Digital justice issues in Ireland: Permacomputing for Wilderland, reversing the ecological strain of information technology.
PhD Research Proposal
Colm O'Neill
Title
Digital justice issues in Ireland: Permacomputing for Wilderland, reversing the ecological strain of information technology.
Abstract
This study aims to assess the potential of permacomputing projects as case studies for cultivating oppositional knowledge for digital justice issues in Ireland. It focuses on both social and ecological concerns related to digital technologies. The study will propose that by highlighting the ecological impact of computing, awareness of related social and digital justice issues will increase. Ireland, with its significant presence of global technology corporations, faces unique digital justice challenges that put strain on national infrastructures and natural ecosystems. The study uses close-up enquiry to examine whether oppositional knowledge can be created by engaging with permacomputing case studies. Permacomputing is an approach to computing that considers the resources required for computing and aims for sustainability. The research will involve a project called Wilderland, which focuses on biodiversity and climate action in County Mayo, Ireland where a new permacomputing project will soon be deployed. The study will gather experiences from Wilderland stakeholders to determine if and how oppositional knowledge can be cultivated. The sought oppositional knowledge is directed at influencing policy, practice, and scholarship in addition to engendering learners' agency in unconventional settings of education for digital social justice. The research questions explore the role of permacomputing in digital justice in education and its potential to inform policy and practice.
Introduction
This study seeks to establish if permacomputing projects can support the development of oppositional knowledge towards digital justice issues in Ireland. Digital Justice is understood here beyond its corrective sense, meaning that the concerns of this study include harms that break laws (e.g. GDPR regulations (relating to data-retention), Digital Services Act (relating to illegal content on digital platforms) or environmental regulations) and harms that are not the object of legal framings but have social consequences (e.g. issues of bias leading to misrepresentation, accessibility, etc) related to digital technologies. Along with digital justice, the ideas of permacomputing and oppositional knowledge are central to this project. Permacomputing is an approach to computing that considers the resources it requires, inspired by permaculture, which is seen as a "radically sustainable computing" (Heikkilä, 2021) practice that actively breaks away from modern computing's excesses (Selwyn, 2023). Oppositional knowledge is knowledge that is "instrumental in the formation of critical attitudes towards dominant power and [lead to] actual participation in oppositional action" (Lee, 2015). With these conceptions, the premise that this study takes, and wants to test, is that drawing attention to the ecological impact of modern computing practices will shed light on related social and digital justice issues and enable more active criticism of the commercial actors within the field. Issues of digital justice and digital rights are multiple, but often hard to name or situate due to the "largely borderless nature of the internet" (Kwet, 2022a) and the seamless, omnipresent nature of digital technology that "is in all aspects of everyday life" (Cruz and Harindranath, 2020). This vastness is why this study focuses on Ireland. Irish citizens and residents face unique digital justice issues as their country has attracted many global technology corporations through low-tax economic policy. It is the purpose of this study to attempt to raise critical awareness of the harms created by the actions of technology corporations in Ireland. While some argue that, in a growth-based system, they bring some economic benefits, these corporations are involved in many of the social, educational and ecological harms of digital injustice. For Ireland, this presence puts strain on its electrical infrastructure, housing, legal systems and distorts ecological targets. In addition, the broader societal phenomenon of techno-solutionism (whereby more technology and more data is automatically thought to be a solution to any problem) related to this technological presence promotes a biased technological optimism which hinders the "reframing [of digital technology] as a problem rather than a solution" (Selwyn, 2023).
Our world faces irreversible turmoil in the dual form of climate change and ecological collapse yet, technological enterprises are continuing their rapid expansion, making themselves indispensable in modern life, with increasing consequences. A report in 2019 showed that the technology sector now contributes 4% of greenhouse gas emissions globally (Shift, 2019) and these numbers are rising rapidly. While it is unfortunate that the morality of these companies alone is not sufficient to abolish them (digital technology critics list privacy issues, (see Gürses and van Hoboken (2018), Zuboff (2019)), monopoly and antitrust problems (see Wu (2018), Pasquale (2016)), intellectual property exploitation (see Crawford (2013)) and computational bias issues (see O'Neil (2017))), adding their ecological impact to the list of wrongdoings opens an additional, urgent, angle of criticism. Although electrical consumption only accounts for 20% of the total ecological impact of the computation sector (the remaining 80% relates to hardware manufacturing), that power draw puts immense pressure on national electric grids. The infrastructure of servers and data-farms organisations like Amazon rely are colossal, requiring power for computers, networking and cooling. These power requirements generate baffling headlines, such as the 2022 report that 105 diesel generators were being installed in Dublin for auxiliary power of server-farms hosting Amazon Web Services (AWS). In Ireland, it is calculated that by 2027, 31% of grid electrical consumption will be attributed to data-centres alone (Cunningham, 2021) (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2019). The digital industry is now responsible for between 2-5% of global emissions, which is more than that of the aviation industry (WSG, 2023). Despite the above, criticism of big technology corporations and the excesses of modern computation is sparse, which is the research problem of this study.
Through small-scale qualitative research, this study wants to test if oppositional knowledge can be created by engaging with radical alternatives categorised as permacomputing. Permacomputing is a radical computing approach that takes inspiration from permaculture (Heikkilä, 2021). This research proposal involves direct engagement with a 'Creative Climate Action Fund' project titled Wilderland, which takes place from September 2023 to September 2025 in County Mayo, Ireland. Wilderland will be a "program of embedded research, public engagement & education activities, creative community workshops and public artworks." The project aims to raise awareness of the biodiversity crisis, and to develop wildlife sanctuaries in one of the few remaining wildernesses of the island. It intends "to act as a catalyst project to encourage people-led climate action"^[^1]^. Wilderland will be the site of installation of a new permacomputing project, which are not common in Ireland, and the stakeholders of Wilderland form the unit of analysis of this study. As such, although not the focus of this study, Wilderland can be considered as a Socially Engaged Arts project, which is sometimes thought of as Relational Aesthetics (Bishop, 2004), or Dialogic Art (Kester, 2012). Three permacomputing workshops will be part of the program of activities at Wilderland, which will have the main aim of providing information and knowledge of current digital excesses, and proposed alternatives via permacomputing.
Establishing if oppositional knowledge can be created in this way will be the task of analysis of observations and interviews with Wilderland permacomputing workshop participants. These steps are detailed in the research design, before which, the research questions are listed, along with the literature review and theoretical framework.
Research Questions
RQ 1 How can exposure to permacomputing practices in education cultivate oppositional knowledge directed at modern mainstream computing?
RQ 1.1 How can that oppositional knowledge empower people at operational levels to influence policy for digital education and digital justice?
RQ 1.2 How can oppositional knowledge of mainstream computing practices help people relate digital justice as a social justice issue?