Tag: Ivan Illich

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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

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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

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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

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Brown-Green Degrowth? On Nazis, Nationalism & the Postgrowth Economy

tl;dr: Stefan Laurin’s painting of Degrowth into the right-wing nationalist corner is lazy armchair journalism

The ideas of a Degrowth-oriented society are a crude mixture of environmentalism and National Socialism – says German journalist Stefan Laurin in a recent blog article. Laurin, who is writing for German outlets like the conservative high-brow magazine ‘Cicero’ as well as the left-wing ‘Jungle World’, focuses his critique on Niko Paech, German economist and Degrowth researcher.… Read more

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Convivial Modernity

In my module on »Sustainable Development« at Karlshochschule International University I also teach sociological theories dealing with the natural environment. The other day my class and I were discussing »Risk Society« by Ulrich Beck among others. The idea behind it is that the old industrial society – modernity 1.0 – has given way to a different kind of modernity, one in which the production and distribution of risks has taken the place of wealth production and distribution.… Read more