A talk given at the The 2nd Ecology of AI Workshop in June 2024

One of the concepts I introduce in this talk is the idea of 'decomputing', as a 50:50 hybrid of decolonial and degrowth approaches.

"Decomputing challenges the expansionism of scale that AI brings to its technical form, to its environmental demands and to its social impacts. This expansionism is AI's version of 'growth', and it's empty metrics echo GDP in the ways they conceal the underlying destructiveness. Decomputing takes the idea of ‘computing within limits’ to refer not only to the scale of computational machinery but to limits of extractive and colonial logics, limits to a biosphere’s ability to recover, limits to our Western knowledge systems and limits to tech solutionism.

Decomputing is the reassertion of relationality over abstraction, and of the vernacular, as Ivan Illich would put it, over scale; that is, of vernacular forms-of-living that presuppose limits to property, limits to technology, and limits to scarcity. It's a logic for resisting datacentres, a way of cutting through the climate-washing and a way of extending those struggles. It's a rationale for more collective action to constrain computing which is out of balance with social & environmental justice."