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Embrace the “glitch” to unlock more sustainable, collective and joyful futures, says nature campaigner Kalpana Arias on the Climate Curious podcast. In conversation with Ben Hurst and Maryam Pasha, Kalpana explores the surprising nature/tech overlap, and how “Glitch Feminism” can help us take back power in our digital spaces, and in turn, reclaim our relationship with tech as a key step in accelerating climate action.
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Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
Welcome to Climate Quickies
[00:00:00] Maryam Pasha: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite-sized nuggets of climate Goodness. From our TEDxLondon experts in under ten minutes
Tech Built for Whom
[00:00:08] Ben Hurst: in this week’s climate, curious, we are reaching into our pockets, pulling out that smart piece of glass that we will carry [00:00:15] around and asking How am I engaging with this? And who was this built for?
[00:00:20] Ben Hurst: We are joined by technologists and eco activists. Carpenter Arias, who’s pulling back the curtain on the so-called tech bro culture that surrounds some of our most [00:00:30] used apps, and thinking about why instead these might actually be thinly veiled attempts at helping people replace their mothers. Today you are gonna get a better perspective on how gaining autonomy over the digital spaces you [00:00:45] partake in also helps accelerate climate action on how to view nature as the original high tech.
[00:00:51] Ben Hurst: Here’s Kalpana Arias. Stay curious.
Apps Replacing Mum
[00:00:57] Kalpana Arias: So I really love Taz [00:01:00] Khan, who is a scholar and the creator of Cyber Collective. And she often talks about the technologies that we kind of perform with our sort of technologies of convenience and all of these kind of conveniences are how we navigate our day-to-day [00:01:15] lives. But a lot of the kind of platforms and apps that we.
[00:01:18] Kalpana Arias: Kind of look to are there to sort of replace this idea of the female or the mother. Oh, so we now, we now have apps that, you know, deliver food to us, that do our laundry, that pick us up from school or, [00:01:30] you know, all of these things that are kind of created from this kind of cisgendered male. White male perspective.
[00:01:37] Ben Hurst: Oh
[00:01:37] Maryam Pasha: no,
[00:01:37] Ben Hurst: this is my
[00:01:38] Maryam Pasha: favorite. Can I say this
[00:01:39] Ben Hurst: is,
[00:01:39] Maryam Pasha: I’ve heard this before too, and this is my favorite thing, is when someone points out that all the kind of [00:01:45] apps that get funding in Silicon Valley are basically just a bunch of young boys trying to replace their moms. Yeah. And you’re like, oh my God. It’s like the driving you somewhere doing your laundry cooking for you.
[00:01:58] Maryam Pasha: It’s
[00:01:58] Ben Hurst: like, I hate it and I hate it,
[00:01:59] Kalpana Arias: and
[00:01:59] Ben Hurst: [00:02:00] it’s kind of, this is gonna really fuck up the way I use my phone. So it’s really the, I’m gonna have to delete Deliveroo.
[00:02:07] Kalpana Arias: No, I mean I still use Deliveroo, I use Uber. I use these apps. But I think having the consciousness there that’s so interesting.
Illusion of Choice
[00:02:13] Kalpana Arias: We, what we get taken away from in our relationship to technology.
[00:02:17] Kalpana Arias: 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. Right. Um, and it’s, it’s very much like, it’s big tech, [00:02:30] big oil, big agriculture. They’re all kind of in the same vein of industries where you have a agglomeration of companies that are.
[00:02:37] Kalpana Arias: Creating a number of platforms. So you think that you have all of this choice and all of this availability, and this is why I really love this [00:02:45] kind of hacktivist, um, punk DIY tech culture because communities and people are deciding for themselves what they would like to see, what they wanna interact with.
[00:02:53] Kalpana Arias: And so you can build it, but unfortunately, like also, for example. If you have an iPhone and if you’re [00:03:00] wanting to build an app, it has to subscribe to certain design styles, design styles that then create certain predictabilities and behavior part patterns, um, across the way that you’re using your technology.
[00:03:12] Kalpana Arias: Um, that all kind of point to, you know, [00:03:15] technologies of addiction and all of this kind of behavior that we’re now seeing day to day. So. We also kinda have to have to think about the infrastructures and the kind of mechanics of the platforms and the softwares that we’re building in.
[00:03:28] Ben Hurst: Man, this is, this is crazy.
[00:03:29] Ben Hurst: It [00:03:30] sounds like you’ve gone down a serious rabbit hole here. Like this is like, ’cause this is like a, a very niche. Well, is it very niche? No, because technology literally rules the way that we live our lives, and it’s everything that we interact with every day. Mm. But how did [00:03:45] you find yourself at, at this point?
[00:03:47] Ben Hurst: Like, ha has this been something you’ve always been interested in in terms of tech? Or is this like a new, a new thing that you’ve just recently started exploring?
[00:03:55] Kalpana Arias: Yeah, that’s a good question.
Nature as High Tech
[00:03:56] Kalpana Arias: I mean. So I grew up with this kind of sense and understanding that nature is a deep form of technology and intelligence.
[00:04:04] Kalpana Arias: So, you know, when we talk about things like ai, there’s artificial intelligence, but there also, there’s also low tech understandings of it. And when I say low tech, it’s like local, traditionally collo. [00:04:15] Ecological knowledge. Um, so that’s looking at like ancestral intelligences and how seeds can be a form of technology because their data forms programmed to kind of grow into a flower.
[00:04:25] Kalpana Arias: Um, so if we can look at nature through the lens, through this [00:04:30] kind of biological intelligence lens, it kind of distorts this idea of technology and it kind of reframes it so that we can. Maybe form a better relationship to it.
[00:04:42] Ben Hurst: That’s crazy because in my mind the next question I was gonna [00:04:45] ask you was how do the two worlds collide?
[00:04:47] Ben Hurst: But what you are actually saying is that they are one in the same
[00:04:50] Kalpana Arias: thing and one in the same.
Beyond False Binaries
[00:04:51] Kalpana Arias: And yeah, I mean this points to that point, like the binary point that you were saying earlier. Um, you know, I mean, we live, we’re. We, we live in this kind of imaginary of, of binaries, of, you know, it’s black and white, it’s nature and urban.
[00:05:05] Kalpana Arias: It’s gray or green, um, and it’s technology or nature, but. We know that the crisis that we’re facing is a crisis of [00:05:15] relationships. So when we are kind of dissecting the two from the middle and not allowing them to kind of co-create with one another, um, I think we’re digging ourselves into like this very small imaginary that is ruining the world.
[00:05:27] Kalpana Arias: Um, so I’m really interested in actually like, how [00:05:30] do we connect those bridges and those pathways so that we can have a world of plurality. Pluralities where different perspectives, different thoughts, different, you know, our phones could be totally different and it’s that they don’t have to be this black box, but they [00:05:45] can exist in a myriad of ways.
[00:05:48] Maryam Pasha: It’s so there’s something you said earlier that I think is so interesting to me and I wondered if you could expand on it a bit.
Hackers Then and Now
[00:05:54] Maryam Pasha: I. Yeah, when I was growing up with technology, which is like maybe a little bit further back, one of the things I loved about technology, like traditional, I guess not traditional technology, how do we talk about computer based ones and zeroes programming thing.
[00:06:09] Matrix.
[00:06:09] Maryam Pasha: Yeah, yeah. Was was this idea that it came from a. It was, it became, it became a counterculture, you know, it was like the [00:06:15] hackers, it was, it was subversive, right? Mm-hmm. Like in the early days that kind of like computer based technology was subversive. It was, it was like breaking borders, like, you know, like geographic borders.
[00:06:28] Maryam Pasha: It was, you know, you were like [00:06:30] hacking phone calls. You were, you were really actually subverting the status quo. Mm-hmm. And now somehow we’ve lost, in my mind, we’ve kinda lost.
[00:06:40] Kalpana Arias: Mm.
[00:06:40] Maryam Pasha: It’s, it’s like what were the kind of hackers and the counterculture and now [00:06:45] like the tech bros and the financiers and like the, the, the, the phones destroying our kind of brains.
[00:06:53] Maryam Pasha: And I do you, as you started to go into this, are you seeing like a resurgence of kind of a hacker [00:07:00] counterculture coming out of this in a different way?
[00:07:04] Kalpana Arias: For sure. I think there is a hundred percent, but at the same time.
Internet Military Roots
[00:07:09] Kalpana Arias: Again, I go deep down into the level of infrastructure, like when the, when the internet came out.
[00:07:14] Kalpana Arias: Mm. It was [00:07:15] seen as this kind of like, you know, utopia.
[00:07:17] Maryam Pasha: Yeah.
[00:07:17] Kalpana Arias: And because a lot of people had more freedom and there was kind of like hacking culture, but the internet kind of rose out. Of military structures. Mm. So I think we have to kind of be honest with [00:07:30] ourselves on the, the, the, the base and the foundation in order to really rebuild from a place that isn’t, you know, from control or surveillance.
[00:07:39] Kalpana Arias: Right. Um,
[00:07:40] Ben Hurst: you said, you said that internet came from military. Structures.
[00:07:44] Kalpana Arias: [00:07:45] Yes. So I think it was, I’m gonna, I’m gonna,
[00:07:47] Maryam Pasha: it was darpa.
[00:07:48] Kalpana Arias: This up was Darnet. It was, yes. Thank you.
[00:07:51] Ben Hurst: What, what, what, what’s going on? What’s happening? What’s, who’s, who’s darpa uh, who is that
[00:07:56] guy?
[00:07:56] Maryam Pasha: History lesson is that the internet was originally like for military to [00:08:00] communicate with each other across.
[00:08:02] Ben Hurst: No way do people know this. Everybody knows this. It’s just me. I don’t know this. No, it’s just else. I know it is a
[00:08:06] Maryam Pasha: common knowledge. I think it’s like if you grew up at that time. Right.
[00:08:10] Ben Hurst: I feel like I did
[00:08:11] Maryam Pasha: well. No,
[00:08:12] Ben Hurst: I was there.
[00:08:14] Maryam Pasha: No, but the thing is, [00:08:15] when do you first remember going online?
[00:08:17] Ben Hurst: Oh, I was probably about.
[00:08:20] Ben Hurst: Eight, nine.
[00:08:21] Maryam Pasha: Yeah. Like dial, I didn’t get online until I was like 13. Right, right. Like that was the first time we could get a dial in connection and a dial up connection. I hope. You know? So, I [00:08:30] think even just if you were like fi, if you’re like basically five or six years older Yeah. Than you are, you kind of have a little bit more of that.
[00:08:36] Ben Hurst: Yeah. That’s why even what the conspiracy was.
[00:08:38] Kalpana Arias: Yeah. Yeah.
Centralization and DIY Rebuild
[00:08:38] Kalpana Arias: And I think it points to this kind of culture of like centralization. And while you know, again, there’s convenience in centralizing things. There’s also, um, this kind of pulling out of identity. Yeah. Pulling out of culture, uh, things become, become homogenized.
[00:08:56] Kalpana Arias: Yeah. And there’s a danger in that. And so I think where like hacking [00:09:00] or DIY cultures come into play is that you get to kind of rebuild things from scratch and actually build things that are for your community.
Glitch Feminism and Connection
[00:09:08] Kalpana Arias: There’s this book from 2011 that is called Being Alone Together, or Alone Together. And it talks about the internet kind of promoting this culture of isolation.
[00:09:19] Kalpana Arias: This kind of propaganda, I think promotes this sort of misinformation of like the internet as kind of dividing us or, you know, creating this kind of culture of loneliness. [00:09:30] Um, when in fact like the internet to us actually created a safe place for a lot of people and for a lot of like nonconforming bodies and, um.
[00:09:38] Kalpana Arias: The best person I think that speaks about this so well is Legacy Russell, who wrote this book called Glitch Feminism, which [00:09:45] is also kind of where what was really inspired, um, our platform to call Glitch, um, which looks at the ways that we can disrupt current technologies so that we can essentially create something new.
[00:09:56] Kalpana Arias: Um, and. I think we are missing [00:10:00] that part of that subculture and that kind of basis of internet for nation, where we can 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.
Closing and Credits
[00:10:13] Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this [00:10:15] quickie.
[00:10:15] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDxLondon. Until next time,
[00:10:20] Ben Hurst: stay curious.
