The following text is a speech I wrote for the opening of the GOGBOT Art & Technology festival in 2021. That year, the theme of the festival was “Infocalypse Now: Time to Recalibrate Reality.“ Infocalypse was conceptualized as an overwhelming stream of information that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. I delivered the speech after weeks of building an interactive installation with Extinction Rebellion Twente, the design collective ‘This Ain’t Rock N Roll,’ and Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion UK. You can see pictures of our installation throughout the blogpost.
The mass confusion created by the overwhelming amount of information that we’re subjected to every day is only possible because of how advanced and pervasive digital technologies are. While lies and propaganda have always been used for controlling societies, never in the history of human civilization have we been as suffocated with opinions, memes, videos, and all kinds of unending streams of data as we are today.
Digital technologies and the information they feed us infiltrates every bit of our lives, sneaking into our political debates, shaping our closest relationships, and eliciting reactions to the multiple catastrophes and crises happening simultaneously around the world.
And it seems like some of us can’t get enough of it. We keep unlocking our phones, coming back for more. We unlock it from our beds the moment we wake up; while we’re on the toilet; during our coffee break; before falling asleep, every single day.
Yet it would be lazy to simply blame these ‘technologies’ as the root of all our problems, as these indestructible, out-of-control forces under which us, mortal humans, are doomed to be enslaved.
We sometimes forget that even the most sophisticated algorithms and powerful AI systems depend on design decisions made on the basis of political and ideological goals. And we forget that, as users, we can turn technologies off, or around, or upside down.
We shape the future of technologies just as much as technologies shape our future. And I think that it is under this understanding we could begin to ‘recalibrate reality.’
In my branch of philosophy, some people argue that reality is actually performed. What that means is that reality is not something that exists apart from ourselves, that we then analyze from a distance, as if it is happening beyond our control. No, reality is being constructed by us, with what we say and what we do.
Like David Graeber once wrote, “the ultimate, hidden Truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
And this is an incredibly powerful idea for activism because it reassures us that when we speak up for what we believe in, when we act as if we were in the society we want to live in, we are effectively changing the world. We are effectively recalibrating reality. And just like that, your words and actions have the power to recalibrate reality.
Except there’s one problem. We all don’t just inhabit our own individual realities. We are sharing a collective one. We share it with our friends, who’ve got our backs and the best intentions; but we also share it with some very powerful, self-interested folks who wouldn’t think twice in harming the rest of us to get what they want.
So, reality becomes this field of struggle with everyone shaping it, whether consciously or not. Take climate change for instance. A hotter planet is our current reality. Why? For starters, because some really influential and powerful people are making an economy based on fossil fuels the only possible reality. Climate reporter Emily Atkin said in an interview, “climate change is not something that is happening to us, it is something that is being done to us.”
Likewise, the Infocalypse is not something that is just happening to us, it is something that is being done to us. There’s a fortune being made out of YouTube’s recommendations algorithms, which infamously push conspiracy theories. There’s a fortune being made through the economy of keeping your attention, scrolling, liking, and sharing. Someone is profiting immensely from it.
So, the way I see it, we either consume and consume information uncritically, feeding into the mass confusion and the Infocalypse, or we take some control back and become accountable for the things we create, the things we put out there, and how those things shape reality.
That’s my message for you today: turn digital technologies around, and focus on what you put out there. This is what Extinction Rebellion Twente and my dear friends, Clare Farrell, co-founder of the movement, and This Ain’t Rock n Roll tried to do with our installation at the Oude Market: a confrontation with our horrifying reality of mass extinction, but offering each one of us the possibility of creating a different reality.
Leave a Reply