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Short abstract:

Based on a 2-year study of an online Swiss-based climate “hackathon,” that was founded by tech-startup entrepreneurs with the intention to bring agile and data driven methods to climate activism, we will look at what forms of power and conflict emerge when green and digital agendas come together.

Long abstract:

In the face of the consistent failure of our societies to implement swift and bold climate policy changes, more and more people — from various sectors and political backgrounds — are getting involved in initiatives that attempt to do something about the climate crisis. As a result, “unconventional bedfellows” (Latour and Schultz 2022), stakeholders and partners, often from different opposing groups or organizations unite for a specific climate action.

This paper is based on a 2-year study of an online Swiss-based climate “hackathon,” that was founded by tech-startup entrepreneurs with the intention to bring agile and data driven methods to climate activism, in the transport sector in particular. These “climate hackers” - from various political and geographic locations - come together weekly using a digital meeting space to invent practical technical “solutions” to climate problems. We investigate the ways in which the various startup practices and logics of the group transform environmental activism. In doing so, we hope to address the entanglements of the green and digital transitions in the transport sector in Switzerland specifically.

Here, we conceptualize the coming together of green and digital logics, or modes of value as alliance building across difference. By looking at the affordances and constraints of the digital infrastructure itself, we will look at how collaboration across difference actually looks like, what type of work is done in order for alliances to form and function (or not), and what forms of power and conflict emerge when green and digital agendas come together.