#4 Digital Earth Talks x Holly Jean Buck
The fourth Digital Earth Talk features author, geographer and environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck.
At this Digital Earth Talks, Holly Jean Buck and the Digital Earth Fellows discuss humane ways of holding countries and companies accountable for their grand promises of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The elusive, catch-all term for reaching carbon neutrality is “net-zero.” Yet, “net-zero” is defined and regulated by the very same companies that profit off of fossil fuels. Hence, as of now the promise of net-zero is a veneer of good intentions which protects the status quo. Challenging and countering this, Holly Jean Buck explores how public data platforms could help people seize the definition and regulation of “net-zero” in order to hold both countries and companies accountable.
We hosted a live discussion with the Digital Earth Fellows in conversation with Holly Jean Buck, moderated by Nora N. Khan, on June 8, 2021.
‘‘Platform governance is climate governance.’’
STATEMENT FROM THE SPEAKER, HOLLY JEAN BUCK
Countries and companies are setting ambitious new net-zero emission targets painting pictures of green carbon neutral futures. Yet, “net-zero” is a deceiving term, as it does not necessarily equal carbon neutrality and can be manipulated easily. A company can utilise unsustainable means of production, and create another company that will neutralise it. Hence, the very measurements for a carbon neutral future are obscured to the point that we do not know when we even reach net-zero.
Meeting net-zero climate goals will require vast amounts of data and computation: from monitoring remaining emissions to tracking carbon removals and exchanging between them. There is a version of this which is inhumane: where a few companies have a monopoly on the standards and information transfer, and are making fantastic profits from the situation. There is a version of it where the system simply does not work: there is too much fraud in reporting of emissions and removals, and no one trusts it. But there is a more humane version, where platforms are collaboratively designed, citizens can use them for accountability, and citizens have the planning tools to make sure that biodiversity, health, and justice goals are not lost in the rush to account for carbon. A key to building this future is to make platforms not just regulated, but publicly developed and owned.
PARTICIPANTS
Speaker • Holly Jean Buck is a geographer and environmental social scientist studying how emerging technologies can help address environmental challenges and build a regenerative society. Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, where she teaches environmental justice. She is the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration and Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough. She holds a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University, and a M.Sc. in Human Ecology from Lund University in Sweden.
Moderator • Nora N. Khan is a writer of criticism on digital visual culture and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research specifically focuses on experimental art and music practices that make arguments through software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Khan is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media; she teaches graduate students critical theory and artistic research, critical writing both for artists and designers, and history of digital media.
Fellow • Alexandra Anikina is a researcher, media artist, filmmaker, and curator working with the themes of algorithmic culture and critical posthumanities. Anikina uses the history of Soviet media technologies to probe the pervasive Western cosmologies of technological progress and to critique the temporalities of data governance and control.
Fellow • Antonio Macotela is a multidisciplinary artist, exploring the idea of economy as a mediatory device through which social relations are established. Macotela draws a parallel between the Q’aqchas - a group of pirate ore miners in the eighteenth century - and a group of contemporary hackers in Spain. Utilising the figure of the hacker, they explore narratives of resistance and strategies of subversion.
Fellow • Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist. They engage with the planet from a position of estrangement, where access to the planet as a spiritual-material object has been denied, and proposes reengineering tools and methods of measuring, monitoring, modelling, and otherwise remotely accessing the world for a project of alternative planetary imagination linking black and indigenous techno-cultures in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Fellow • Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. His performances, installations, and AI programs narrate a mythology that interrogates narratives shaping our present. Rahal will create a mythology that remixes folklore, urban legends, and science fiction to interrogate the mythic narratives that construct our digital reality.
Fellow • Sheila Chukwulozie defines herself as an Igbo Cyborg contending with the state of being simultaneously fixed and fluid, object and subject, matter and spirit, digital and analog, able and unable, native and migrant. They are working with Uzoma Chidumaga Orji. They will explore a paradigm of verbal technology rooted in Igbo cosmology, and specifically in the concept of time. Through storytelling, linguistic excavations, and investigations of perceptual apparatuses, the duo advances the notion of Igbo proverbs as a technology.
Fellow • Uzoma Chidumaga Orji creates visual metaphors, scenography, and interactive digital experiences that interrogate post-colonial identity crises. They are working with Sheila Chukwulozie. They will explore a paradigm of verbal technology rooted in Igbo cosmology, and specifically in the concept of time. Through storytelling, linguistic excavations, and investigations of perceptual apparatuses, the duo advances the notion of Igbo proverbs as a technology.
Fellow • Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, and performance. She explores themes of race, identity, family history, and technology. Perry will unpack the relationship between industrial metal minerals and geological time, slavery, and industrialised labour in the United States and beyond. Recently, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and racial violence, their project questions the role of art and its capacity for causing change.
Fellow • Temitayo Ogunbiyi explores environment, line, and representation. Moving between mediums such as drawing, painting, and installation, her work links current events, anthropological histories, and botanical cultures. Ogunbiyi confronts systems of surveillance and behaviour in digital space through notions of play. By considering the Planetary Sensorium as a monitoring structure birthed from Western constructs, she investigates how play can subvert and highlight its pervasive surveillance systems.
About Digital Earth Talks
How do we imagine a humane Digital Earth to come? Join the discussion and explore the visions of leading voices in art, tech, and philosophy from around the world.
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