If you’re anything like us, technology today feels like a double edged sword. We use the internet, phones, apps and AI (probably) everyday, despite our inklings that these technologies are not necessarily good for the planet, people or political systems. From our food delivery apps to pinging emails, these technologies are extremely convenient and our lives can feel “locked” into these digital infrastructures. Once we start looking at the environmental costs of these technologies, it feels even worse.
Luckily for us, we had the nature campaigner and technologist, Kalpana Arias, join us on Climate Curious and share her alternative visions for technology and digital infrastructure. Inspired by her work in Guerilla gardening, tech for good and “glitch feminism”, Kalpana is pushing for technology that is based on community needs, creativity and nature – rather than the big tech, control and convenience.
From guerilla gardening to tech ethics
When Kalpana started guerilla gardening during the Covid-19 pandemic, she thought it would be so much easier for her and her fellow gardeners if they could easily access the information they needed. But our current information systems don’t lend themselves to easily and accessibly sharing this kind of knowledge. It got her thinking more widely about the technologies we use everyday without thinking about it:
“So many times the technologies that we do have around us, we’ve just opted into. We’ve subscribed without even thinking about, like, do we actually wanna have a relationship with this app or this phone? I think being critical and thinking about our relationship with the tools around us is super important and how I started thinking about wanting to build my own platforms.”
After all, these technologies are still very new and Kalpana thinks we need to think more deeply about how we regulate and think about our digital and cyberspaces. In particular Kalpana realised that the wider infrastructure around these convenient bits of tech is masking a lack of true choice and/or imagination:
“We think we have all of this choice, but in reality, unless you are aware of who’s creating these platforms, that choice is done for you. It’s big tech, big oil, big agriculture. They’re all kind of in the same vein of industries, where you have an agglomeration of companies that are creating a number of platforms.”
After all, as Kalpana, and Climate Curious co-hosts, Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst, discuss in the episode, Why we need bugs, not bots, the internet originates from research and work for the US military. Tim Berners Lee is famous for creating the world wide web in the 1990s, but the beginnings of the internet actually began much earlier during the Cold War. In the 1950s, American scientists were exploring how to keep the military connected with one another if there was a major attack by the Soviet Union, sparking research into information and digital systems that would connect computers and allow information sharing like never before. Fun fact: the first two computers able to connect and send messages to one another was in 1965, when scientists Lawrence Roberts and Leonard Kleinrock managed to send a message from a computer at UCLA to a computer at Stanford University. (Enter the rabbit hole and read more about the history of the internet here).
Fast forward to today and a similar story is playing out with current headlines about the use of AI in conflict. For instance, the current US administration and the Department of War recently ended a contract with Anthropic (Claude AI) after they raised concerns about the use of AI for mass surveillance and fully automated weapons. Similarly OpenAI has now signed a contract with the Department of War despite deep concerns by many users. Of course that’s not forgetting the environmental impact of AI, such as the negative impact of data process centres for many local communities. So, how do we start thinking about – and creating – technology that is based on entirely different principles to the military complex, silicon valley, or big oil industries?
Nature as technology
For Kalpana, she turned to nature as a guide; for her “nature is a deep form of technology and intelligence.” She asks what would happen if we went beyond the binary choice of picking nature or technology and instead bring them closer together? She sees how nature and technology overlap – such as “how seeds can be a form of technology because their data forms are programmed to kind of grow into a flower” – and her work explores what happens when you look at nature through a “biological intelligence lens”. Her hope is that reframing nature and technology in such a way opens up far more possibilities and imagined futures than the ones presented to us currently.
In creating her guerilla gardening platform, Glitch, Kalpana and her team were looking to put these ideas into practice:
“If you’ve just moved into a neighborhood and you wanna find out where your local park is, you’re gonna use Google Maps or something like it. But there’s just a huge problem with all of these really big tech companies, because they don’t really cater towards local public needs…”
Glitch aims to solve this lack of timely, helpful data about your local area. The platform allows individuals to input data directly and more:
“When you go on the platform, you can ask Glitch questions about your local green space. Also it gives you these ideas of placemaking [for] where you live in and the streets that you pass on your day-to-day basis, and what grey spaces could become green. In that way you can become this kind of ecological citizen that participates in your neighbourhood.”
You can download Glitch on your phone and experience your local space in a different way. As Kalpana says, the platform was made to have the input from local people rather than more distant, centralised big tech platforms – so it encourages citizens to get involved.
Bug not bot
Another unique part of the Glitch platform is how the “chat” function is called a bug, not a bot. Kalpana explains:
“You can speak to a chat bug called Glitch. It’s a bug instead of a bot because we also wanna promote this idea of relationship building with your technology. We see technology as a species rather than a tool that you can interact with”
It might seem quite scary to see technology as a species rather than a tool, but again this is inspired by Kalpana’s reframing of nature and technology to bring these two opposites together and see what happens. Glitch the bug is fed biodiversity and local data points by citizens and can then use the generative chat function to create new interactions and conversations as users need. Kalpana thinks that “if we can give it [technology] this kind of form of agency and power” that maybe something new, something beyond the human imagination, can come to realisation.
These ideas are inspired by multiple thinkers around technology, philosophy and nature, in particular, the work of Legacy Russell, who wrote the book Glitch Feminism. Kalpana sees glitch feminism as how errors and malfunctions “can disrupt current technologies so that we can essentially create something new” and encourages us to “think about the different worlds that the internet provides for different types of people and the way that it does connect us and can bring us together.” Glitch attempts to do that – disrupting both IRL and digital spaces to make grey spaces green and connect citizens in a new way.
New technology futures
Towards the end of the conversation, Kalpana reminds us of the famous Andre Lorde essay and quote, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Her work and many other similar technologists are trying to (re)imagine what technology looks like when you take it out of these systems that were built from the military, big tech, big oil etc. She ends on a really hopeful note:
“I think we just need to build new tools altogether and perhaps what can help us build all of those tools is the “more than human”, because we’re constricted in our human imagination… We need new imaginaries and I think from that place, who knows where we can go? We do need guardrails and the right ethics to lead us in the way, but I think, this world is crumbling as it is, and we need new ways and new forms of living.”
This possibility – to create new forms of living, to see technology as working in tandem with nature and rethinking traditional systems of power – feels very hopeful. Our thanks goes to Kalpana for offering this new perspective on technology for the Climate Curious team! We will be sure to keep bringing listeners the latest on tech philosophy so you can decide what kind of tech future you want to help create. Finally, Kalpana mentioned many thinkers, groups and organisations in her episode and we’ve collated those links below for anyone interested in learning more.
Further reading on glitch feminism, tech philosophy and more
– Cyber collective and Tazin Khan
– Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
– Glitch Feminisms by Legacy Russell
– Biodesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Deep Green by Claudia Pasquero & Marco Poletto
– Softer Digital Futures
– Writings & Works by Alex Wolf
Lead image photo credit: Sebastiankauer, Flickr, CC by 2.0.
