Critical Consideration Postcards

Critical Consideration Postcards

A series of postcards sent from various gatherings and events where communities critically consider the social life of XG.

Basel, October 2023. Save St Ives Day / Keep Our Sea Chemical Free. This image was shared by Harun Morrison and Therese Keogh during a conversation on sites of environmental and social offshore-ness. Harun and Therese related recent attempts to halt a geo-engineering project in St. Ives Bay, Cornwall. A Canadian company called Planetary Technologies, backed by Elon Musk, wanted to use the bay to test Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, a technique to increase the ability of seawater to absorb Co2. Here we see is the digital and green transition according to Big Tech. \[larger version of image?\]

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Brussels, October 2024. Visit to the cellars of Maison de la Paix, where local internet provider Domaine Public experiments with setting up a local data center running on solar panels and using a salt battery. Celo and Denis speak about the motivations for the project that mix a desire for energy autonomy with a need for keeping the digital infrastructure they maintain at close hand and on a reasonable scale.

Stockholm, xxx. Welcome to Stockholm / Where limitless connectivity means limitless possibility. Yet other large banners where Ericsson promises "climate action with exponential impact". 

Paris, February 2025. Anti-AI demo behind the Grand Palais, the location where the AI Action summit would be held the next day. After 20 minutes, the gathering was broken up by the police. With red hat: 'Marie Capucine' (she said: I am obviously not called that way) joining the demo because "Someone has to say no to Musk and Trump and their plans for Gaza". Picture published by Anti-Tech-Resistance.

Paris, February 2025. The Smartness Mandate? At the AI Action summit, AWS assumes AI is evident. Panel organized by Amazon WebServices (AWS). Image taken by Seda, who later said about the AI summit: "it felt like massive gaslighting. Governments pushed and willing to undo decades of regulation and energy policy, and for adopting an AI imperative at all costs."

Paris, February 2025. Image shared at the Anti-Ai summit by organisers Anti-Tech resistance. "AI is not to be regulated, it is to be dismantled". Unplug baby unplug? But unplug what?

Paris, February 2025. Banner attached to the stage at the Anti-AI summit organized by anti-tech resistance in the Annexe de la bourse du travail: "IA x industry = 0 planet". The meeting could not take place in its original location and had been quickly moved to this venue. Later, in Grenoble, we start to understand more of the tensions around this group. Their anti-tech approach is based in an essentialist understanding of nature, at times anti-feminist, and bleeding into anti-trans statements.

Brussels, February 2025. Accelerating the transition in the Energy Devroom at the yearly Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. The room is packed all day.

Grenoble, March 2025. Feminists do not forget / Tech made in Grenoble / Kills in Gaza / Queers 4 Palestine. Three days of action against the extension of a chip factory include the work of bringing together local and global struggles. Using all means possible, activist make an effort at solidarity on multiple scales.

Bernin, March 2025. The digital fascinates, enhances fanaticism and makes fascism / Overconsumption of water, energy and soil / Extractivism, colonialism and war. Augmented life? Diminished life! Connecting the dots behind the slogan of chip producer STMicro (Augmented life!), protesters critically consider the price of digitization.

Paris, February 2025. In a TV-interview, the French president Emmanuel Macron insists that American data centres are dirty, but the European ones will be clean (and Open Source).