Short Abstract

This panel explores how digital and AI technologies, often promoted as efficient and sustainable, generate material, economic, and ecological waste. By examining global inequalities, political economy and creative reuse practices, we rethink “waste” in the context of digital technologies and AI.

Description

Digital technologies and AI entered our lives under the banner of efficiency, productivity, and environmental sustainability. However, thanks to a growing body of research on the environmental impacts of AI, we now have a clearer understanding of the costs these technologies impose on the planet. Beyond their ever-increasing energy demands, the constant upgrading of systems (i.e., planned obsolescence) and the appetite for data generation result in unprecedented levels of waste. Much of this waste is exported to less affluent regions of the world for processing—what Bell (2018) calls “garbage imperialism”—rather than being managed where these technologies are primarily developed and deployed. As such, this dynamic reproduces colonial hierarchies, which Sultana (2022) called “climate colonialism,” whereby the lands and ecologies of already disadvantaged communities are polluted in the name of creating sustainable and efficient systems elsewhere.

In this panel, however, we aim to broaden the notion of waste challenging essentialist approaches. When studied in non-Western context, discard can also be a source of ‘making-do’ like in the case of so-called ‘frugal innovation’ that underpins Jugaad culture in India. In addition to the material waste disposed as a result of redundant infrastructures and hardware, we will also consider the various forms of waste generated by the political economy of AI itself. For instance, the vast sums of venture capital invested in AI start-ups may represent not only financial waste but also the waste of time, labour, and resources, as a significant proportion of these ventures ultimately fail. In other words, we can even say that such wasteful speculations end up ‘putting our economic/ecological’ future to waste. In summary, this panel seeks to consider digital (data) technologies from the perspective of waste in the pursuit of challenging dominant notions around it while also aiming to contribute to a roadmap for resilient futures.

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