Fieke Jansen, Author at Branch

Letter from the editors

Michelle Thorne, Fershad Irani and Fieke Jansen

A heavily blurred red flower with hazy clouds and some electricity pylons in the background. — Image by Tom Jarrett (CC BY-NC 4.0).

We are at a critical threshold in our computational future. Rapid expansion of data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, and fossil fuel usage are all booming in response to unprecedented private and public investment in digital infrastructure. In 2024, the 1.5°C global warming limit was surpassed across the entire year, and the boundaries of several life-supporting planetary systems have been exceeded. More intense heat waves, storms, fires, and floods remind us of how human activity impacts all life on this planet.

Much of the internet today is part of larger, extractive systems that are exhausting critical resources like water, land, and raw materials – intensifying environmental harm across the technology supply chain and increasing greenhouse gas emissions, which heat up the planet and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few.

Is a different way possible?

What if we rebuild the internet to respond better to the constraints of the energy grid? How could we adapt the browsing experience to use fewer resources when fossil fuels are being burned and support awareness of how the physical realities of the planet affect our experience on the web?

What if we reimagine digital infrastructures attuned to life systems? Digital futures that are built by default to operate within planetary constraints? What if we could prioritize community ownership of the internet, joy, and just the right amount of technology to meet collective needs?

This issue of Branch sets out to play with these possibilities through the lens of Grid-aware Websites. Together we’ll explore what’s possible right now and where we can take things through the collective imaginings of future pathways. We’ll also touch on ideas such as tiny infrastructures, regenerativity, and other alternative approaches to bring our browsing experiences more in touch with the natural world and the more-than-human lives all around us.

Editors Q&A: What’s in this issue #9?

Read more from our editors about the articles in this issue and why we’re excited for readers to dig in and become attuned.

Michelle Thorne:

Fershad, you edited a couple of sections of this issue of Branch. Can you tell us about the articles that are featured in it?

Fershad Irani:

Sure! I edited the sections on Attuning the Web and Building a Grid-Aware Web. A lot of the articles in this section build on the Grid-aware Websites project we’ve been working on over the last year, where we’ve been developing a toolkit for developers and designers to create dynamic web experiences that respond to the carbon intensity of the energy grid.

As part of that project, we brought together a wonderful advisory group, made up of community members from CMS projects and independent specialists. Several of them have written articles for this issue. One strong message that came from the group was the importance of making the business case for sustainable design – how to speak about these ideas in a way that resonates with decision-makers.

We begin the issue with Nick Lewis and Lucy Sloss, both members of the advisory group, who offer a forward-looking perspective to a future where the physical world and the internet are truly attuned. It’s a thoughtful introduction to the larger themes of this issue.

From there, we dive into the grid-aware web. Tom Jarrett shares the story of how we redesigned the Branch site itself to better reflect real-time energy data. Then Michael Oghia, together with Andy Eva-Dale and James Hobbs, offers practical guidance on how to communicate the value of grid-aware websites to organizations – an important resource for advocates inside institutions.

Grace Everts presents fascinating user research from Harvey Mudd College, where she studied how people react to the environmental impact of browsing once they’re made aware of it. Hopefully, it prompts others to continue with similar research projects. Grace’s findings set the stage for Raj Banerjee and Shraddha Pawar, who offer a design pattern that gives users the ability to pause features when the grid is dirty. It’s a small but powerful form of agency and a nicely nuanced take on the idea of grid-aware websites.

Tia Nguyen then contributes a thoughtful piece on how digital sustainability can be brought into the everyday workflow of developers through a Visual Studio Code extension.

Michelle:

There’s also Nora Ferreirós and Nauhai Badiola who have been working on some examples in WordPress. Could you share more about what’s going on in the world of WordPress and grid-awareness?

Fershad:

Yes, absolutely! A very large portion of the web runs on WordPress, and Nora and Nahuai have been thinking about how the Grid-aware Websites project can be built to work with those sites. WordPress has a really nice plugin ecosystem which allows any user to add specific bits of functionality to their site (forms, image optimization, etc.) with just a few clicks.

So Nora and Nahuai haven’t just written an article for Branch (in both English and Spanish!), they have started work on a Grid-aware Websites plugin for WordPress as well. Their article looks at some of the features the plugin aims to introduce to the WordPress editor, and how WordPress authors can control the changes the plugin makes to their website. It’s great to see an idea like this come to fruition, and I know there are members of the WordPress community who are excited about it as well!

Michelle:

That’s fantastic – yes, the Branch site itself runs on WordPress, and as part of this issue, we’ve done a lot of updating to the code. There’s going to be a new and improved way of seeing grid intensity information on Branch.

Fershad, you’ve been working closely with designer Tom Jarrett on how to make the energy grid more visible through design. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Fershad:

Definitely. When we started the Grid-aware Websites project, we saw Branch as a really good opportunity to “dogfood” our toolkit and explore grid-aware patterns in a live setting. Tom, who designed the original Branch site in 2020, returned to collaborate with us on this new iteration.

We focused on how to surface grid intensity data to users – not just passively, but in a way that gives people control. This led to the development of a new web component specifically for grid-aware interfaces, which now appears at the top of the redesigned site. Tom’s article also talks about this and unpacks the design choices we made.

Michelle:

Amazing! We’re looking forward to people checking out this section of Branch focusing on the grid-aware web. Now, I’ll hand the mic over to you, Fershad.

Fershad:

Thanks! So, Michelle and Fieke – you co-edited the Regenerativity section. What does attunement mean to you in that context ?

Michelle:

To me, attunement means bringing things into harmony, and making systems more aware or responsive to life. It felt like a fitting theme for this issue.

Together with the amazing Dr. Fieke Jansen from the critical infrastructure lab, we wanted to showcase a shift – not just toward more sustainable digital infrastructure, but toward more regenerative ways of thinking. That means moving past simply reducing harm to imagining systems that replenish and support life over the long term. Fieke’s brilliant article lays that out really clearly, with a helpful diagram showing the spectrum of action from sustainability to regenerativity.

We also tried to keep things playful, by asking: What would regenerative computation look like? How can responsiveness be built into systems?

Fieke Jansen:

Exactly. This section grew out of conversations that Michelle, Lori Regattieri, and I have been hosting, including a dialogue and debate series in late 2024 exploring how we can reimagine digital infrastructures to be smaller, more equitable, and rooted in community.

The event was an invitation for artists, thinkers, and public interest engineers to imagine what responsive and regenerative infrastructures look like that center people and the planet over the accumulation of capital and power through extractive logics. To co-produce knowledge on how we can build sustainable and equitable futures requires an open process, where we imagine and think out loud together. To overcome what Mark Fisher described as capitalist realism, where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The dialogue and debates series did just this: It brought together people from across the globe to get inspired and discuss alternative pathways forward. Some contributors to that series are featured in this issue.

Fershad:

Michelle, do you want to talk us through the other articles in this section?

Michelle:

Absolutely. We open with a piece that Dietrich Ayala and I wrote together, which explores the role of browsers today and offers provocations for how we might green them and make them more sustainable. Next is David Mahoney’s thoughtful essay on grounding us in the physical realities of data centers and (by drawing inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement in the UK) proposing a place-conscious approach to the cloud.

Ola Bonati and Judith Veenkamp contributed a wonderful piece on permacomputing, featuring a zine that explores provocative, low-tech prototypes. Their work, and that of the artists they feature in the article, help us reimagine computing through the lens of ecology.

Fieke:

The great thing about Ola and Judith’s piece is that they highlight several artists, designers, and researchers who – through their creative practices – challenge our understanding of computational progress. For example, Lukas Engelhardt questions the idea that we need bigger, faster, and better computing – with a tiny computing project. He designed a small server which runs on only 12 volts. The article also looks across these projects to identify what is needed to imagine alternative pathways: becoming a kind of scientist, taking time to explore, finding community, and allowing for complexity.

Another one of these artists is Sunjoo Lee, who wrote about her Gardening Electricity Handbook in this issue, a practical guide to mud-powered circuits. It’s not that this project generates a lot of electricity, but it helps ask the question of what it takes to power digital systems and to demonstrate that not every mud sample is the same. Some mud samples contain different compositions of life, and different organisms have different properties. There’s an attunement to place when we consider where these different mud samples have come from. So her project is quite beautiful.

Michelle:

We also have Alexis Oh, who shares a sonic project called Sounds of the Grid. It invites us to listen – not just see – the changes in grid intensity, as we browse the web.

Lori Regattieri’s article then reflects on the geopolitics of AI and climate change, especially how the Majority World is often treated as raw material for US tech companies, further concentrating private wealth. She offers some really beautiful provocations around how to redefine what innovation means if we rebalance the geopolitical relationship away from an extractive to a more equitable one.

Rounding out the section is Esther Mwema’s article Cosmology of the Internet, which presents three artworks that trace the colonial legacies, sacrifice zones, and future visions tied to today’s internet.

It’s an incredibly rich issue. Thanks for sharing your reflections, Fieke and Fershad – and to everyone who contributed. We hope readers feel invited to explore, experiment, and imagine more attuned digital futures.

Acknowledgements

This issue of Branch would not have been possible without countless hours of effort behind the scenes over the past few months.

To all the authors who have turned their thoughts and ideas into the wonderful collection of articles that make up this issue, thank you.

Those articles were masterfully copy-edited by Oliver Lindberg, who worked with all the authors and editors to refine the stories that are told in this issue in ways we hope will resonate with you.

Branch wouldn’t be what it is today without the work of Tom Jarrett, who has been a close collaborator since the beginning. For this issue, he came up with a fresh new design for the Branch site and also created illustrations for some of the articles. Also thank you to Tessa Curran, who created the cover illustration for this issue.

Finally, absolutely none of this would have been possible without the tireless coordination and planning efforts of Katrin Fritsch and Hannah Smith, who juggled all the moving pieces required to put this issue together with aplomb.

Fershad Irani is a web sustainability consultant living in Taipei, Taiwan. He works with the Green Web Foundation across a range of areas, particularly turning sustainable web ideas into working prototypes and code libraries. He specializes in carbon emissions calculations, and is the lead maintainer of the CO2.js library as well as the Grid-aware Websites project.

Fieke Jansen is a co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab and a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are to understand power and conflict around the environmental impact of expanding infrastructures. She is also the co-lead of the Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights coalition.

Michelle Thorne is the Director of Strategy at the Green Web Foundation, co-initiator of the Green Screen Coalition for digital rights and climate justice, and editor of Branch magazine. She’s curious about reconnecting with the radical roots of openness and caring for the commons.

Sustainable and Equitable Infrastructures: Moving from Extraction to Regeneration

Fieke Jansen

In 2025, the urgency of the climate crisis and ecological devastation is well documented. While political and industrial leaders are eager to present new technologies as a way to engineer our way out of these crises, the resulting narrow sustainability efforts at best fall short of their promise and at worst intensify the extractive and exploitative models on which our economies are based. This begs the question: How can we move from this extractive model to one that is sustainable and equitable?

In his 2007 article “Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration”, architect Bill Reed offers a framework to move beyond maintaining the economic status quo by drawing attention to design practices aimed at restoring ecosystems and transforming underlying power structures to have more equitable outcomes. He argues that contemporary sustainability efforts are directed at “doing things better” rather than “doing better things”.

Doing better things, Reed argues, requires regenerative design: a place-based approach that engages with all stakeholders – human and more-than-human (i.e. nature) – to build equitable and healthy relationships. In a regenerative design, people and the planet are no longer seen as a resource for extraction but as an interconnected system in which every organism equally participates. These regenerative practices, or what others describe as being in good relation with the Land, are already applied on a small scale.

Visualising energy needs of practices that take a conventional extractive approach to those that work with living systems in a regenerative manner. — Visualizing Bill Reed’s article “Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration” (Source: Brian Alessi).

Restorative and regenerative infrastructures

In 2023, the critical infrastructure lab held a co-design workshop in Montenegro, and in the environment session, we asked participants to identify their favorite technology of nature. People looked around the building and brought back leaves to symbolize photosynthesis, branches and mosses to represent networks of trees, lichen, mosses, fungus, and worms to foreground composting processes.

This reminded me of the many ways technologies mimic natural processes – from renewable energy sources, like solar power, to the internet that mimics rhizomatic fungi and tree root networks. However, our technologies and infrastructures stop at the extractive and do not restore or regenerate what they have uprooted socially and environmentally.

Can we imagine alternative infrastructural practices that restore and regenerate? Not to offer one quick fix but to challenge our understanding of what infrastructures are and whose interest they serve to open up space to rethink the problem and the solutions at the right scale. Only by shifting our worldviews away from capital accumulation, optimization, and growth towards good relations with the Land can we create alternative futures that prioritize people and planet over profit and capital.

Breaking free from the mindset of the oppressed

To me, the words ‘extraction’ and ‘exploitation’ have become so normalized in relation to technology and infrastructures that these practices have lost their impact and true meaning. In a discussion on internet governance at the Green Screen coalition event, Indigenous activist Alana Manchineri asked if we could explain the word ‘extractivism’. After a few attempts, she looked at us and said “we just call this stealing”.

It was at that moment that I realized that in Western Europe and North America, we have lost the basic understanding of what it means to be in good relations with the Land. We have accepted that states and markets colonize our territories, homes, bodies, and minds for a sense of political and economic security. The first step in imagining alternative computational infrastructures, therefore, starts with breaking free from the mindset of the oppressed and seeing what is hidden, excluded, and missing from the debate.

Infrastructure that decomposes

Infrastructures are associated with the notion of permanence and durability, and the idea that they can only be designed and governed by experts. A highway collapse can have serious consequences to human life, and an electricity or internet outage is often quantified to its perceived economic damage.

However, at the 4S conference in Mexico in 2022, Miki Namba argued that infrastructures can also be soft and in good relation with the Land. In Laos, during monsoon season, bridges are regularly washed away and the choice of materials – bamboo vs concrete and steel – impacts the autonomy of local communities and the health of the Land. Where bridges are constructed from bamboo, the washed-away remains decompose in nature. New bamboo structures are easily rebuilt by local communities, allowing them – if needed – to change their location and reduce dependence on a central authority to come and fix giants of steel or concrete.

This simple bamboo structure challenges the notion of permanence in infrastructures, offering new avenues of agency in determining how our infrastructures are shaped and in turn shape society and providing avenues to imagine an end-of-life that does not disrupt but gives back to the Land.

Making choices

In an ongoing research project, we asked different stakeholders to design data centers in scarcity, i.e. what needs to be included in an infrastructure policy that focuses on limits, reduction, and redistribution instead of growth and capital.

We have found that designing in scarcity, rather than growth and abundance, allows people to explore demands and practices that would otherwise remain unimaginable in the contemporary infrastructure debate. It becomes about governance.

Where sustainability demands are directed at the state as a power holder, oppose the current focus on efficiency gains by the market, object to the neoliberal political calculus governing AI infrastructures, and demand public interest solutions. Specific demands center on drawing red lines on what type of data storage and computing is undesirable, prioritizing the allocation of existing and future infrastructural resources to public interest use, requiring large-scale computing and infrastructural projects to have an end-of-life plan, and developing an industrial policy that stimulates infrastructural practices that give back to the infrastructural ecosystem and technical community.

Redesign to be in good relation with the land

A restorative approach to computational infrastructures demands a redesign that concentrates on the keep-it-in-the-ground principle. To keep critical raw materials in the ground, we need to reduce the total volume of hardware used to power our infrastructures, extend the end-of-life of servers, sea cables, routers, and switches, and change server design.

For the latter, I will draw inspiration from Plantin and Marquet’s research, which found that recent design changes to servers and the architecture of data centers were fueled by the inability to significantly scale up computational power in a location due to the physical limits of cooling techniques.

Facebook, through the Open Compute Project, pushed for changes in data center hardware (components, cables, racks, etc.) that made servers wider and heavier, which required adjustments to the floor and floor plan of data centers.

If we can radically change the hardware and physical environments that run our infrastructures to allow for more computing in one location, we could also radically redesign our hardware to allow for reuse and 100% recycling. This shift away from profit and capital towards infrastructures that are in good relation with the Land will not emerge from the market unless ecological considerations are imposed on the technology industry, and state subsidies support research and development into reusable and recyclable hardware.

Organic computing

A regenerative approach to computational infrastructures is about closing the loop from extraction to regeneration, figuring out ways in which our ‘hard infrastructures’ give back to the Land.

In the co-design workshop in Montenegro mentioned above, Maxigas commented that hardware design is historically determined: The silicon chip, a critical part of almost every modern electronic device, became the default way to process, store, and receive information. States and companies have invested and continue to invest billions in this semiconductor technology, and silicon chips have become the center stage of the geopolitical struggle over power.

In this billion-dollar race to the bottom, silicon chips are highly polluting due to the chemicals, toxins, and carcinogenic substances needed for their production, which has foreclosed other ways to assemble computers and servers. If states, as seed investors of technology, would invest in alternative approaches to computing, and think of post-silicon computing or compostable technologies, we might be able to move away from extraction towards regeneration.

Post-silicon computing would require finding other, non-polluting materials to process, store, and receive information. Branch has previously featured the Data Garden art project, which proposes “a carbon-negative data infrastructure that promotes unification between people, living systems and technology” (Clarke et al., 2021) by encoding information into DNA. And this 9th edition of Branch features the Electric Garden by Sunjoo Lee, who works with regenerative energy sources in her search for technologies that support life rather than harm it.

The electrical garden of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam in collaboration with Sunjoo Lee. — Mud batteries experiment by Sunjoo Lee at the University of Amsterdam (Source: Niels ten Oever).

A pathway forward

These are just a few examples of how our computing infrastructures can be in good relations with the Land. These approaches go beyond the status quo and open up avenues to imagine and speculate about what can be – an important first step to get us to non-extractive and equitable infrastructural practices.

There is no silver bullet; we need to decolonize our minds, design compostable hardware, give agency back to the people, and choose the wellbeing of people and health of our planet over the accumulation of capital and power in the hands of a few.

* A longer version of this article is expected to be part of an edited volume entitled “Planear la salida: horizontes ecosocialistas en el capitaloceno”, published by Verso Libros.

Letter from the Editors

Katrin Fritsch, Fieke Jansen, Maya Richman and Katherine Waters

1. Hosting a garden party

Strong branches do not grow overnight. Much attention goes into seeding the work and caring for the saplings so they can be rooted firmly in the earth. The work reflected in this magazine is thanks to the tireless commitment of many people, some of whose names are known and others not. In it, we are thinking of those who care for our forests and waters, those who question anthropocentric narratives telling us to disregard the non-human world, and those who see that technology is as old as time itself, neither purely digital nor inherently extractive. We thank everyone who nourishes these networks, responds and adapts to changing social and ecological landscapes, and seeks out new pathways for connection and action.

It is therefore fitting that many of the pieces in this special edition on the intersection of climate justice and digital rights were catalyzed together amid the branching walkways of a botanical garden in Heredia, Costa Rica.

The botanical garden represents many tensions at once.

Originally a space designed to categorize and control nature, the garden’s inherent connection to colonial legacies reinforces the university and empire as the seat of power for knowledge creation. Yet while the predominant narrative of these institutions is that humans can control nature, we know this is not the case. Upon closer view, the garden is a rich explosion of life, with diverse, interdependent ecological relations in constant motion. Amidst the bureaucratic illusion of control is a wild space of growth, change, and the radical repurposing of human-made infrastructures.

Torch Ginger Bud by Kira Simon-Kennedy (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Butterfly by Kira Simon-Kennedy (CC BY-NC 4.0)

2. Issue at a glance

As a place of both resistance and rest, the walled garden provided our meeting with a space to breathe and think differently about the entrenched challenges we are facing as a planet, exacerbated by capitalist and extractive technologies. In this edition, you will find pieces born of those conversations, grouped into four sections. They represent different voices from the burgeoning community of researchers, practitioners, and funders whose work on technocapitalism, just transition, and sustainable and equitable infrastructures envisions tech in the service of equitable climate action. Special thanks to Maya Adams and Kira Simon-Kennedy for the beautiful visuals and photographs that accompany the pieces; and to La Bruja RISO for the cover design. We deliberately decided to make this a multilingual issue, including pieces in Spanish [ES], Portuguese [PT], and English [EN]. Please read the contributions with care and appreciation for all those who are exploring the deep and branching networks at this intersection.

Countering false and misleading solutions to ecological crisis

Becky Kazansky and Nikita Kekana reflect on and challenge the reduction of natural elements to financial commodities [EN]. In the interview about her book ‘Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas’ [ES] Paz Peña names and critiques technocapitalism and offers equitable feminist technological approaches as a way forward. We end this section with Jessica Botelho, Lori Regattieri, and Eliana Quiroz on empowering community-driven alliances against social-environmental and climate disinformation [EN].

Towards a just and equitable transition

Heather Milton-Lightening speaks to the tensions and contestation between colonialism, capitalism, and justice, and discusses ways of organizing through which we can create the world that we want to see [EN]. A conversation between Joana Varon and Alana Manchineri [EN|PT] brings to light Indigenous struggle in the Amazon, the physical and technical colonial relations enforced on them, and ways of organizing. The Kuirme Collective, consisting of Rub(én) Solís Mecalco, Aymara Llanque, and Camila Nobrega invert the dominant discourse on extraction and identify ways to build alliances across movements and issues [EN]. Michael Brennan and Hanan Elmasu end with a reflection on navigating the interstices as funders [EN].

‘The term “raw materials” itself should be questioned, as it contributes to the neo-extractivism narrative by preparing the ground for the appropriation and transformation of relations, territories and memories into “natural resources” or “materials”.’
Kuirme Collective

Imagining sustainable and equitable infrastructures

Paola Mosso and Janna Frenzel [EN] reflect on their workshop discussion envisioning digital infrastructures and share time capsules from the future. They emphasize that digital infrastructures are not just machines or processes, but the people who design, maintain and inhabit them. Juliana Guerra [ES] narrows in on who governs our internet infrastructures, who gets to decide how sustainability is defined, and who benefits from it. Jennifer Kamau [EN] shows us that as long as migrants from climate-vulnerable countries are trapped in racialized infrastructures and do not have an equal seat at the table, there can be neither equity nor sustainability. Remy Hellstern and Jen Liu argue that we need to learn from nature and create proactive response frameworks and technologies that are regenerative by design [EN].

‘Border walls will not stop the climate crisis; they just reinforce the injustice of carbon capitalism.’
Jennifer Kamau

Building bridges and ensuring tech serves equitable climate action

The video message ‘An open movement to support climate action’ [EN] by Michelle Cheripka for the Open Environmental Data Project reinforces that open is a tool to shift power, and that the open community is working to be in service of climate justice and equitable climate action. Luis Carrasco argues for the power of open data, but only if we can unlock its knowledge to the public [ES]. Maya Richman and Fieke Jansen reflect on their work to bring the climate justice and digital rights communities together [EN] and Nathaly Espitia Díaz offers an example of community organizing that centers self-care and collective care through ‘Postales sonoras’ or ‘Sound postcards’ [ES]. Oona Castro investigates the need for just socio-environmental infrastructures in the Amazonian Region [PT]. We close this special edition with an interview with Molly Mathews on organizing behind the scenes [EN].

While these thoughts began much earlier than June 2023, the conversations we had among the butterflies, beetles and birds sustained us and have given birth to new connections, alliances and dreams. We invite you to engage and grow more branches with us.

Agapanthus by Kira Simon-Kennedy (CC BY-NC 4.0)

3. Crossing pathways

The interconnections between the co-editors are many, and long before the meeting in Heredia, Costa Rica, we met to discuss how to best share its conversations on climate justice and digital rights beyond our usual circles and networks. The idea for a special edition of Branch was born. The pieces contained here reflect a growing community of organizers, researchers, technologists and funders who want to interrupt extractive systems and build infrastructures that are just and sustainable for people and the planet.

Green Screen Coalition

The Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Coalition is a group of funders and practitioners looking to build bridges across the digital rights and climate justice movements. The coalition fundraised and co-designed the Costa Rica event, as well as this special edition of Branch, to help share essential perspectives on the intersection. The aim of the coalition is to be a catalyst in making visible the climate implications of technology by supporting emerging on-the-ground work, building networks, and embedding the issue as an area within philanthropy. Beginning in earnest in spring 2021, the coalition consists of Ariadne, Ford Foundation, Internet Society Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Green Web Foundation, critical infrastructure lab, and Stiftung Mercator.

4. Green Screen Digital Rights and Climate Justice Edition

Over the last three years, Branch magazine has been sharing essential reflections and dreams of a sustainable and just internet for all. This special issue aims to showcase the work of a growing network with a plurality of approaches and perspectives at the intersection of climate justice and digital technology beyond the internet. It amplifies voices that approach the topics from feminist, decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, and which center care, respect, and non-extractive forms of exchange. With shorter pieces than previous event reports, we want to highlight a variety of perspectives. In this way, Branch magazine can cast a wider canopy and bring new allies and collaborators into the conversation. Our ultimate goal is to help document the multitude of approaches that currently challenge the status quo, and build transterritorial networks of solidarity and co-liberation. There were many hearts and hands who helped make this edition possible, you can find their names on the about page.

Katrin Fritsch researches, writes and consults at the intersection of climate justice, digital rights, and feminism. She advises organisations on data, justice, and emerging technologies. Currently, she is a senior program manager at Green Web Foundation, and the chair of epicenter.works. Previously, she co-founded and co-led MOTIF, a think tank working towards social justice in the digital age. Katrin is the co-initiator of Feminist Futures, and holds an MSc in Data & Society from London School of Economics and Political Science.

Katherine Waters is an editor and writer from London.

Maya Richman, co-lead of the Green Screen Coalition, is a jack-of-all trades who has spent the last ten years listening and learning about the plurality of struggles for technological justice across the world, and supporting activists and organizations to untangle technologies’ hold on our lives and reclaim its power to bring about social and political transformation.

Fieke Jansen is a co-principle investigator of the critical infrastructure lab and a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are to understand power and conflict around the environmental impact of expanding infrastructures. She is also the co-lead of the Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights coalition. In her PhD at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University she looked at the institutional and societal implications of data-driven risk scoring and biometric recognition in Europe. Fieke is a former Mozilla and Green Web Foundation fellow where she explored ways to frame the climate crisis as a core digital rights issue. Prior to starting her PhD Fieke worked for Hivos, where she set up the Digital Defenders Partnership, and at Tactical Tech, where she led the politics of data program.

Embracing imperfect methodologies for cross-territorial collaboration

Maya Richman and Fieke Jansen

The Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Coalition started in 2020 on a journey to explore how digital rights and climate justice intersect, and how we might most effectively integrate these issues into our work, as funders and practitioners. Here we offer a reflection of the things we, Maya and Fieke, have learned along the way. Seeing as the rest of the magazine dives deep into specific topics at the nexus, we wanted to use this piece to share insights into the process of seeding and supporting the network itself.

Red Pistil by Kira Simon-Kennedy (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Crotton Plant by Kira Simon-Kennedy (CC BY-NC 4.0)

The NGO industrial complex has a tendency to claim issue areas like extractive industries claim territories. The desire to stake claims and say ‘we started on this topic first’ ultimately limits the impact of the work as it breeds territoriality and borders rather than interdependence, collectivity, and connections of trust. Slowly exploring how the internet and digital technologies have impacted the planet and the people on it reminds us of just how longstanding these conversations and contestations over land and water are.

As we grow this transnational network, it is important we do not reinforce the narrative that this is a new issue or belongs to a single entity or institution, but rather use the momentum and opportunity to honor and strengthen the ongoing struggle and hard work on the ground.

Doing this has required us, two people based in the global north with knowledge of the digital rights field and the funding ecosystem, to start by listening and learning in order to determine how best to position ourselves in the ecosystem. An initial landscape analysis and issue briefings undertaken by different actors in the network showed the work ahead of us to be intimidating in scope and scale. We had to embrace the uncomfortability of not knowing, and define what we meant by climate justice and digital rights in order to build alliances with others. Through this, we saw a role for ourselves as conveners and bridge builders, between climate justice and digital rights movements, and between grassroots and Indigenous organizers, civil society and funders. The intersection of different positionalities, languages and experiences produces rich complexity, but also (internal) conflict and we’ve found our power as a network lies in our collective ability to embrace these differences, find common grounds, and deal with conflicts as they arise. Our collaborators remind us that the care and commitment with which we navigate these relationships will determine how impactful this coalition can be.

In our capacity as conveners, we hosted two international climate justice and digital rights events, one in Germany in 2022 and one in Costa Rica in 2023. We (re)discovered that building trust and understanding across languages and movements takes time, but is essential when developing strategies against powerful actors and crossborder industries. Building transterritorial solidarity networks requires that we make intentional spaces in international gatherings so people on the frontlines can speak about their resistance and work, in their own language, on their own terms. Only then can we name things for what they are and plot out collective futures.

What struck us in Costa Rica was that we have grown so used to words like ‘extractivism’ and ‘extractive cultures’ to describe the industrial capture of land, resources and personal data, that it requires different perspectives, like those of Indigenous activists protecting the land, to boil it down to its essence: mining other people’s territories is just stealing.

Throughout, we have been refining our collaborative design methodology, inviting community members with complementary perspectives to build the agendas of our events alongside us. Together, we develop shared approaches, challenge assumptions, and bring clarity in mutually beneficial ways. Following feedback from the Berlin event, we added three more thematic areas for discussion: extractivism and mega projects, false and misleading climate solutions, and sustainable and equitable infrastructures. Framing and setting the agenda of our events with the community has allowed for distributed leadership and the creation of actionable shared agendas, as well as keeping us conscious of the need to remain reflexive and acknowledge our own biases. This yields tangible results: thanks to the initiative of the attendees of the Costa Rica meeting, we made space in the schedule for conversation on important topics that we had overlooked, including climate migration, how to stand in solidarity with Indigenous people, and power structures within funding.

There is no easy way out of the multiple crises we are living in today.

Often we fumble, and find that at times our actions contradict our commitments. However, we believe we can only find new pathways out of our concurrent overlapping crises if we actively center and promote different values, Indigenous, feminist, decolonial and community approaches, and commit to working differently. This is where the energy for change is. What we see is a blossoming community that needs support to continue to build together and to bring in the voices of those who haven’t been in the room. We plan to continue into the next year, by sharing the work of the community, surfacing opportunities for collective action, and directly funding projects that seek to intervene and build alternatives.

For too long, the future has been determined by one worldview.

Moving forward we need to celebrate a plurality of approaches and ideas. Over the coming year we hope that the needle will shift from a market-based logic to one that centers people and planet. This means for those based in the global north that we have to start thinking and working towards societies that are based on limits, reduction, and the redistribution of our internet infrastructures and digital technologies. We also hope that we see a shift in the allocation of resources, where more is distributed to those at the frontlines protecting the land, to those whose territories are most impacted by the ecological crisis, and those who are experimenting with new approaches.

New Research on Climate Justice and Digital Rights

Fieke Jansen

In 2021 Ford, Mozilla and Ariadne launched a research project to better understand what responsible grantmaking on the intersection between digital rights and climate/environmental justice could look like. In July 2022, we proudly presented 8 new pieces of research on this theme.

The Engine Room created a landscape analysis as the key research partner in this project. We also published seven issue briefs by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), BSR, and the Open Environmental Data Project and Open Climate.

In this article I offer a preview of what you can expect from these different pieces of research. With the links below, you can jump to a specific report summary:

Landscape mapping – The Engine Room

Gaps for joint actions between environmental and digital rights movement – APC

Interplay between internet and environmental governance – APC

Extractivism, mining and technology in the global South – APC

The impact of disinformation on environmental movements – APC

Climate justice and the knowledge commons – Open Environmental Data Project and Open Climate

Where environmental justice, climate justice and digital rights meet – Open Environmental Data Project and Open Climate

Climate misinformation – BSR

Landscape Mapping

The Engine Room report At the confluence of digital rights and climate & environmental justice: A landscape review provides an overview of how an extremely diverse set of communities and movements work across the intersection of climate justice and digital rights. Why should you read it?

A recurring theme in discussions I have had on climate and tech is that people feel they do not know where to start. This report is a great place to start as it offers an accessible and thoughtful overview into different climate and environmental justice issues that emerge from technological innovation. The Engine Room specifically outlines five issue areas;

the environmental toll of digital infrastructures;
access to information and climate disinformation;
climate monitoring;
increased surveillance of environmental activists and land defenders;
migration justice.

Next to these five issue areas the report offers insight into cross-cutting themes and challenges. Take for example the reports section on the need for a shared worldview between communities, movements and sectors. Here the Engine Room acknowledges that the climate justice and digital rights movement have different languages, histories and entry points into issue on climate and tech, but connect working towards an intersectional lexicon to more fundamental ideological differences. They found that within and between the movements there are different ideas on how to define and address injustices, and the movements have distinct and conflicting views on the role of the state and market in addressing harms and fostering solutions.

Issue briefs

1. Mapping the gaps between digital rights and environmental justice actors in the global South

APC issue brief dives into the gaps between the digital rights and environmental justice movement. They argue that digital rights involvement in climate issues to this day has been ad-hoc and focused on isolated issues rather than as a core strategic concern. They identify four important gaps that limit joint action:

Awareness of each other’s advocacy terrains.
Different relationships to power.
A general absence of cross-over advocacy concerns as core strategic agendas
Gaps in capacity building: Evidence of low-hanging fruits

All four gaps are worth elaborating on, but my Aha moment when reading this issue brief was on the different relationships to power. Here APC refers specifically to the relationship with the private sector. Environmental groups have adversarial and contested relationships to agribusiness, energy and other extractive sectors, while some digital rights organizations collaborate with Big Tech or Big Tech on digital rights. Any meaningful action on the intersection on climate and tech thus requires a clear articulation of the relationship with the market.

The issue brief ends with avenues where the relationship between digital rights and environmental justice actors in the Global South could be strengthened.

2. Environmental and digital rights: Exploring the potential for interplay and mutual reinforcement for better governance

This issue brief by APC explores what those working in the internet governance sphere can learn from governance debates on environmental issues. The deep dive highlights the commonalities between the governance issues: global in scope, the need for action of market, state and citizens in management and protection, cross-cutting policy areas, and exercising key rights. They translate these commonalities into governance questions that still need to be addressed.

What allowed me to ground their argument was the example of applying environmental law to regulate the environmental harms of the internet infrastructure. In this blog post I write about the impact of data centres beyond carbon and how these infrastructures are increasingly becoming a focal point for conflict over land, water and energy.

APC asks if would it be possible, using the Aarhus Convention, to demand more information on the massive natural resource dependency of data centres, the environmental cost of using and manipulating data, and the projections of greenhouse gas emissions from our use of technology?

3. Extractivism, mining and technology in the global South: Towards a common agenda for action

This third APC issue brief clearly explains the challenges and conflicts around the mining of natural resources needed tech hardware, what they refer to as extractivism. It offers clear examples of the harms in the DRC, in Mexico and Brazil, and in the Lithium Triangle in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia.

They deliberately use a broad definition of extraction to include both rare metals and minerals needed for digital devices and the consumption of another natural resource, such as water in both the mining and the data process. This framing is important as it will allow digital rights actors to connect the environmental tool so the internet to the broader profit-driven extractivist approach of the technology sector.

“Extractivism” in the context of this brief refers to the formal and informal mining of minerals used in the production of technology in the global South.
APC

4. Addressing the impact of disinformation on environmental movements through collaboration

The fourth and final issue brief presented by APC engages with how the operations of disinformation/hate speech and the data economy impact the discourse on climate information and the safety and security of the environmental researchers, NGOs and activists.

The issue brief highlight how a paid speech by the fossil fuel industry is a problem. Not only do social media companies continue to receive ad revenue from disseminating climate disinformation, but the study conducted by InfluenceMap also shows how these post spread. The influence map found that in the United States, 25,147 Facebook ads with misleading “greenwashing” messages from just 25 oil and gas organisations were seen over 431 million times.

Check out the “influence map” report here

5. Climate Justice & the Knowledge Commons: Opportunities for the digital rights space

When looking at the intersection of climate and tech there is a tendency to look for answers by looking towards the future or at the work, other movements are doing. In this deep dive into the knowledge commons the Open Environmental Data Project and Open Climate argue that we also need to look at our own histories and the values that have shaped the digital rights movement to find avenues of cooperation.

The digital knowledge commons will be a critical space for facilitating communication about, and collaboration around, climate action. Resources are needed, however, to ensure these spaces remain accessible and inclusive, and that they don’t perpetuate existing social injustices.
Evelin Heidel, Shannon Dosemagen and Katie Hoeberling

Drawing from their own experiences working at the intersection of the climate and open movements they highlight five areas where digital rights groups can collaborate with climate justice activists:

Addressing misinformation around climate change on social media platforms, especially in
languages other than English, and in countries other than the U.S. and Europe.
Understanding how intellectual property might act as a barrier to knowledge about the
climate crisis or for the deployment of climate solutions.
Building a linguistically, geographically, and socially diverse knowledge commons with open
tools that can address important knowledge gaps on climate change information, including
climate crisis responses.
Exploring new future narratives to build a common path towards a better Internet: more just,
inclusive, and equitable.
Using a climate lens to analyze digital rights issues, such as privacy, surveillance or artificial
intelligence, and understanding how climate change might impact digital rights

6. Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, and the Space of Digital Rights

In this issue brief the Open Environmental Data Project and Open Climate explore the different histories of the climate justice and environmental justice movement (from US vantage point). This deep dive came about after the authors noted that we (the initiators of the broader research project) used the terms climate and environmental justice interchangeably. They argued that in order to be responsible grantmakers, we need to be aware of the distinct histories and struggles that shaped these two movements.

This issue brief is an important read for those who want to learn more about the differences and commonalities of the climate justice and environmental justice movements and where digital rights issues may intersect. They specifically identify three areas:

The relationship between the surveillance state, environmental activists, and the right to privacy
Climate migration and the right to migrant privacy and protection
The ability to use, collect and understand environmental data

What I enjoyed reading were the examples the authors used to illustrate that not all people affected by climate crisis are affected equally, and how not all environmental issues should be collapsed under climate justice, even if climate justice is intimately connected to environmental justice.

7. Building a High-Quality Climate Science Information Environment: The Role of Social Media

BSR argues that a healthy information environment is crucial in fighting the climate crisis, and offers a deep dive into the issues around climate misinformation. If you are interested in learning more about climate misinformation and why social media platform responses have been lacking, this is the issue brief for you. It starts by unpacking climate misinformation and the different ways it manifests on social media and changes over time. The report then offers a good analysis of how social media platforms ‘traditionally’ deal with misleading or harmful content on their platforms, and why their responses to the climate misinformation have been lacking. They conclude with recommendations for social media platforms, civil society, and digital rights funders.

None of the major social media platforms include climate change in their misinformation policies, implying that they do not view climate misinformation as something that is likely to lead to physical harm, especially imminent physical harm. As a result, platforms currently do not remove climate misinformation from their platforms.
BSR