I’ve just returned from a few days in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I had the absolute privilege of joining CREA’s Reconference – a primarily Majority-World led feminist space, with performances, strategy circles, workshops and more.
I’m left with a lot of food for thought, about issues I work directly on, and also issues that are tangential (but always eventually relevant). I’ve worked in tech/social justice space for nearly 15 years now, and when I’m in European digital rights spaces it becomes quickly clear to me how new the digital rights community is – there are relatively few elders, and (important for me personally) even fewer elders who look like me. In spaces like Reconference, or global feminist spaces more generally, it fills my heart to see feminist activists who are twenty or thirty years older than me, full of experience that I’m grateful to learn from. There are a few in particular I’ve been lucky to learn from over the years – Srilatha Batliwala, whose writings on power and movements have been so influential to my own writing and thinking about technology, who we were sad to miss in person at Reconference, but whose work and impact was very present – and Bishaka Datta, whose work on sexuality and the internet in the early 2010s opened my eyes, among many others.
Reconference was full of elders whose work touches in so many ways on the issues we’re battling today when it comes to technology and digital rights, but who – at least in the European setting – often don’t get a seat at the table. I’m left wondering how we can do a better job of acknowledging the youth of the digital rights movement in comparison to other social justice movements, putting ourselves in situations where we’re learning and listening, and creating welcoming entry points for people who might not see their work as having anything to do with technology but whose sharp critique on structural power is exactly what the space needs.
The role of tech in our movements
I talked with people, as ever, about how they see technology impacting their movements and their organising. And in many ways, I feel like there were two ways of thinking about the current moment: one where people felt like technology hasn’t, at its roots, changed anything – there were right wing governments and propaganda before – and who see the current crises we’re in right now as more of the same.
And there was another way of thinking: people who felt like our relationship to and dependence upon technology has fundamentally changed our relationship with each other and with the state, a paradigm shift rather than a continuation of business as usual. Anja Kovacs’ work on embodied data is a good example of this – arguing that we need to stop thinking about data as a separate resource, instead acknowledging that our bodies are fundamentally affected by the way in which tech is intertwined within our societies.
Personally, I can see the argument on both sides. Feminist movements have indeed always been impacted by gross inequities in power and resources, and by dis- and mis-information. From where I sit, there is something about the scale and reach of digital technologies these days that feels different – that said, I’m conscious that my work centres around tech and data, so perhaps that’s just what I’m seeing.
Tech as a source of strength and access
On the flipside, too, technology also offers ways to strengthen our work, making it easier to archive, save and access information. More on those lines, I attended a beautiful workshop on Liberatory Archiving, run by Ezrena Marwan and Saru from Utar Chadhav.
Saru from Utar Chadhav shared their archiving and podcasting practices, encouraging us to rethink the way that we imagine a podcast happening – not just as two people talking to each other, but instead as a process of care and pleasure. At Utar Chadhav, they take 3 months minimum per episode, and think about the very process of the podcast as a way of bringing people together to discuss a topic, recording it together and ending with a listening workshop over a period of weeks. Each episode has a particular artist that documents the process and produces art for it. And all this, of course, takes time – but the slowness and the care is part of the process.
I deeply appreciated hearing experiences like this, in particular because they make use of technology while also working against the capitalist and extractive logics of speed and profit built into that same technology. It takes a lot of intention and care to go against the grain in this way, and such stories show us that it is indeed possible.
This thread of rethinking and reimagining ran through the conference in different ways. Joe Sacco encouraged us to rethink what we consider to be a democracy to be, and asked us to reflect upon whether we actually have democracies (which imply and require regular participation, not just a vote every four years) – or if we simply have electoral regimes calling themselves democracies.
Bishaka and I ran a strategy circle on imagining our expansive digital futures – specifically, thinking about a few specific scenarios that we imagined to be true in the year 2035, and working backwards to strategise how they came to be. Some of the ideas that came up in the small groups suggested paths forward with solidarity at the heart, in a way that sits somewhat in contrast to the dominant narratives I see in Europe at least.
For example: right now on the European policy scene, it’s all about digital sovereignty – independence and autonomy for states, able to control their own digital infrastructure and digital assets (and potentially, their own users). The logic behind that implies a faith and trust in states that personally, I’m not sure is warranted – and also ignores the deeply global systems powering our technology, from the data workers powering AI, to the environmental impacts of lithium mining, or the child exploitation that makes cobalt mining possible.
In contrast, the people in our workshop who were working on the scenario that “Social media is a space of joy and pleasure” suggested that some kind of transnational legislation was necessary, going beyond states and borders, and with solidarity at the heart of it. My first thought upon hearing that was how opposite that approach was to the digital sovereignty approach, in that it acknowledged our collective interdependence upon one another, rather than attempting to strengthen (European nations) independence.
There were many more sessions that gave me pause for thought – like a session on ‘the trouble with pronouns’ by Madhavi Menon, which suggested that respect might beside in failure to identify, and encouraged us to stop equating respect with ‘getting things right’, for example. And a beautiful exhibition by Azadeh Akhlagi, who uses conceptual photography and the creation of massive tableaus, to re-examine historical events in Iran. In her keynote talk, she explained to us the immense amount of research that goes into creating those scenes, shining a light on the huge amount of people whose stories aren’t typically foregrounded in historical retellings.
And Nishant Shah talked about the myths powering generative AI – disruptive inevitability and breathless acceleration, and how the very premise of emerging tech is that it needs to “unsettle us” in order to settle in society. I appreciated the push from Nishant to question what we take for granted, and to draw clear differences between “computable information” processed by and produced by generative AI, and truth (or multiple truths) that we take in in our lives.
All in all, I’ll be thinking about everything that came up at Reconference for a long while, and I’m so grateful to have been able to attend. The infrastructure that makes a conference like that possible is so extensive, from the macro to the micro, and it was a really special week.