[Aquí en español] The zero draft of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) was published a few days ago. Regarding its position on digitalization and its environmental impacts, we at the Latin American Institute of Terraforming believe it is important to emphasize the following:
The 21st century is marked by two major processes: the climate and ecological crisis and the fast digitalization of the planet.
Achieving sustainable development goals cannot only mean focusing on the possibilities of digitization but also taking the socio-environmental impacts of digital technologies seriously not to jeopardize SDGs such as “sustainable cities and communities,” “responsible consumption and production,” “climate action,” and “life on land.”
The technologies global production chain begins in El Estor, Guatemala, with nickel and rare earth elements extraction to support the world's digital infrastructure. Its mining has polluted Lake Izabal, exterminated biodiversity, and sickened and depleted indigenous populations, but in the name of techno-capitalism and its progress, who cares.
The map developed by Coding Rights clearly shows the material basis of digital technologies and how this material base has a differentiated power dynamic between North and South, but also between East and West. And the map makes more visible the global chain of production of digital technologies that, as in all capitalism, displaces the socio-environmental effects to the most marginalized populations.
But I would also like to reflect on something crucial for any analysis of digitalization in the 21st century: the climate and ecological crisis we are experiencing, but in its geopolitical sense.
This January 25, 2023, a new version of Privacy Camp, an annual conference jointly organized by EDRi, VUB-LSTS, Privacy Salon vzw and the Institute for European Studies at USL-B, was held.
The Latin American Institute of Terraforming was present at the panel “Solidarity not solutionism: digital infrastructure for the planet”, and this was our first five-minute intervention to deepen the conversation.
Representing civil society, we made a five-minute statement at the event “Digital technologies in the green transition: Friend or foe?” as one of the ministerial sessions of the OECD Digital Economy Ministerial Meeting held in Gran Canaria, Spain. You can read it here:
According to the World Economic Forum (which brings together the most powerful elite of world capitalism), “a twin transition approach recognizes that there is a huge and largely untapped opportunity for technology and data to drive sustainability goals. Rather than treating digital and sustainability in isolation, a twin transition strategy combines these critical functions to unlock huge benefits in terms of efficiency and productivity”.
At our institute, we are very critical of this concept. And we had the opportunity to make a two-minute statement at the public event “Twin Transition (Green and Digital) – Roundtable” -on the “stakeholder day”- in the context of the OECD Digital Economy Ministerial Meeting held in Gran Canaria, Spain. You can read it here:
If you are in Barcelona, you can go to the Santa Monica arts center from June 9 to August 21 to see the exhibition “La irrupció” (free admission) curated by Marta Gracia, Jara Rocha, and Enric Puig Punyet. More than twenty international and local works will open a dialogue about the complex circumstances we are living on the planet after the disruption of the pandemic.
Jara Rocha <3 also invited us to think about an itinerary, which you can do in person from now until August 21, 2022. Curiously, as many of these works are digital, you can also do the itinerary remotely, completing the pieces from your imagination, ghosts, and desires. You can find it right here.
The Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) has finally published its final Action Plan. We discuss some of its aspects based on our comments on its preliminary draft.
Good news for us:
In general, it's challenging to compete with the imaginaries imposed by hegemonic digital technology where concepts such as “digital revolution” and “disruption” champion every time a problematic aspect is raised. The first reading of the CODES Action Plan draft, in this sense, raised an alert: once again, the mere (commercial) promise of digital technologies seemed to have more relevance than the scientific evidence on the effects of digitization (those we know and, also, very important in the planetary limits in which we find ourselves, those we do not know) on the environment. We made this apprehension known in our comments. On that occasion, we stated:
”...if CODES really wants to give greater importance to the promises of digitization concerning sustainability rather than to the environmental damage and challenges that lie ahead due to the deployment of the technologies themselves, we urge that this strategy be rethought for at least two reasons. On the one hand, and as various academic literature has recognized, the digital promise of the future is an integral part of the “capitalism as usual” engine that this same document points to as a problematic attitude. And on the other, because the environmental damage of digital technologies is real, as are its challenges, and it seems unrealistic – especially in line with official IPCC documentation – that it is not given at least the same level of importance in the text.”
We’re glad that a certain empty optimism about digitization has been left behind in the final document. A turnaround is visible from the very first pages:
(before)
(after)
