دانلود کتاب The Cost of Convenience: A collection of provocations on the relationship between technology and the climate crisis

This report is the result of The Cost of Convenience, the first workshop convened by the Minderoo Centre of Technology and Democracy in June 2021.
We reached out across several academic fields to challenge an international group of experts with
the task of writing a provocation on the impact that digital technology has on the environment, pushing
otherwise careful academics to enter into speculation, critique, exchange, and dialogue in order to bring
transparency to this opaque issue.
We quickly discovered a need for bridging across several distinct and siloed conversations and across
the problems of media infrastructures, the tech sector’s environmental impact and the potential harms of
our digital information environment our natural environments. We found a need to scope new research on
tech’s environmental impact and a need for collaborative and international efforts to identify areas that
require immediate action and research. What you are reading is the first step in this process. Like the ‘zines’
of the Punk Rock era that inspired our report’s style, we also see our work as a provocation for you to join
us in continuing.
These provocations are a fitting start for us at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, because
we see our main goal as supporting the democratic values in everyday digital technologies. As a centre,
we challenge assumptions about power in two senses. The first, as we and our international collaborators
do here, is to think about the material consequences of our digital lives - how electricity and resources
and infrastructures of digital technologies are implicated in the choices that we make as every day.
Four key common themes emerged across the provocations that we present here. The first set of
provocations concern the extraction of data and resources needed to power technology-saturated
lives. The second cover the costs incurred without a ‘right to repair’ - the planned obsolescence of
the digital age that encourages people to consume without regard to costs over the lifecycle of digital
products. Third is the challenge posed by greenwashing, including the prevalent narratives about digital
technologies as weightless, clean and green and the companies that produce them as blameless in the
environmental crisis. Finally, these provocations question the digital exhaust and the resources and
infrastructures needed to maintain it.
What links these four themes and the provocations that follow is that they all suggest how citizens and
communities can question the values and choices of technology companies through a lens of power.
That brings us to the second sense of power that we at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and
Democracy are committed to: restoring the balance of social and political power to citizens in light
of the increased dominance of large companies making choices about data-driven infrastructures
in our everyday lives.
We convened the Cost of Convenience Workshop in June 2021 when much of the world was still grappling
with COVID-19 restrictions. What emerged was a model for collaborative thinking and the first steps in
new connections to help us reclaim that collective voice, articulating what counts over what is convenient,
what is valuable over what those in power value.
We hope that we can inspire you, too, to begin new ways of challenging the cost of convenience with us.