Climate change is not going to disappear and it is not going to improve, at least if we continue to legislate as before. In Democracy in a warmer time: climate change and democratic transformationA multidisciplinary collection of subject matter experts analyzes the increasingly intertwined fates of American ecology and democracy, arguing that only by strengthening our existing institutions can we weather the “long emergency” ahead.
In the following excerpt, contributing author and Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, Holly Jean Buck, explores how the acceleration of climate change, the modern Internet, and the recent resurgence of authoritarianism are influencing and amplifying each other’s impacts. negative, to the detriment of all of us.
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Taken from Democracy in a warmer time: climate change and democratic transformation, edited by David W. Orr. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.
Burning hills and blazing red skies, stone-dry riverbeds, expanses of brown water enveloping tiny human rooftops. This is the scenario of the 21st century. Which it is the plot? For many of us working in climate and energy, the story of this century is about making the energy transition a reality. That is when we completely transform both energy and land use to avoid, or not at all, the most devastating impacts of climate change.
Confronting authoritarianism is even more urgent. About four billion people, or 54 percent of the world, in ninety-five countries, live under tyranny in fully authoritarian or competitive authoritarian regimes. The 21st century is also about the fight against new and growing forms of authoritarianism. In this narrative, the 21st century began with a wave of crushed democratic uprisings and continued with the election of authoritarian leaders around the world who began to dismantle democratic institutions. Any illusion of the success of globalization, or that the 21st century would represent a break from the brutal 20th century, was stripped away with the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The plot is less clear, given the failure of democracy-building efforts in the 20th century. There is a barely discernible plot of general resistance and reconstruction of imperfect democracies.
There is also a third story about this century: the penetration of the Internet into all spheres of daily life, social and political. Despite turn-of-the-century rumblings about the information age, we are only beginning to conceptualize what this means. Right now, the current plot revolves around the centralization of speech on a few corporate platforms. The rise of platforms offers the potential to connect democratic uprisings, as well as embolden authoritarian leaders through post-truth memes and algorithms optimized to dish out anger and hate. This is a more difficult story to tell, because the setting is everywhere. The story unfolds in our bedrooms while we should be sleeping or waking up, filling the most mundane moments of waiting in line at the supermarket or in transit. The characters are us, even more intimately than with climate change. It makes it difficult to see the shape and meaning of this story. And while we are increasingly aware of the influence that moving our media and social lives to big technology platforms has on our democracy, less attention is devoted to the influence this has on our ability to respond to change. climate.
Think about the meeting of these three forces: climate change, authoritarianism, the Internet. What comes to mind? If familiar characters from these stories are recombined, it may appear that climate activists are using the capabilities of the Internet to promote both networked protest and energy democracy. In particular, the defense of a version of “energy democracy” that resembles wind, hydro and solar; decentralized systems; and local community control of energy.
In this essay, I would like to suggest that this is not actually where the three forces of growing authoritarianism x climate change x domination of technological platforms directs. Rather, the political economy of online media has locked us into a social landscape in which it is impossible to build both the political consensus and the infrastructure we need for the energy transition. The current configuration of the Internet is a key obstacle to climate action.
The possibilities for climate action exist within a media ecosystem that has monetized our attention and profits from our hate and division. Algorithms that make advertising profits by maximizing time on site have discovered that what keeps us clicking is anger. Worse, the system is addictive, with notifications generating dopamine doses in a piece of what historian and addiction expert David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.” Society has more or less sleepwalked into this outrageous industrial complex without having a real analytical framework to understand it. tech platforms and some research groups or think tanks offer “disinformation” or “disinformation” as a framework, presenting the problem as if the problem were bad content poisoning the well, rather than the structure itself being rotten. As Evgeny Morozov quipped: “Post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism: a byproduct of operations.”
A series of works describe the contours and dynamics of today’s media ecology and what it does: Siva Vaidhyanathan. Antisocial mediaTomorrow U. Noble Algorithms of oppressionGeert Lovink sad by design, Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana ZuboffRichard Seymour The Twitter machineTim Hwang High-risk care crisis, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writings on understanding the social relations of Internet technologies through racial capitalism, and many more. At the same time, there is a reasonable counter-discussion about how many of our problems can really be attributed to social media. Research on the impacts of social media on political dysfunction, mental health, and society at large does not offer a clear portrait. Scholars have argued that placing too much emphasis on platforms may be overly simplistic and reeks of technological determinism; They have also pointed out that cultures such as the United States and traditional media have a long history with post-truth. That said, there are certainly dynamics occurring that we did not anticipate, and we don’t seem quite sure what to make of them, even with multiple academic areas in communication, disinformation, social media, and democracy working on these investigations for years.
What seems clear is that the Internet is not the connectivity we imagine. The ecology and spirituality of the 1960s, which shaped and structured much of what we see today as energy democracy and the good future, told us that we were all connected. Globally networked: sounds familiar, like a fever dream from the 1980s or 1990s, a dream that itself had its roots in the 1960s and earlier. Media theorist Geert Lovink reflects on a 1996 interview with John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Grateful Dead lyricist, in which Barlow described how cyberspace connected each and every synapse of every citizen of the world. planet. As Lovink writes: “Aside from the so-called last billion, we are already there. This is what we can all agree on. The coronavirus crisis is the first event in world history in which the Internet does not simply play “a role”: the event coincides with the Internet. There is a deep irony in this. The virus and the internet…sigh, that’s an old trope, right? In fact, when reading a cultural history, it seems obvious that we would reach this point of being globally connected and that the Internet would not only “play a role” in global events like COVID-19 or climate change, but would shape them.
What if the Internet really has connected us more deeply than we typically believe? What if the connection of everyone imagined in the second half of the 20th century is actually appearing, but it manifests itself late and not at all as we thought? We are indeed connected, but our global body is neither a psychedelic collective consciousness nor a data transmission infrastructure comprising packets of information and codes. We seem to have created a collective brain that is nothing like a computer. It works with data, codes and binary digits, but acts emotionally, irrationally, fight or flight and without conscience. It is an entity that operates like an emotional child, rather than with the clear computational sensing ability that common “Internet” graphics convey. Thinking of it as data or information is the same as thinking that a network of cells is a person.
What we are connected to and collectively creating looks more like a global endocrine system than anything we envisioned in the years when “cybernetic” was a prefix. This may seem like a banal observation, given that Marshall McLuhan was talking about the global nervous system more than fifty years ago. For decades we had enthusiasm for cybernetics and global connectivity and, more recently, a revitalization of theory about networks, kinship, rhizomes, and everything else. (The irony is that after fifty years of conversations about “systems thinking,” we still have answers to things like COVID-19 or climate that are almost the antithesis of considering systems as interconnected, dominated by a set of specialized knowledge and not incorporated social sciences and humanities). So, globally connected, but divided into silos, camps, echo chambers, etc. Social media platforms act as agents, structuring our interactions and our spaces for dialogue and solution building. Authoritarians know this, and that’s why they have farms of trolls who can manipulate the variety of solutions and the feelings about them.
The Internet, as we experience it, represents a central obstacle to climate action, through several mechanisms. Promoting false information about climate change is just one of them. There is overall political polarization, inhibiting the coalitions we need to build to make clean energy a reality, as well as creating crippling infighting within the climate movement over the strategies that platforms benefit from. There is networked opposition to the infrastructure we need for the energy transition. There is a constant distraction from the climate crisis, in the form of current scandals, in an attention economy where all topics compete for mental energy. And there is the waste of time and attention invested in these platforms instead of real-world actions.
Any of these areas are worth spending time on, but this essay focuses on how contemporary media ecology interferes with climate strategy and infrastructure in particular. To understand the dynamics, we must look more closely at the concept of energy democracy, as generally understood by the climate movement, and its principles: renewable energy, small-scale systems, and community control. The bitter irony of the current moment is that it is not only growing authoritarianism that prevents us from achieving good futures. It is also our narrow and twisted conceptions of democracy that are trapping us.