In this episode, we talk to Anne Pasek, the Canada Research Chair in Media Culture and the Environment, and an Associate Professor between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. We love Anne for lots of reasons, not least because she has a 50 watt solar panel, a little Raspberry Pi computer, and an acid battery, all in her backyard, hosting a server. Together we discuss pleasurable ways of responding to climate anxiety, what would happen if the internet wasn't always on, but instead functioned in tandem with the sun, and why addressing climate crisis isn't necessarily about living with less, but learning to live in sync.
Anne Pasek is the Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment and an Assistant Professor cross-appointed between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment. She studies the cultural politics of climate change, focusing in particular on how carbon becomes mediated and meaningful in different institutional and social contexts. As an energy humanist, she further investigates the connection between research methods, academic norms, and carbon intensity, developing and prototyping low-carbon alternatives for conducting research and sustaining collegial connections.
Her forthcoming monograph, entitled Fixing Carbon: Mediating Matter in a Warming World, is a comparative study of how carbon became legible to different communities, to different effects. Spanning from climate denialism, corporate sustainability initiatives, degrowth accounting, and emerging carbon-negative markets, the book demonstrates how carbon has come to be the subject of wildly variable social formations and political projects, suggesting that the element is fundamentally polysemous. Dr. Pasek traces this problem to carbon’s materiality as an element, arguing that carbon politics are largely decided through the bonds and relations that constitute the work of climate communication.
Reading List:
Getting into Fights with Data Centers: https://emmlab.info/Resources_page/Data%20Center%20Fights_digital.pdf
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Roel Roscam Abbing, "This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline’: a design inquiry into degrowth and ICT" LIMITS ’21, June 14–15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.21428/bf6fb269.e78d19f6.
Chris Preist, Daniel Schien, and Eli Blevis. 2016. Understanding and Mitigating the Effects of Device and Cloud Service Design Decisions on the Environmental Footprint of Digital Infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1324–1337. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858378. [the cornucopian model of the internet originally comes from this paper. Abbing's 2021 paper builds on this idea. You should check them both out!]
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Dr. Kerry McInerney. Dr. Eleanor Drage and I are the hosts of the Good Robot podcast. Join us as we ask the experts, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, head over to our website, www.thegoodrobot. co. uk, where we've got a full transcript of the episode and a sample. We love hearing from listeners, so feel free to tweet or email us. And we'd also so appreciate you leaving us a review on the podcast app, until then sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode.
Eleanor: In this episode, we talk to Anne Pasek, [00:01:00] the Canada Research Chair in media culture and the environment, and an associate professor between the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment.
We love Anne for lots of reasons, not least because she has a 50 watt solar panel, a little Raspberry Pi computer, and an acid battery, all in her backyard, hosting a server.
Together we discuss pleasurable ways of responding to climate anxiety, what would happen if the internet wasn't always on, but instead functioned in tandem with the sun, and why addressing climate crisis isn't necessarily about living with less, but learning to live in sync. We hope you enjoy the show.
Kerry: Thank you so much for being here with us today. So just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what's brought you to thinking about feminism, gender, and technology?
Anne: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. So I'm a professor at Trent University here in Canada. I split my time between a cultural studies [00:02:00] department and the school of the environment here. So I get to both talk to a lot of artists and critics, and then also folks who are doing environmental science and want to, think about how to do science in a way that has more of a social impact, which is really lovely.
But my backstory is that I started out in media studies. I was a little PhD student who was going to write a history of computer failure, which I thought would be just a lot of fun, looking at the aesthetics of glitches, the history of the blue screen of death, it was going to be a kind of aesthetic social history but one that maybe didn't have terribly many political stakes.
But I was a Canadian studying in a US institution and I'd managed to snag a Fulbright. And one thing that the US government does, cause the Fulbright is a bit of a soft power exercise, is that they take all the international students that they have on their program and plunk them in a city for a weekend to talk about an issue.
And for me, that was 2014. We were taken to LA and we were given a tour about what the American government in its, [00:03:00] various levels and partnerships was up to about the drought that LA was going through then. And they did like a bad job. Um, The only solutions we were toured through were pitched at like single family homeowners.
No one mentioned the words climate change at all. And, I was in this really international group, my colleague from Kenya next to me was like dramatically unimpressed with this drought. This drought was baby stuff. The real stuff was still to come. So it created this crisis for me where I reckoned with the fact that it seemed like the people in charge really didn't have climate change in hand.
And I thought if I was going to spend, the next five years of my life making new knowledge I should probably make new knowledge that could contribute in some small way to thinking on that issue. I really wanted to make sure there were deeper stakes to the research I was doing.
So I switched from writing about computer failure to writing about failure and how we think about and communicate about climate change. And I've been on that train for a good while since. And as for how [00:04:00] gender gets into it, gender's in everything. So it's the waters we swim in and a really good tool in the toolkit.
Eleanor: So can you help us answer our three good robot questions? What is good technology? Is it even possible and how can we work towards it?
Anne: I fear I may be a little bit of a poor sport on this front because I am, I'm a bad philosopher in that I'm quite indifferent to having a sort of coherent up and down defensible answer to the question of what is the good.
My, my view is that's always the subject of political contestation, right? So it's better to ask, less what is intrinsically good and more, what, what is good for who? According to who, right? So in what part of the world, at what moment in time to what different class or racial position, and then the fun is just seeing how those debates work out and what kinds of tactics people use to make better or worse arguments for that.
What good technology is going to be, debated and it's going to shift. And part of the work that we do [00:05:00] is tracking how people make new wedges into what seems like a kind of intractable definition. And the history of feminist science and technology studies is just a really good toolkit for following that along.
Kerry: I really like that partly because, something we always hold a lot of space for on the podcast is this idea of like feminist friction and contestation being really important. And so often we ask this question and we get a lot of people who say, I have a really clear idea of what good means to me.
And then we get a lot of people who just refuse to answer it. And they're like, I just think that's the wrong question, which is both an incredibly important thing. And also the most classic like feminist academic thing to be like. But are we asking the right questions?
But I am so fascinated in your work and you have a big fan base here in our office because of all your incredible research. But I want to start off with the question of carbon. And so can you tell us about carbon, but also why we think about the idea of low carbon in the wrong way?
Anne: So that the dissertation that I was working on ended up being a history of how people communicate about carbon [00:06:00] in relation to climate change. And I was interested in asking this as both a very obvious question, right? Climate change is a matter of shifts in the carbon cycle.
We measure everything in carbon dioxide equivalents and worry quite a lot about how to, emit less carbon into the atmosphere. That's the 101 of it. But. It's actually maybe a little less intuitive than we might presume because carbon itself is a chemical element, right?
It's in pretty much everything always in chemical bonds, right? So we never actually experience it or see it in and of itself. There's no sensory life to carbon that we can turn to and use in public education or like political projects. So when we talk about carbon and climate change we're always talking through really complex computer models and like a lot of spreadsheets.
And it's quite difficult to make that charismatic or intuitive to people, right? It's often just data and data that we're then as a second order effect asked to have a moral feeling towards. I was tracking how people [00:07:00] were grappling with that work and over the past 30 or so years.
And I think at this point, we can probably say that there are many ways to think about carbon badly. So I'm interested in the history of the personal carbon footprint which more and more people know is a concept popularized by an oil company. And it gives us... the problem is phrased as such, where the best action to take is to take less actions, to do less, to try and be less bad.
There's no kind of winning condition or condition of sufficiency there. And quite often the only methods that people have to act towards this is to, take expensive consumer choices most of which might actually be a bit dubious when you drill down on the math of it.
And we could also think about carbon taxes. Here in Canada, that's a really hot political issue, but it's also a bit of a paradox, right? Because it's supposed to be a means to make carbon visible via price signals, but there really isn't the kind of like political will to do that to the full extent where we would actually have sort of radical consequences in [00:08:00] everyday life because of a carbon tax. Plus, even if we did and we're incrementally maybe putting our toe in that pool the consequences that follow from that aren't equally borne out, right? A lot depends on where you live. A lot depends on how much money you have.
If we're feeling towards carbon, we're feeling in a way that, that can be quite reactive and frightening. And then I also think about carbon offsets, right? So. The whole buying and selling of these carbon commodities presumes that carbon's a fungible commodity and that you can trade in it in this really frictionless way just by moving numbers around in a spreadsheet.
And there's quite a lot of like virtuous feeling that, that can come from this and quite a lot of fraud. So... this is all just to say that, thinking about carbon is to think about like relational outcomes, to think about structures of feeling, to think about a lot of technical systems that we need to make the invisible visible.
And there are better or worse ways to do that. But whenever you do that, you're doing politics and politics, both on the level of like public opinion and [00:09:00] policy design. And also politics in the level of like social belonging, public emotion, and relational outcomes, which are often very inequitable.
Eleanor: You created this incredible zine in the form of a really fun, informative PDF, I think it was, that was sent round our office. Loads of people loved it. And for those listening, we have this incredible Slack that has many different channels on it. And it was in at least one or two of those channels. So multiple people had posted it and it was called Getting into Fights with Data Centers, or A Modest Proposal for Reframing the climate politics of ICT. And it was about why we shouldn't build more data centers. But not only that, it got us to think about and piece together the geographic path of our data or our digital whale, as you call it. So what is our digital whale and what should we [00:10:00] be doing about it? Tell us about this, zine.
Anne: Yeah. So the backstory here is that I was asked to conduct a couple of workshops with artists and art administrators who were worried about the sort of carbon footprint of their digital arts practices or their institutions. And this happened a couple of years ago where it seemed like there was quite a lot of sort of public discussion about the rising climate impacts of digital systems.
Based on how you count, that's maybe one to three or maybe 4 percent of the overall like carbon emissions of the world today. Just digital stuff. And that number is rising. There's some wildcard technologies out there like Bitcoin or generative AI that, that may accelerate this quite quickly or only a little bit.
But it was also, I think, in retrospect, like a consequence of how um, during the pandemic, there was this sort of market increase in our sort of digital consumption of goods, right? Watching a lot of TV, doing a lot of working from home, that kind of stuff. There was this group that was quite anxious [00:11:00] about this and how they could contribute to something of a solution.
And you, you might have heard, advice that you should turn off your zoom camera or delete old photos in the cloud, right. to kind of do your part to to mitigate against this, tsunami of data and carbon emissions. But again, I wanted to refuse the premise of the question.
It's difficult to intuitively understand, but substantively digital goods aren't like plastic bags at a grocery store. It's not the case that using less of them correlates one to one to less waste being produced. This is because a lot of the parts of our digital networks are always on.
So regardless of whether or not the bandwidth, capacity of a system is at 50 percent or 70 percent or 100%, the same amount of energy draws happening. I wanted to ask, encourage people to ask different kinds of questions and to also think on, different interpersonal registers, less of, what can I do to be less bad and more, what can I do to be a sort of effective part of a political movement to [00:12:00] win some major wins.
And I think the most exciting. space to go and think those thoughts is the many otherwise disconnected local struggles against data center expansion. So data centers are popping off like mushrooms in a backyard -more and more of them every day. And these have pretty significant consequences to the communities that are on the fence line that have these things in their backyard.
That can be stuff like, quite extensive noise pollution rising energy prices, water tables getting stressed by the large amount of water consumption to cool down these things. And there's just a, wherever you find data centers, you find local communities that are unhappily pushing back against their sort of bad neighbors.
And I'm really interested in thinking about what a coalition of politics might look like. I care a lot about climate change. These people don't necessarily do so, but we have a sort of common cause to be made in trying to curtail the growth rate of these, massive sort of football stadium sized pieces of infrastructure.
So yeah, I, I think that was the pivot I [00:13:00] wanted to encourage in people's thinking. And the zine sort of, lays that out, but then also explains how you can find a data center that you might come to care about in a particular way. That could be one that's, already in your community or you could use tools like TraceRoute to make some pretty educated guesses for where data that's important to you is currently being housed.
And then hopefully tune in and try and participate in the social movements that are happening around those data centers. And the pleasure of doing this in a zine form was that I got to use I, I hope pretty accessible and fun language in laying out that case and proposing a bit of an activity.
Language that, would be a little difficult to pull off in an academic paper.
Kerry: I think it's so wonderful. And I was at the Mayday Rooms Archives in London last week, or maybe it was a week before that, I've lost track of time, but that's the archives where they quite chaotically and very much in the vein and spirit of what this archive is for, collect all the documents and memorabilia of anarchist movements and radical movements in the UK.
And so they're [00:14:00] very anti the idea of what an archive is normally so it is ordered enough to use it, but it's also just a room that you walk into and they're like, Enjoy. And this is the kind of material that I can absolutely imagine- I'm like, I need to give them a copy of this because they're very much encouraging you to be like, collect and remember these kinds of documents and these events that were really crucial for building these solidarity movements and these collaborative politics.
Um, you know, And I think right now, especially like the kind of work you're doing is so important. My husband's from North Carolina and like the state, as of this week has been absolutely devastated by Hurricane Helene. And so I think one of the weirdest disjunctions, I think is having these conversations about how, in our kind of space, like AI is going to revolutionize our futures while we're like very directly encountering kind of these catastrophes of climate change.
And yeah, I really like your work because I think it gives people a little bit of hope in between that sort of quite terrible juncture. But I also know that you have done your own kinds of like experimentations when it comes to thinking about low carbon. You've talked about all the ways that like [00:15:00] existing approaches to low carbon are maybe very limited in different ways, but we would love to hear about what you are doing in this space to challenge that or how your own experiments with low carbon are maybe giving us a different way to think about this problem.
Anne: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I want to stress that I don't presume to have a singular or best answer to this or really any question, right? I think diversity of tactics is often the best way to to move through the world. Data center fights, I think are a particularly compelling one, but many people have different resources, opportunities, and skills.
I've had the pleasure of working with a very talented trio of people at NYU. Tega Brain, Benedetta Piantella, and Alex Nathanson, who are the architects of a digital platform called Solar Protocol, and I am a humble steward in their network, which is to say that in my backyard, I have a 50 watt solar panel, a little lead acid battery in a box.
And a little Raspberry Pi computer [00:16:00] that, that hosts a server. And so we're interested in thinking about what it would mean to design digital systems that are the opposite of the cloud, that, that sort of embrace intermittency as part of the ways in which the world works.
And part of the social expectations we want to orient ourselves around and which, might produce different kinds of subjects and different kinds of user experiences of the internet. So Solar Protocol there's a sort of larger network of servers. I'm just one of them.
Many different spots of the world which means that the sort of battery charge on all these different servers is going to be pretty different across the global span of any given moment. The sun will move around and so too will rates of energy in each local spot.
And solar protocols like internet protocol twist is to serve content from whatever server has the highest battery charge. So normally, if we want to watch a season of TV on Netflix, that file exists in, I don't know, 20 to a hundred different data centers in [00:17:00] different parts of the world, and it will simply serve you whatever data center is closest to you and therefore like fastest and gets you the most information in the less amount of time, but solar protocol does the opposite.
And we're going to subordinate speed to local environmental conditions and therefore live in tandem with the sun. So using just the sort of brute effects of solar energy as a kind of environmental logic, rather than also building like a kind of complex machine learning efficiency algorithm to dynamically serve content in a way to reduce a carbon budget There might be a simpler, more de growth kind of way of approaching the problem.
And you also get to learn to build a bunch of fun infrastructure if you are a server. Skill up and also have new experiences.
Eleanor: I've encountered two people with time limits on their social media this weekend. One is 9, the other is 33. And, it strikes me that you need the world to change stop on your [00:18:00] behalf in order to cut this addiction, to really nip it in the bud.
So you've said that, it's intermittent the sort of the server, but really it's rhythmic. So can you tell us about your perspective on doom scrolling and how ...and the students that you work with and their attitude towards building an internet that, that allows you to use it in this very rhythmic way.
Thank you.
Anne: Yeah, people a very clever person called Roel Abbing has coined the idea of the cornucopian model of the internet, right? We think about digital goods as this kind of unending horn of plenty and therefore also, sometimes we eat so much we get sick is sometimes how I feel about my phone use habits.
[Editor's note: the cornucopian model of the internet originally came from Preist, Schein and Blevis's 2016 article. Abbing then draws on this idea in his 2021 paper]
As a kind of, project of interrogative design or a bit of a prefigurative way of imagining what the future might look like and feel like if we do pursue 100 percent renewables my, my students and I are working on building another backyard solar server, but one that would host a Mastodon instance.
And Mastodon is like an open source alternative [00:19:00] to Twitter. People speak about it as part of the fedaverse 'cause there's a bunch of federated open source, alternatives out there. This is one. And the premise is if we do this, we would have a social media platform that you can only access when there's sufficient local energy here in Peterborough, and which would therefore, go to sleep in the middle of the night, perhaps, or be more available in the summer versus in the winter.
And we're just terribly interested in spinning this up and seeing what happens, because, it's not many. It seems like there's not many opportunities otherwise out there, we might need to create our own to, to think about how we can live with different energy systems systems that don't have kind of fossil fuels and that cornucopian model built into the way that they work.
Plus, I think it's fun to, be a little more in touch with the place in which you are working and think about what the locality of Canada might mean versus the kind of, globally overbuilt always full of uptime internet. We're being a bit parochial on [00:20:00] purpose, I guess, but I don't want to give the implication that like the goal is just to Always live with less and have a kind of minimalism to it.
The fun thing about solar energy is that there are these really extreme peaks in the middle of the day where there's this moment of abundance for a couple of hours, there's more energy than we can store in our battery. And so we're trying to, at the same time as, make this kind of degrowth internet thing happen.
Also find ways to use that energy for different things to, to cue people into this sort of feast in the middle of the day. So our current idea is to make a little robot that activates in this solar peak and does some drawings. We'll make some art and give it away as a kind of nod to the gift economy that solar energy seems to presume.
So per your podcast title, it will be a good robot.
Kerry: What is the good robot going to draw?
Anne: We're thinking of visualizing some of the solar data we collect just to show that again, there, there are these interesting rhythms. There are these kind of like special periods, even as there are these periods without.[00:21:00]
So again, like we, we don't want people to walk away feeling like the solution to the problem is to just consume less. We want people to think about how they can move through rhythms of Intermittence but also abundance.
Kerry: Oh, that's really lovely. And I think it's an important counterpoint as well, because I do agree with you that I think sometimes the narrative can be almost quite punitive in different ways, but specifically, it comes from this perspective where it says the issues we have and we as often very much people like me who are based in like England or in the global north.
We have too much access to technology. And so we've all cut back on it. And, yeah, I would agree that I definitely use my phone way too much. That is not up for negotiation, but yeah, I have a lot of family who live in places like Fiji where they like don't have great electricity infrastructure or their power drops in and out quite a lot.
And so I'm always thinking Oh, like something in me also reacts a little bit viscerally when people are just like, we all just need less technology. And I'm like, Oh, but for a lot of people, like these are like amazing technologies to have, built into your lives and integrated.
And that's not at all to undermine the kind [00:22:00] of very real criticisms of things like doom scrolling or like social media. But yeah, I like this idea of thinking about it more in terms of like abundance and kind of slower periods rather than just a kind of cold Turkey or like a, no, we just all need so much less.
Eleanor: Also the people that want to bliss off the earth into transhumanism don't love the abundance of nature. I think they think it's something that, is always sort of bare mortality a kind of, an earth that's just a bit of soil and not much else. The, we need to love this abundance that we have, but know how to treat it.
For those who don't know, she is Donna Haraway, a great lover of nature and dogs and mortality.
Anne: Yes. Yes.
And I think, in parallel with all these things, right? Like part of the project is to resist the easiness of dystopian or uncomplicated utopian thinking, right?
But per Haraway, right, stay with the trouble. And, but also, keep your ears out for the pleasures you might find there too. [00:23:00] Cause that's a very important part of doing politics as well.
Kerry: Absolutely. And for all of our listeners as well, like on our website, which is www.thegoodrobot.co.uk, we will be linking of course, to any thinkers or texts that we mentioned today. So that'll include Anne's amazing work, but we'll also include Donna Haraway's work. And so if you're thinking, I would really love to know a little bit more about this, or this is. So if you to me, then you can go to our website, you'll find the full transcript of this conversation and also those resources.
And yeah, I think something that personally helps me navigate this sort of techno doom and the techno optimism, I guess that we're talking about is being in community with people, being in solidarity with people, finding people who are asking similar questions and sharing similar concerns. And I think that's a thread that comes out to me from across your work, as so much about it is building community, sharing, sharing solidarity.
And so I wanted to finally ask you about another cool research initiative you did which was better than any academic conference that we've ever been to which [00:24:00] involves sharing a kilo stack of really beautiful zines about peoples research interests. And so we were wondering if you could tell us about this project what is it, why did you start it and how can we do the same?
How can we ourselves also create these networks of knowledge and exchange?
Anne: Yeah. We are on our third year now of running DIY methods, which is we say it a mostly screen free experiment in research exchange. Plane- free as well. Part of this comes from one loves to do self reflexive critiques in academia. So why not critique the way that academia thinks about carbon and the sort of climate impacts of research. And air travel is a pretty bright red spot on the map that you might build there. And during the pandemic, it was something that was totally off the table for most.
We reproduced as close as possible our experiences of conferencing online. And we didn't really, I think, stick the landing there. A lot of like accessible gains were made, like more people got to participate for less [00:25:00] money from more diverse corners of the world with less like visa and childcare implications than ever before, but I don't think it was a particularly convivial and good time.
And so in many instances, we're just seeing a kind of like uncritical return to normal. But normal wasn't that good anyways. It our gambit here is to have a kind of stealthy environmental intervention where instead of getting on planes, instead of staring at zoom for hours a day you can participate in a conference by sending us zines.
We collect them all or we print them. And then we put them in a big package and sent them to you in the mail. And your experience of the conference is one of, at your leisure, perusing through these really beautiful objects. And so there's, again, like a kind of politics of pleasure there an interest in kind of building a coalition of people who are forming different desires for the future.
Even if they aren't beginning, like I began in like my climate anxiety feelings. But also I think what's really interesting about it is that it is that continued [00:26:00] provocation that responding to the imperatives of climate change means changing a lot of presumptions about how the world works and where we see ourselves in it.
And maybe that means like for academics, thinking about ways to share research that doesn't involve PowerPoint, right? Where we can put different versions of ourselves forward, operate on different registers of language towards different audiences, and the beauty of zines is that they can be so under-determined. can be many different things and move through many different circuits. The hope here is that through decarbonization, we are reexamining a lot of these like academic norms and presumptions that don't serve us all very well in the present.
And so we could have, a big political struggle to, to win better conditions, to be different kinds of people to each other to have more inclusive and equitable outcomes. But also, more fun, more beauty. I think these are all really useful goals to [00:27:00] think together in a basket.
Eleanor: I love getting incredible post and I remember when I was younger, my friends and I used to send each other mail and it'd be like really beautiful colored stuff, and I just really miss that sensation of getting something exciting and interesting through the post. And we get so tired at conferences that something tangible that you can, As you say, peruse in your own time is fantastic.
And but the pleasure that you were talking about really reminds me of something. One of my favorite philosophers, Gayatri Spivak, says that we are in the game of the reorientation of desire and anything that can contribute to that process, I think is just fabulous. So thank you so much for coming on this podcast and talking to us and we really hope that you come this side of the pond and see us in person sometime soon.
Anne: Yeah, it's been a pleasure and that would be a lovely day so here's hoping it comes.
Eleanor: This episode was made possible thanks to the generosity of Christina Gaw and the Mercator Foundation. [00:28:00] It was produced by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney and edited by Eleanor Drage.
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