░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ Introduction

It has been argued that we have entered the era of ‘Post-Abundance’ with the breaking down of supply chains, energy price rises, global conflicts, and climate effects all impacting resource availability and cost. Computation is one of the key sites for this impact, via supply chain disruptions that have repeatedly decreased component availability against a background of increased demand and higher price per compute. Computation is also one of the drivers for these crises: for example, the energy use of AI training and cloud computing now dwarves the kWh usage of multiple countries combined and is increasing; semiconductor production is widely seen as an emerging trigger of major conflicts and the next technological arms race; and computational e-waste is blighting landscapes throughout the Global South causing long-term impact on communities and landscapes.

In response to these conditions, there is a growing argument for de-growth and a need to re-think how we understand ‘progress’ aside from consumptive computational and technological advances.

We in the 3C group discuss the climate crisis as a hyperobject that intersects with many forms of disempowerment and injustice around the world, allowing for a wide range of social, racial, and economic justices to be understood in relation to the climatic. This facilitates an interdisciplinary approach to the research, tying it into other critical projects adjacent to climate and technology, such as decolonialism, critical technology studies, critical race studies, and algorithmic justice.

The work we undertake as a group focuses on carbon and technological literacy around computational systems and their uses, promoting uses of them in arts and design practice that modify, hack, or employ these tools in ways that reduce consumption, minimise waste, and engage with their hidden functionalities to propose mindful and critically reflexive engagements with them. We do this work in and outside of academia, with students, communities, publics, and arts and culture organisations.