Green and Chrome Supremacy: FAQ v0.1

Abstract

The Green and Chrome Supremacy: FAQ reports from the ongoing thinking of the Infrastructural Rehearsals collective, shared often and early. In conversation with many others, this FAQ makes space for imagining those transitions we urgently need, away from those we certainly don’t need nor want. We feel our possibilities for directing energies towards a differently organized eco-social transition are limited by the way the green transition circulates at the moment. In this FAQ, we therefore think out loud about why and how the coupling of digital and green transition contributes to this limitation. We don’t think that the transition we need requires further industrial digitization and instead of a universalized green, we might want to go for many exuberant, vernacular and renegotiable shades of gray.

In order to make space for the transitions we need, we propose to do some spellbreaking as the conversation about how to respond to climate collapse is currently hijacked by Big Tech, Big Agro and Big Oil. Together (no surprises), they distract us with pyrotechnic techno-solutionist disruptive pathways, extremely risky tests that seem to be all about keeping in place business as usual.

The work that feeds into this FAQ is attuned to a long tail of struggles and research paths that might fall within something that could be termed as anti-colonial antifa trans*feminist queer abolitionist technosciences. The fundamental connective tissue for such struggles is the aim to resist technosciences as knowledge production siloes that feed the capitalist machinery, but rather identify forms of engagement that evade mandatory expertise, reject the prioritization of technically savvy voices, stay curious about the nuances of sociotechnical schemes of relation, are imaginative regarding methods for observing, describing, intervening and ending (infra)structural violence. We are collectively committed to a mode of mutual aid that rejects solutionism, the reproduction of technoscientific hegemonies and the authoritarian continuation of deadly schemes of conservative innovation for technically mediated lives.

This FAQ is certainly not about mastery of knowledge or a transfer of expertise about the digital and green transition. It is also not a closed statement nor a rigid positionality. It is an attempt to keep gaining collective courage to step through the mirage of these shiny promises and to unfold an abolitionist perspective on the green and digital conundrum.