Скачать или смотреть James Maguire - Eco-Tech Imaginaries: Data, Resources, and Future Colonialisms

This talk by James Maguire on "Eco-Tech Imaginaries: Data, Resources, and Future Colonialisms" was part of the workshop series "Across the Layers: Scientific Knowledge Production, Planetary Resources, and Data Centres". The online workshop series was organised in collaboration between the Collaborative Research Centre “Virtual Lifeworlds”, the research project “Virtual Infrastructures” and the RUST-lab at the Ruhr-University Bochum by Leman Çelik, Stefan Laser, Estrid Sørensen and Lynn Werner.

Across the Layers: https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ac...
RUSTlab: https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
Research Project "Virtual Infrastructures": https://www.sfb1567.ruhr-uni-bochum.d...

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While the centrality of data and digital infrastructures – not to say computation more broadly – are becoming more acknowledged within anthropological and STS thinking on climate futures, the forms and connectivities between these infrastructures and the futures they imply remain somewhat underarticulated. This talk positions itself within this space by describing the work of a bio-tech data collective, Grow Your Own Cloud (GYOC). Responding to the call for more localised, collectivised, and sustainable digital infrastructures, this group have produced a series of speculative prototypes that chart the design pathways for storing data in DNA (plants, flowers, forests).

The talk explores the role of speculative methodologies in imagining more desirable climate futures while critically engaging with the ethical implications of such work. The talk argues that these eco-tech visions of integrating nature and technology in new, and climate friendly, ways problematically reproduce some of the central tenets of colonialism’s extractivist resource logics. Rather than a drive to change the structures of the data economy – and the range of discriminatory and predatory practices it facilitates – such prototypes allow a particular form of gaze that continues to see “solutions” to “problems” through the same troubled optics of colonizing and extraction. The paper ends with a mediation on how to extract ourselves from some of the more fossilized logics at the heart of transition thinking.