Conviviality

2024/06/072024/12/09

Liberalism Today: A Plea for an Ecologically Oriented Liberalism

tl;dr: Liberalism must evolve to include Ivan Illich’s concept of conviviality, integrating ecological sustainability and social justice, emphasizing mutual dependence and ethical responsibility for today’s crises.

Liberalism, as a political philosophy and historical movement, strives for a free political, economic, and social order. Freedom, in turn, means the absence of constraints in making decisions between different options. In philosophy, political science, theology, and law, the term generally denotes a state of autonomy of a subject. In today’s times, given the pressing ecological and social challenges, there is a need for a realignment of liberalism towards an ecologically oriented model, in which the concept of conviviality by Ivan Illich plays a central role.… Read more

2020/03/302020/03/30

How We Win To Save The Climate

tl;dr: Covid-19 shows us that we can change. Now let’s make it work for saving the climate.

We all make new experiences these days. And that “we” is an estimated 1.7 billion strong, around 20 percent of the global population. We spatially distance ourselves and adapt our everyday practices in a grand social experiment on a scale unimaginable only a month ago. Some of these changes might revert back once the Covid-19 pandemic is over, depending on how long it lasts and how long we have to participate in this experiment.… Read more

2019/05/202019/05/20

Artificial Intelligence as Convivial Technology

tl;dr: Artificial Intelligence research needs to focus on enriching people’s relation to each other, empower them to organise their life beyond the market, and assist in the transformation towards sustainability

Technology is never neutral. It transforms the world, our perceptions of it, and our relations towards one another in a fundamental way. Artificial Intelligence (AI) as technology, as a technological paradigm, as specific applications of machine (self-)learning as well as automation of highly cognitive decision routines, raises questions if we should use it, how we should use it, and what happens then.… Read more

2018/03/102018/03/14

Digital Sustainability and Social Innovation

tl;dr: Social innovators are political entrepreneurs and the sustainability of the digital age requires a new political economy

Can digitalisation aid in achieving Sustainable Development? The answer is ”definitely maybe“. Digitalisation comes with great potentials of empowering active prosumerism and new forms of creative collaboration beyond the market, but also with great rucksacks of material and energy consumption. Digital Sustainability then demands fundamental economic change towards a circular economy, but also a transformation of social behaviours and structures.… Read more

2018/03/022018/03/02

Digitalisation and Sustainability

tl;dr: Those who want to talk about digitalisation should also talk about the circular economy and sufficiency

Is the digital economy an enabler for a sustainable society? What role do commons, both digital as well as physical, play when it comes to inclusion, equity and mitigating climate change? How can different actors in society frame digital technologies from the normative perspective of Sustainability? These and other questions have been discussed at a recent ideas conference of the TU Berlin on digitalisation and sustainability – “digitalisation” being a very German-English description for the increased use of digital technologies throughout society and their economic, social, political and ecological implications.… Read more