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Paper short abstract

This paper investigates how technocratic, colonial and capitalist paradigms in environmental science have manifested into hostile technologies for conceptualizing and visualizing climate change that paralyze publics instead of mobilize them to shape common futures collectively and carefully.

Paper long abstract

Scientific visualizations of climate change have received ample criticism by visual theorists and critical scholars: The perspective in climate graphics is total, yet grounded nowhere. They represent apocalyptic futures, that immobilize publics and foreclose possibilities to shape common futures in any other way than a scientific and technocratic one. Meanwhile, historians of environmental science have demonstrated its institutional and ideological ties to a capitalist, hegemonic and technocratic status quo. The discipline has therefore been oriented towards cleaning up the messes of late industrial modernity and has little incentive to facilitate stable, caring relations between people and land. By comparing the history of environmental science with critical inquiries into climate visualizations, this paper investigates how technocratic, capitalist paradigms became manifested into hostile technologies for conceptualizing climate change, that paralyze instead of mobilize. Can we understand the widespread burnout from climate activism, whereby decision making defaults to hegemonic institutions with strong ties to fossil capital and fascist regimes through the lens of technological hostility? And ultimately, how can this understanding steer scientific practice and technological design towards future-making in the image of care, humility, diversity and resilience?