Technology as Nature
Panel Discussion
Thu 29-10-26, 19:00 - 21:00
For free
For adults
in English
public
What On Earth..?
Big Tech, AI and the Politics of the Planet’s Future
29.10.26 - 30.09.28
For free
For adults
in English
Big Tech and AI are reshaping societies around the world. As climate, nature and planetary boundary challenges intensify, technology is increasingly presented not simply as a tool, but as the means through which we will manage, measure and ultimately solve environmental problems. At the same time, digital expansion is driving demand for energy, minerals, land and other natural resources, entrenching broken systems and concentrating extraordinary economic and political power in the hands of a few companies. Emerging technologies, and the ideologies and business models behind them, are becoming powerful forces in determining which environmental futures become possible and which are foreclosed.
What On Earth..? examines problems rooted in current technocentric ideologies, particularly around AI, and connects them to climate and environmental issues. It traces how these technologies are reshaping environmental outcomes through their growing influence on power, politics, wealth, culture and society, and asks what this means for the planet.
This series follows a thread running through a particular technological worldview: the belief that complex social and ecological problems can be made governable through more data, computation, optimisation and technological intervention; that nature can be measured, modelled and managed; and that limits can ultimately be worked around or overcome in the pursuit of innovation. We follow this worldview across themes rarely considered together: from climate information to hyper-scaling and hyper-consumption, through synthetic landscapes and cultures of waste, to new frontiers of extraction beyond Earth. Along the way, we examine the ideas, politics and forms of power making these developments possible.
Each theme is explored through two linked events and an accompanying essay, bringing together evidence, insights and people to develop critical foresight.
The first of the two events asks how we got here: which ideas, technological systems and narratives dominate the current agenda, whose interests they serve, what evidence we have, and how they are changing the world.
The second event interrogates what follows: where is resistance emerging, which assumptions need to be reconsidered, and what would it take to redesign or reimagine these forces? The series brings into conversation overlapping groups working across environmental movements, critical approaches to AI and digital expansion, and the cultural, social and political implications of both.
In conversation with guests from across disciplines and around the world, What On Earth..? explores the increasingly complex entanglement of emerging technologies, the planet we depend on and the politics of the future, and asks how we might shape that relationship differently. Where it goes next is not inevitable. These are collective choices that can be made deliberately, grounded in evidence and guided by the cultures, values and forms of society we want technology to help create.
What on Earth...? is a collaboration between Spore Initiative, Tactical Tech, and Adrienne Russell of the University of Washington.
