Critical Consideration Postcards

Critical Consideration Postcards

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

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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 and mix their desire for energy autonomy with a need for keeping digital infrastructure close at hand and on a reasonable scale.

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  Basel, October 2023. Save St Ives Day / Keep Our Sea Chemical Free. Harun Morrison (artist in residence at greenpeace) and Therese Keogh (artist and activist) shared this image from a greenpeace protest during a conversation on sites of environmental and social offshore-ness. Harun and Therese told us about recent attempts to halt a geo-engineering project in St. Ives Bay, Cornwall. In the image the protestors are watching as a Canadian company called Planetary Technologies, backed by Elon Musk, run a large scale experiment on Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement in the bay, a technique using large mounts of chemicals to increase the ability of seawater to absorb Co2. The tests lead to investment by Frontier Climate - a payment infrastructure owned by Stripe, allowing future purchase of carbon removal tonnes by Planetary Technology. Stripe become members setting the standard for Carbon Removal credits on the EU Carbon Expert committee. This large scaled unoptimised experimentation is what the digital and green transition looks like according to Big Tech.

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  Stockholm, 2024. Welcome to Stockholm / Where limitless connectivity means limitless possibility. The campaign was launched after the World Economic Forum announces the news that 6 of the 9 planetary limits have been irreversibly breached. On other large billboards, Ericsson promises "climate action with exponential impact". The conflation of 5G with promises of climate change mitigation focuses on continuous growth and a limitless planetary condition. Is this what sedyst meant when she said "Green transition is such a mindf$ck"?

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  Paris, February 2025. At the Anti-Ai summit, this image was shared by the organisers. "AI is not to be regulated, it is to be dismantled". Unplug baby unplug? But unplug what? Somehow, even resistance seems to become a form of infra-solutionism. I feel this is what depletion of the imaginary feels like, when the only way out seems to be disconnection. How can we intervene in a world that relies on a level of digitisation and service, that we can simply not afford? Digital degrowth is only part of the answer; many of our modes of life (education, economies, mobilities) have become dependent on those digital infrastructures.

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  Paris, February 2025. Anti-AI demo behind the Grand Palais, where the AI Action summit will be held the next days. 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"). We met her in front of the Grand Palais, she was like us looking for the location of the demo. Marie Capucine explained she joined the demo because "Someone has to say no to Musk and Trump and their plans for Gaza". Picture published by Anti-Tech-Resistance.

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  Paris, February 2025. A screen at the Grand Palais announces a panel organized by Amazon WebServices (AWS) with the title "The AI imperative". At the AI Action summit, AWS assumes AI is evident. The summit is full of infra-solutionism: bringing digital infrastructures to any problem to solve it. It goes from proposing that AI will be the way to deal with climate change by optimising existing processes or use of resources; to somehow making the processes of work or mobility more lean. 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."

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  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.

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  Brussels, February 2025. Accelerating the transition in the Energy Devroom at the yearly Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. The schedule overflows with proposals for Open Source car batteries and ways to fix the grid; the room is packed. It is hard to imagine this as a deep work on imagination and imagining other forms of infrastructures, as nothing in the stream of projects and . It's not a question of alternatives, i.e replacing Google Drive by Nextcloud. This needs work by people working on a high level, e.g. policy, but also will need to involve tech-developers, those maintaining infrastructures and most of all people experiencing the brunt of these infrastructures.

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  Grenoble, March 2025. On the outside of the temporary open air kitchen, this banner: 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. It included preparing over a thousand vegan sandwiches to take with us on the march.

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  Bernin, March 2025. The banner reads: 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 implications of ongoing digitization and the impossibilities of the relocalisation of chip production.

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  Screenshot, February 2025. In a TV-interview, Emmanuel Macron insists that American data centres are dirty, but the European ones will be clean (and Open Source). During the power blackout in Barcelona whilst infrastructure and communication is completely inoperable, the Amazon data warehouse in a Aargon powers up its 46 diesel generators to provide continuous services to clients outside of the areas in the power blackout. Due to their application to be an infrastructural "Project of General Interest of Aragon (PIGA)" they have 46 diesel generator sets. We can estimate that the diesel generators produce use as much diesel as at least 290 double decker diesel buses and emitting high levels of particulate matter pollution. When Jara reported on the blackout last week, they said: "We could not stop laughing nervously".