the needs of the most vulnerable groups in our society and I think these should be the starting points of the discussions that take us away from the superficial layer of where we're trying to fix things with tech and that is true for the digital rights space as well as the sustainability space and but then still like it's a panel about hope and visions so I want to tell you about a project by a friend that very much inspired me throughout COVID the friend's name is Abia Gattas she's a Lebanese and lives here in Germany and she started a project called Hamam Radio a grassroots community online radio an uncensored space this is what she calls it for communities that have been historically marginalized and the communities she's part of are feminist communities and non-binary queer communities in the swana region that's the southwest asian and north african region and Hamam as the name says like points to the spaces the baths where people can indulge in self-care and where they have a safe space and one of the main challenges that Abia saw when it comes to community organizing organizing her communities is that there is a lack of safer spaces online for community exchange for community building safer spaces that exist outside the big social media commercial platforms and usually a lot of this community building gets done offline people meet in spaces they exchange but due to COVID that was not possible for her and her community anymore because these spaces where people could meet offline were shrinking so the radio the online radio that she built was a space outside of this highly surveillance and censored social media platform a space that would allow her communities to share their stories to talk about topics that are oftentimes still taboos in some of the societies that she's working with topics such as mental health and sexuality and women's rights feminist movements gender based violence and so on and for her this online grassroots radio was also a space to share hope to share love to share music to share joy so not only focusing on all the misery that is surrounding us but also collectively like talking about hope and love and I interviewed her like two years ago about this radio project and she said we learned how to process grief collectively and how to share emotions with each other we told each other our own stories of violence and trauma collectively we tried to heal her mom radio is our way to regain control and autonomy over our narratives and collective memories to better organize so for her this super low tech tool of an online grassroots radio was a tool that was very empowering for her community and this is where the sustainability part comes in we don't always need high tech platforms we don't have to like always start with the social media and try to rethink it but sometimes the tools are already out there and the tools have been used for communities around the globe for many many years so this low tech tool where they gathered they reached 300,000 listeners in the region and on the live radio and many more via recordings was such an important tool a digital tool but not a high tech digital tool not a social media digital tool so when I think of a just internet of the future I like to think of these grassroots online radio format a just internet of the future that is all about enabling and powering these infrastructures that communities need in order to organize and to join together so this is one example one vision but then also discussing I'm hoping that we're discussing the deeper layers of like what does justice and sustainability mean to us thank you Julia very good opening statement already I'm gonna introduce Imara now Imara Yanke Sontan and Imara is a social researcher and a social psychologist and she also holds a phd in philosophy from the indigenous university Ciglo Bainton of Jaguar in Bolivia and she as well has a postdoc in food sustainability in Latin America and Africa and currently Imara is at Leuphana University in Lüneburg as a full-time lecturer and also as a fellow research fellow and really looking at sustainability yeah from a decolonial and feminist perspective and also Imara is part of Leuphana's it's a Latin American group for feminist studies and yeah one of the really interesting angles of your work I would say is like this sustainability and green technology but then also this notion of neo-extractivism which I hope that you can tell us a bit more about so very welcome and yeah I would be curious what would be your bold vision of a just of just and sustainable digital technologies what's what's in your mind thank you very much for inviting us and today is a day of indigenous futurism I wanted to start there because we are talking about the apocalypses and when we imagine the apocalypses this time where everything collapse we imagine these apocalypses in the future but actually for us that started 500 years ago with the colonization process that connected both worlds the north and the south and in this connection this connect plurality in our systems so when we imagine the future we imagine resistance responses each response come from first of all the recognition of this plurality what means technology for us what means technology for each one and who is getting the benefit from this technology so in this case when we are talking about greenwashing ideas greenwashing solutions when we are looking to renewable reusable energy when we are thinking a circular economy when we imagine green cars with biofuel and with lithium in the middle so I'm going back to the ontology of some components in our system yeah who has to deal with that in our case Bolivia is the country who has the biggest reserve of lithium in the world near to Chile and Argentina these three countries is a is a triangle of damage and conflict and I wanted to talk about that in this plenary in this session because we are now in a moment of crisis where policymakers are focusing a lot in green solutions and it's fundamental that in the middle of these green solutions we also look for what some people call externalities that we want to put in the center life is in the center our lives systems of lives not just human beings but the whole system is in the center the problem of green energy is that green energy produce inequality and this is called neo extractivism neo extractivism is an example of how colonial ideas continues as a tool for building transformation in the future so when you imagine this future of justice and social and ecological justice we want to put in the center this discussion yeah I will stop now with my first intervention and later I can show some data for you to see what I'm talking about yeah thank you great thank you so much and Lynn is an Lynn car sorry is an assistant professor at the herty school in computer science and public policy and Lynn actually is a physicist so we're trying to bring some different disciplines also to this panel and her research and teaching focuses on methods from statistics and machine learning to inform climate mitigation policy across the energy sector and Lynn is also the co-founder and chair of climate change AI which is a really yeah I would say a really groundbreaking organization that helps to facilitate the work at the intersection of machine learning and climate action so it is anchored within within I would say a social foundation but it's also really clear in forming climate policies and also working with AI technologies or machine learning technologies in order to get to this better future and previously Lynn cuck was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the energy technology and policy group at ETH Zurich so yeah my question is how would your bold vision look like either with machine learning or also with digital technologies in general what would you like to see yeah thanks instead of talking about a bold vision maybe I can try to introduce some like frameworks to think about also sustainability of digital technologies and in particular I am personally interested in climate change mitigation so how can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions either with machine learning and other digital technologies or also from the technology itself and I for the most part I've worked on projects trying to use machine learning as a tool to help with climate change mitigation but recently I also looked into the overall footprint the greenhouse gas emissions footprints of machine learning and here we introduced a framework which is very similar to how people think about digital technologies in general to to start assessing and quantifying also this impact and we distinguish three different aspects from machine learning that are relevant here and the first one is the direct impact which we call computing related impact so this emerges when you run AI algorithms and it comes both from training algorithms but also from inference so when you are using it to do something with your data and it actually turns out that in many many areas this using the algorithms this inference part is is the bigger part even though there's a lot of talk about the training phase and it includes both the energy that's consumed when you are running the algorithms and data centers but also the emissions that are associated with producing the hardware and that's what we already heard about so there's a for especially for small devices there's a lot of share actually that is attributable to the production and the end of life of this hardware and then the next big part is the indirect impact and that's when you are using these technologies to do something and we've heard probably throughout the conference of different projects where AI is being used to help with sustainability goals but what people also do and is applying it in all kinds of ways because it's a it's a it's a neutral technology in that sense or it's a it's a tool to do something and it's being applied in the oil and gas sector for example to help with extraction and to help with sales of oil and gas um it has like lots of kind of areas where it is just meant to reduce costs and not necessarily helping to achieve sustainability goals and probably in some cases also counteracting those so we distinguish the second area of the immediate application impacts where we look at the positive and the negative kinds of ways that it can be applied throughout the economy and then the last part is the system level impacts and that indicates that the technology itself also has implications on the larger socio-economic system for example in ways that you also don't immediately associate with sustainability so if you are using AI and recommender systems and you have targeted advertising you might influence the consumer behavior and might actually have people consume more or consume differently and that might impact actually greenhouse gas emissions potentially even much more than some of the direct impacts that one is talking about similarly their rebound effects their effects of how the technology might lock us into more carbon intensive technologies autonomous driving is an interesting example that might individualized transportation over public transportation which has huge sustainability implications so the system level impacts should not be overlooked and that's why we sort of distinguish the immediate and the system level impacts even though there's sort of an artificial distinction because oftentimes yeah you have to look at the application holistically um so maybe yeah maybe that helps um also this discussion I've only looked at greenhouse gas emissions impacts but of course there are lots of other environmental impacts such as water and of course social social impacts can be assessed in a similar way um but that being said quantification is still really difficult so we can do this for maybe single projects but to understand the overall footprint of digital technologies and of especially of specific digital technologies is really difficult um there exist numbers for all of information and communication technologies they range in a in a few percent um so maybe one to two sometimes more percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to digital technologies um but that's in itself also pretty uncertain number yeah um thank you so yeah it's also um I imagine really difficult to find this quantification of of all these different topics. Camilla I'm gonna um yeah um finally Camilla Nobrega I'm very happy that you're here as well um Camilla is a journalist and currently a PhD student at the um gender division of the free university um she is um researching on mega projects and social environmental justice through uh Latin American feminist and queer perspectives and Camilla also initiated a really cool project called Beyond the Green a laboratory of transmedia narratives investigating exactly these topics and Camilla is based between between Berlin and Rio de Janeiro and um yeah has published a lot of works around these topics so I'm very curious about your vision or your thoughts on this topic on building um just and um sustainable digital futures what what is your vision or your thoughts well thank you for the invitation first and uh thank you all the other panelists for sharing because it's also nice to be the last because everybody kind of holds the space and we uh we hold the space for each other I would say and give energy to continue so first thing I would say usually when we talk about feminisms people think directly about like a specific look on gender but it also can be uh and that's the way I I use to investigate and and working as an activist and articulation and so on to understand feminisms also as a possibility of unveiling different layers of power so uh so that's my main thing on connecting feminisms and social environmental justice lenses and uh so in the beginning I thought okay if I talk from about Brazil and I thought about if I bring a picture of for example the forest burning that I'm pretty sure all of you saw since like 2019 mainly uh I thought okay what kind of feeling it would bring to people if I showed the the forest from you know top down because usually those are the pictures that we see uh and what kind of feeling could it cause in the case I said that satellite images taken between January and June this year show 1,400 square miles of the forest destroyed more than in any six months period in the seven years of recording keeping under the current methodology of the this is from the Environmental Research Institute or IPA as we call in Brazil is a Brazilian non-profit and people like to say that that's a very common quote that this is the extent in four times the size of New York City because we need to compare everything to New York and but I mean it's a lot it's still a lot also if under the government of Bolsonaro I can add that the area destroyed in the first half of 2022 is 80% larger than the same period in 2018 this was the when the government of Bolsonaro started and one of the reasons that I have to check my notes today is because my mind is very accelerated tomorrow is a very important day in Brazil we have the elections but what kind of feeling it brings when you see those pictures like top down from a forest that is burning and usually I have seen I live in Germany I have seen and following and talking many discussions and even I showed sometimes those pictures and I felt okay something is getting wrong because in the end we saw a lot of like the the multiplication of projects with the focus on forest conservation multiplication of projects even from for example big tech companies that just jumped into the debate on environmental conservation with the aim of and like mainly stop or to reduce or to compensate that's a good word that many companies really like uh green how green gas houses emissions but the thing is is it enough like what does it mean when all of these projects start and many of them with the design that's based in the global north and most of as I might have already said like the most consequences of mineral extraction different kinds of neo-stractivisms are actually happening in the I don't like actually this expression but you understand as a global south it's the majority of the world actually so I would talk let's pretend I didn't talk about the forest top down and I will restart because then I want to start a talk I would just say a comment then we we can try try to sum up but I wanted to talk about displacement and about dispossession because what's really behind those forests burning what's behind different kind of mega projects and and in this kind of I include for example mining projects agribusiness projects I follow a lot of them projects and even mega events because that's how I started following them when mega events were happening in the city where I what I come from Rio de Janeiro when the world cup and the olympics happened at the same time what happens what what kind of people what's being displaced when the forest is burning when people are being displaced and usually you see some connections so many traditional traditional communities are being displaced many indigenous communities as I was also saying and many people that are organizing politically it's not of course we can't romanticize idealize and say it happens but there are some connections many groups that are under displacement are trying to fight for different kinds of livelihoods or have different kinds of understanding of nature for example and different kinds of relations to the occupation of territory so when we talk about a forest there that is burning about people being displaced and it's very hard to estimate I would not be honest if I say that I know how many people are being displaced by for example hydropower dams at the moment but the estimatives are something around 80 million people all over the world just about dams and in Rio de Janeiro for example 100 000 people were displaced by the the mega events just to give some like the dimensions of displacement we also see so we see it's not just a material displacement but it's displacement of ways of thinking of living of relating to nature of understanding technologies what is technology for how people understand technologies what kind of things they are organizing in territories when a mega project comes and why do they cross exactly those communities so I bring that because I also think it can connect even with Berlin if we thought we think about what kind of communities are being displaced if if we think about house project and like the the project houses for instance that almost do not exist anymore those are of course it talks about class about race about sexual orientation many queer communities migrant communities are under displacement everywhere so I would say for me and and and in the case of Brazil just to bring some I don't know why many numbers in my head today but if we think we have numbers like people that have been murdered in the last year because they are environmental defenders and according to the global witness there were 27 people just in Brazil but what do we mean about environmental defenders 19 of these people were land rights defenders and then we come to the main thing how to connect like I think we can look to many kinds of projects can be mining agribusiness can be infrastructure to bring internet to some communities to countries everything depending on how they are decided they are crossed by all these intersections of of race of class of sexual orientation of citizenship citizenship ethnicity so a kind of internet that I imagine as a journalist and activist researcher is an internet that is connected to land rights is connected it's an intersectional kind of understanding internet in a decentralized way because monocultures are not not just about agribusiness monocultures are also about thinking about yeah about how we we connect about how we do communication and articulation to access to information and so on I talked too much so I'll stop no thank you so much thank you Camilla um is there any immediate reactions from you yes I have one reaction connected with international division of work because I think that really relates with what you are saying now um when we create this division between global north and global south we are also creating these barriers of who needs to deal with the raw materials who has to offer water energy labor rights for we to have here green energy and in in our perspective from the global south I'm saying as this forced division and it's it's so difficult to enter in green markets here it's so difficult to enter with justice so we have a fight for land how you are saying now we have a fight for access to nature we have a fight for technology also so democratization of technology all is is a discussion that we can put in the center what means for bolivia for example to industrialize lithium that we have to buy the technology from korea we have to buy the technology from united states from germany from china china is concentrated 85 percent of a batteries lithium batteries production in this moment so who has the technology who has the knowledge has the power let's divide this power but not just to produce more because it's also discussion of who consumes more who has the right even to to use green cars who has the right to eat ecological food who has the right to sleep eight ten hours because they have guarantee of a house of a territory and we still fight them for water so this is the opposite agenda that we have when we are talking about lithium because lithium needs water to produce and if we're still buying raw technology we will never be able to transform also our own conditions so this discussion of intersectionality can't be a liberal discussion because why i'm saying that because we have in our sustainable agenda in general intersectionality as a new topic what we are saying we're saying that indigenous people that before the we were not human beings and we had these categories between culture and nature where we put nature down and culture up and which culture western culture so in comparison of that we have indigenous that nobody knows if they are human or not i'm saying things that is still happening why because they don't need to drink they don't need to eat they don't need to sleep they don't need to love they live in the same territories where everything is happening and this is an overlapping of categories class gender racism yes that affect some bodies differently than others so with that agenda sustainability is making a lot of money because they say we are offering now opportunities for people let's think in carbon of settings for them to continue building their economy also we are paying the damages of the climate change offering chances for other people to conserve their nature to conserve the land and the forest this conservation is so racist because we are saying that because you are indigenous you have to take care of nature because nature is your nature is our nature so you take care of our nature at the same time that we're still consuming what we are consuming so this crisis is also an epistemological and ontological crisis when we are going to see nature in the center when we are going to see that people who is involved in this nature is resisting as nature and i'm not going to talk just about indigenous futurism i'm going to talk about plant of futurism so nature is resisting and this resistance is an example of plurality no monoculture diversity diversity of opportunities of building a different system where all of us are included yeah so i provoke this in the table imagine that you also have some ideas to share with us thank you so much and i actually have a question for you lin like because we're talking a lot about like open like open data or information or also knowledge about these topics like for you for example climate mitigation so what is the current data situation like from your perspective what is needed or where is the lack of knowledge and do you also observe it similarly to amara that there is these monopolies um with when it comes to these data around climate or what is what's what's your opinion yeah so um that was also my reaction from from hearing what you're saying i mean it's really we see an incredible risk of concentration of power with digital technologies and especially with ai as well um that's due to skills that's due to infrastructure it's just um we already see that that most of what's happening it's happening and very few big tech companies and um this is also a geographic concentration of power so much of it is happening in north america and in china um so there's absolutely a risk of of of that to happen and this is not big well it's partially because data and and coder held being held back but lots of it is actually already open source but i see it's it's it's a it's a skills problem or capacity problem that most of the training programs are in the us for example most of the universities that do that kind of research and um and then quickly people also get absorbed by a big tech um so we have huge issues bringing um people into small organizations into um small corporations and um you know they mostly they can make a lot of money in certain countries and certain companies and it's really really difficult than to say no i'm taking a big massive pay cut and i go work on a sustainability problem with a smaller organization um so there's definitely danger of of concentration here and then on the data side um also in terms of which kind of problems get tackled um of we see the same thing that there is a lot of data about um again north america europe um but we have very much less data about the rest of the world and that also informs which kind of problems get solved um how well um these solutions perform elsewhere because if we let's say train a machine learning algorithm on some remote sensing task on north america it will naturally perform worse in other environments because we have different kinds of data um so so that problem also is absolutely there we see that of course things like wildfires in in california get addressed quite a bit by with digital technologies that's because it's right in front of silicon valley um so yeah we definitely see that kind of patterns super interesting thank you um julia i would like to um hand over to you so i mean you've been in the open source space also since quite some time you mentioned before like this community-based community-based i don't know activism or working on projects so i'm interesting maybe if you can share some learnings from your work um yeah on opening up opening up technology but also yeah what what are what are learnings from your side yeah um i'm just trying to connect some of the things that have been said because um i think the biggest learning for myself as someone who used to work in a space that called himself the digital right space for like 10 years is to see how many topics are interconnected we had a digital future scattering where camila and katrin were also part of with 50 plus civil society organizations in berlin where we were trying to like move from like just preventing harms that a lot of the civil society organizations are doing super important work but then also what do we want to move towards what are the visions that we have for the work that we are doing what this winning look like for different fields and when we were hosting this event a non-profit organization from the uk called foxcloth brought three content moderators to the conversation content moderators from facebook and tiktok that showed us how immediately connected digital rights are with labor rights like what camila said like how is the internet connected to land rights then how digital topics connected to to labor rights so understanding how these topics intersect and connect and then also understanding how people are organizing and fighting for rights in the space like when we look at content moderation we often perceive these um works as like low skilled click work um people who are working under very bad traumatizing conditions who are shielding us from extreme content and violence online who are like compared to like higher skilled tech workers and not yet organized because they have very strict ndas because they are working in a very highly surveilled work environment so these content moderators are now trying to organize and some of you might ask like what does this have to do with sustainability what does this labor organizing and fighting for for labor rights have to do with the discussions that we're having here at this conference and um there are works councils or for example um amazon um employees for climate justice so people organize on a labor around labor issues but then they're also pushing for more climate justice for holding their organizations and companies to account when it comes to these issues so this and I might be describing that in a very kind of vague way right now but for me it was it's eye-opening how these topics are interconnected and how we cannot like just look at one singular struggle without like also acknowledging labor rights at the same time yeah um and then also this question of the future comes in right so like what kind of future are we actually walking towards Julia maybe because you've been working so much on this like why is it so important to like meet together as a community in a gathering like what you've done and like really think about these futures like why is it important to do this kind of work um from interdisciplinary intersectional angles yeah we started the gathering out with a quote by Gloria Steinem that says without leaps of imagination or dreaming we lose the excitement for possibilities for what's possible because dreaming after all is a form of planning so stepping away from the status quo or like reflecting on the status quo and then trying to a vision like where do we want to go like what are the narratives um that help us to rally people behind our causes is super important in the civil society space and it's something where there is often a lack of resources um a lack of resources that enables us to create and hold these spaces together and to invite like other perspectives in like the perspective of the content moderators and and their working conditions um and then collectively like flashing out mapping out and also discussing about what gives us hope there was one workshop around hope I don't know who participated in it but it was very popular to not only talk about the grievances but also to look at the things that we've accomplished and to learn from community activities and to learn from like labor rights struggles but also other struggles where there's already been a lot accomplished so what how can we use these strategies and methods and project them into the future yeah thank you so much Camilla um in our prep call we also talked a bit about um like taking these contexts into consideration or these intersectionalities and do you have some thoughts on this um or some other thoughts that you want to react to maybe also to Aymara uh about intersectionality in with digital rights and the environment I think because I think I tried to what I was talking before was mainly based like from an intersectional perspective or like uh implication the the oppression is um from a Dominican let's say activist researcher or to curiel that's also part of GLEFAS the group that Aymara takes part as well and it's amazing group so that's why I'm mentioning again um so I think yeah we have to there are many ways of understanding intersectionality as well because the term got very popular and we have those problems with all the terms that get very popular and we just use it so much that sometimes it is disconnected from where it comes so uh thinking what comes to my mind and I know one of the criticisms about it and it's very important is when it's disconnected from what we we all were saying so um from the roots from what kind of struggles come a term as intersectionality and it's a lot based in race struggles like in struggles anti-racism and uh and those intersections with class and so on so um to think about we can maybe maybe make a parallel it's coming to my to my mind and it's connecting with what we were discussing on how also we use the term sustainability and I think sustainability was a term that it's rooted already I think it's different because it's rooted already in in a very cooperative setting like sustainability comes from discussions that since the beginning had the the idea of sustainable development comes from the idea of keeping development going on somehow and making adaptations and and proposing those systems but but limits of the growth the the report from Club de Roma study 30 years now 50 years now yeah and it is still a big reference but it's very important to understand from wheat perspective and it it it comes from understanding sustainability from the the idea of growth the idea of progress and those ideas if they are not contextualized they can also bring a lot of what people are calling environmental colonialism so we talk about data colonialism uh Lynn was talking about the the dangers that can happen in the increase of power concentration and I think ideas behind the green can also cause a lot of harm depending on how we understand them what kind of understanding zone about the nature are we talking about like there is a global crisis yes but are we all in the same boat no of course not so yeah yeah we are both makes I'm I do you want to react to this like maybe you can talk a bit more about this because you've been working also a lot on this critique of sustainable development and also this notion of new extractivism which I would be really interested if you could share some thoughts with us because yeah it's also a new term for me so yeah from your perspective what are your thoughts super thank you for relocating the discussion in new extractivism because it is a new technology term we are building this term also we have the policies in technology yes so new extractivism we understand as a combination between actors that come from the state and actors that come from the market that both together repeat extractive activities for example with food production we are saying that we have food crisis so there is food insecurity and the alternative is to jump to monocultures and we are transforming landscapes to produce more food so this narrative is a new extractive narrative that comes behind a mega-infrastructure so we have in Latin America Il Sacosi plan so they are two plans that has more than 10 years they are building train systems roads infrastructure for producing transformative options for the economy so there is also enchantment there so that means that many indigenous communities indigenous leaders most of the male indigenous leaders they are engaged with these ideas of transforming the economy taking raw materials for their own places to have some benefits yeah and that includes food that includes water extraction so participation I think it's a topic that we can discuss in this space participation and inclusion when we talk about democratization of options I wanted to share with you something that for me is a challenge 2022 this year we had an increase of raw materials demand around the world I'm not saying that this is part of the results of united nation human development report so we have less resources biggest demand and we have the increase of autoritarism around the world so we are losing democratic systems liberal democratic systems they are not perfect they still offering oppression to many people but we are losing democratic systems so in a planet of with crisis political crisis technology is also a discussion of geopolitics and when we imagine this a figure this picture that is in the top probably we can't look for options but actually options are there they multiply not just because we have one enterprise dealing with the agroecology I'm talking about one technology what means agroecology that we produce food building chances for the rest of life in the same land to continue living with us ecological production farming build it with indigenous and with small farming production all of those type of technologies that we have traditional technologies they can be part of our daily life also as an option but if we account always is the same narrative one big enterprise can transform the economy of one country but thousand of small initiatives they are just local initiatives so it's also to change the perspective of who is doing the option the alternative and this is a future possible if we decide how we want to self-determinate our territories how to deal with our modernity how to deal with our technology to share options for life we will change the system is my thought yeah thank you everyone is writing down a lot of thoughts do you still want to share something with us otherwise I would maybe do a small exercise with the audience so I would just add one thing to what I might have just said when I talk about talked about displacement for example it's interesting also to see how many communities engaged for instance in agriculture are also being displaced so once we are talking about alternatives that are trying to resist and in many cases you have we have on the one part of the world like alternative not alternatives but systems that are there for so many decades centuries trying to resist while other kinds of solutions stop down are coming to sometimes the same territories and displacing by some kind of techno solutionisms which is also the reason why you're working a lot on land rights right maybe you can also explain this angle a bit more because it's also a bit complex like why is it so important to think about land rights basically because all the systems we are discussing about an internet one being one of them I don't know if I can call system but Julie can help me in that but I mean part of infrastructures all of them need land we are not talking about abstract things that sometimes we have this feeling that we talk about clouds and things that are somewhere else but they are very rooted on the one hand because all the data centers that need all the natural resources I mean natural resources and also space too because now the big tech for example they really like jumping into techno solutionism so they cause the problem but they also offer solutions so it's a very big deal because there are many projects in partnership for example with municipalities there are many projects that are questionable you know I mean I think the process is more about who is deciding about it who is involved so it's the whole thing about who is taking decisions about an occupation of land and sometimes in those cases there are different kinds of displacement there are different kinds of invasions of territories so that's why looking through land rights is very interesting it's also the the most difficult even for journalists if we look at the case of Brazil maybe you heard about there is one journalist that was murdered Don Phillips a British correspondent in Brazil and he was an environmental journalist but what was he investigating land rights so this is like pointing the finger in in some places I think we need to go and collectively because alone is impossible communities okay I feel like I would like now the audience to maybe take like a few minutes two three minutes either on your own or if you're comfortable speaking with a neighbor just putting down some notes maybe some questions that you would like to ask discuss a bit what yeah what kind of topics we've been talking about and then we're gonna open up for a round of questions and do another closing round of closing statements so I'm gonna yeah maybe for two minutes you can just talk a bit and then we're gonna see what the questions are okay is there some thoughts or questions please thank you all for the very fascinating discussion I really appreciate you bringing up the fact that folks from the larger world are expected to both develop and also provide all the resources and also sustain themselves but I feel like this I'm gonna call this dichotomy between the overdeveloped world and then the over extracted world it's expected that that the current like the overdeveloped world maintains its current level of development but also that the global south has to catch up and develop and be eventually as good as them even though we know that right now with being in the middle of this climate crisis that this is not sustainable in any way your shape or form so I was wondering if you had sort of like any bald visions as Catherine called it for how a de-developed global north might look like or sorry talk could you say one more once more your question how it developed how if you had any sort of visions or for futures of because then we never hear the other side of discussion that what things that absolutely need to happen which is a de-developed global north or what would that look like how how we get there that's that's I find that's something that I'm always looking for in these discussions but we almost never get there so I was wondering if you had any visions for that I can say two things connected with this I don't know if it's the same line that you are asking because English is not my mother tongue so I don't know if they catch you um historical devolution is in the center of our agenda so we have to discuss again who is responsible of this historical damage the second reconnection um it it it seems that the resonance of what is happening there and here can be part of the same agenda so reconnection like what you said some minutes ago we have oligopoly concentrating the benefits more than 60 percent of each production system is in hand of big companies they look like god the new gods of the future right but we can transform this to plurigots to pluri options of transforming so reconnection between consumers and producers a reconnection closing the the value chain transforming benefits who benefit from that so if we think in justice from the global north from to the global south it's not just to close the pipe and to to rethink in how to consume as an individual we need to open a chances to create this dialogue and technology and internet has a lot to offer with that decentralization of technology towards democratization and participation of each actor to do this transformation is necessary for a systemic change do you want to add something camilla or no because you were like yes yes yes i think i might have said many of the things that i would just say that there is actually one very big movement and actually it's usually called the growth and this is the biggest discussion in europe about like kind of changing the system and slowing down and so on but then i get back to what i might already said that is i i've been involved in some of these discussions but when it's not through a lens that is about colonialism and all these intersections it seems also very dangerous because the global north will keep you know like the the power of decisions even about slowing down and what causes we are all it's everything everything is connected it's transnational so but the debate exists and it's interesting to follow is there another question yes hi thank you first of all it has been amazing everything you've said my respects i'm curious now i come from Mexico my partner and i and we have an NGO and we work now that i heard the term global south which is new for me i think we work with the south of the global south you know like the real real real marginalized communities indigenous communities i'd agree um internet brings opportunities but i think it also brings risks i'm curious of what you think of about the risks of bringing internet to marginalized communities that is their first contact with internet i'm thinking for example i don't want them to go to facebook you know i don't want them to or maybe yes but do you can you comment react or the risks of bringing internet to marginalized indigenous communities that will be super helpful thank thank you very much because i'm going to talk about your territory also sapatista movement connected with Kurdistan and with bolivia's a social movement from from chapare they are using internet for this new internationalism transnational social movements dealing together to learn how learn from each other to imagine different futures so it's not just a sense of offering technology because people they are so intelligent they can use in favor of transformation so in brazil we have the same experience woman international woman they say okay we know that everybody can see what we are doing in whatsapp so now we are going to use facebook to put our ideas so who is in the opposite side of us will learn but we also will split information it's a good opportunity for us to create this new internationalism and for that reason also we are here come on i am in germany all the time dealing with the fact that we as immigrants we are cleaning your places we are producing your food but we are not in the center of the discussion in academic spaces how important is to put our voices and for that we need technology yeah just as a part of our my feelings connected with this and i mean there's so many obvious challenges that we're going to explore our threat surveillance like the surveillance capitalism that we have online like that is just looking to exploit the data to in order to like provide you with ads and sell you products this information we've seen that as a big challenge as well with new communities that are getting online that do not have to like hate the word digital literacy but what are facts what is this information that is being spread and we've seen many democracies struggle under this these are the things these are just two things that we're going to export and yeah there's certainly many more like i don't know what you can think of aside from surveillance and misinformation problems that we're exporting also the fact that the majority of the tech gets built by like a very homogenous group of people so you having access doesn't immediately also mean that you have the means to build to shape the space so we're extracting the minerals from sweat the parts of this world but then when it comes to building the software and the tools this is very centralized in a few places where we are building where people are building tools for the majority or what they perceive as the majority and so many other needs and demands are like fall short and thank you also to share i'm curious now also about your organization we can talk i would say also just to include the other part of the thing Julia just said like centralized where i'm part of a collective from brazil called intervoices we fight for democratization of media and we have a project for example called free technologies free territories and i think there are many there are most of the technologies and internet systems we know they are very centralized but there are other ways of doing that like local networks and those kind of stuff and we should all know about it and and i think this is one of the main things one indigenous leader in brazil and i interviewed her for i interviewed her many times during these last years and one of the things she says is i don't want internet if it means losing my territory so i don't want any just any kind of internet i want to be i want my community because it's not i want i don't remember exactly the code but it's in the direction of i want my community to decide what kind of internet we will have because if not we can lose all the rights and i think that's that's a thing so how we can do it from another point of view and amplify different kinds of technologies and ways of connecting that are not centralized i think this is the also for journalists for communicators for all of us it's it's the main thing misinformation is also huge in about the environment about climate uh in this moment because of the corporations that control our communication systems it's too centralized right now thank you for the question thank you and we will send you information one last question one two three thought okay okay i just wanted to share a positive example and i work for a project we organize citizen assemblies in small municipalities all over germany and we are using a software called console i don't know if you've heard about it but it was invented in in madrid and there were the indignados there were protests and then the city of madrid created this platform an open source platform so people can actually post their ideas and share ideas and organize the city and yeah i think it's a very nice example of like a building a just and sustainable future and i wonder maybe this could be something that can be exported yeah what are your thoughts on that can you tell us the name of the software again please it's called console or the console foundation and i know it's being used all over europe maybe even in abroad i don't know yeah i think it's used for citizen participation right so that citizens can get in touch with their local politicians but also make proposals talk about community budgeting like a budget is allocated and then you decide and deliberate on where you want to spend this what you want to spend this budget on these are tools that are certainly important when it comes to leveraging the internet and the digital technologies that we have especially when it comes to increasing transparency also on like a politically decision making so that people can keep track on what is being discussed what is being decided how they can bring their own ideas into the discussion and see what others around them think so these deliberative tools we've seen that in taiwan as well when it comes to discussions around certain regulations i think they started out by discussing how uber should be regulated and by having discourses that do not necessarily lead to a divide but that center around how do you find finding consent so when we look at social media platforms and like people commenting like a lot of hateful comments on statements that people are making there's also digital participation tools that are focusing around consent polis is one of them that would be an example where people can like submit ideas but they cannot comment on other ideas they can like rate other ideas up and like create their own ideas and see how the consent bubbles are moving and like what the different opinions in the space are so i think these experiments are interesting and can definitely be helpful for improving the democracies we live in and the voices that get heard in these democracies so building it also into the technology and like really making sure that it's around consent and not about polarization for example okay thank you so much i think this was a lot of content i think my main takeaways were like being aware of context and really working with intersections and like trying to bring all these difference perspective and different lived experiences together and we also talked about monocultures or in general monopolies and how important it is to really bring them down and yeah work against that and then obviously we also talked about open data we've talked about climate mitigation and also about indigenous rights and indigenous lands so i would like to close this round because you are all working actually on really really great projects so is there something that people can follow on or can look up or is there also some last final thoughts that are still on your mind and don't you would like to say i can maybe share another positive example i co-founded an organization with now more than 50 volunteers and even some staff members and we we are totally online like we have met mostly in the digital space and we run the entire organization in the digital digital space of course people meet each other in person every now and then around the world but of course without the internet we couldn't have even gotten together and have like a global community around the topic now our topic is climate change and machine learning but you know digital tools made this possible but what we found is that you know the social tissue but you know the the connections and the organizational form behind us is i think the the main driving force um it's just that we are able to meet you know on a daily basis online but um it still needs people and and agendas and topics to to achieve something i am um so earlier this year we launched 25 feminist tech principles and we're now exploring so the principles go from equity and visibility along the supply chain to designing for informed consent and many others and we're now exploring how we can feed these principles into policy discussions um and it's 25 principle sorry 12 principles by 25 people from around the globe um so this is one thing that we're working on where we're looking for collaborators that understand policy processes that have an overview what's going on and where where we can connect with these principles also the german digital strategy now has a short paragraph on digital tech or feminist tech policy so this could be a jumping off point for these discussions and then we're also looking at societal risk assessment so oftentimes when we look at risk assessments in tech we're so there's such a strong focus on the individual because the regulators are looking at it through a consumer protection lens um but what would a framework look like that can help us to um talk about the environment environmental and sustainable harms um yeah and we are exploring how such a framework would help us to better assess the risks of some of the technologies that are being built right now so if people are interested in these topics this is something we're working on at super um and yeah please join us in in this work nice thank you camilla do you want to go next yeah before i just wanted to mention the name because sometimes i i keep talking and thinking at the same time but the indigenous leader that i mentioned because i was like i didn't mention alexandra munduruku in case people want to also get to know her because she's amazing and yeah i mean my collective that i mentioned is called intervosis so we are more than a hundred people in brazil fighting for media democratization so we try to find the intersections on the one hand among monopolies so digital monopolies now we are launching a book about that land monopolies and traditional media monopolies because in brazil we have a very concentrated media so our biggest problem some years ago when i entered the collective was the concentration of media traditional media in the hands of private companies in brazil now our our our challenge got much bigger with all the transnational corporations on communication but we also try to bring the the other possibilities so we work with different communities and we are part of as well not just work with but we are very different people working on local and feminist from from any perspectives of of media yeah and i have the project beyond the green in case people want to like i'm it's it's a project i'm fighting for but with the aim of bringing together feminist lenses different formats of investigation about all these topics about mainly mega projects so bringing art journalism research activism and i have been doing this in the last years and hope to continue and have more things about it yes thank you so much thank you i will connect with the idea of digitalization and oral voices in front of us are so vulnerable in this moment because orality as an strategic as an traditional strategic from territories was an option to share knowledge from the past to the present how we say in the in aimara's perspective aimara is the name of my own place my own nation too we say put the past in the front to go to the future and in in this case orality can be transformed by digitalization so how can we also rethink technology to share our own plural systems of thinking and this is one option that come for all of us to imagine not monocultures but pluricultures so i was imagining the future as a future where we are still alive and who will tell this story this story will be tell it by the protagonist of this story so it's a great opportunity this moment to create these platforms where we can imagine different different connections between territories we are doing now in lefas that is the space where i'm working as an activist we are doing this small schools we call anti-racist schools in those places one strategic that is so important is to share knowledge on internet why they are doing that because in it we are working now in republica dominicana and it internet connection is very low but what is going on in it is affecting the whole system so we need to hear what is going on there which voices we are going to elevate this has to be a bottom-up initiative not a top-down initiative so it's reimagined the future also with others who are not just the vulnerable they're closing this binarism of vulnerability and privileges or men and women or south and north how we integrate this system because all of us we are here great thank you so much and yeah that's it thank you so much for coming and for your interest and thank you to all the panelists for all your thoughts and ideas and sharing all of that with us so yeah thanks a lot