ABSTRACT
As concerns around climate change escalate, the need to address the environmental impacts of computing becomes more dire. While urgent action is needed, there is also opportunity to rectify longstanding inequities and injustices present in the relationship between computing and the environment. The aim of this one-day hybrid workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners and develop a material ethics of computing. We frame material ethics as a shared understanding of the relations between material and labor that shape digital infrastructures. Through presentations, discussions, and facilitated activities, we aim to build a research community to understand how computing facilitate sites of environmental damage and degradation, and also spaces for justice, change, and hope.
- Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos. 2019. A planet to win: why we need a Green New Deal. Verso Books.Google Scholar
- Gary Cook, David Pomerantz, Kassie Rohrbach, Brian Johnson, and J. Smyth. 2015. Clicking clean: A guide to building the green Internet. Greenpeace Inc Wash. DC (2015).Google Scholar
- Sean Cubitt. 2016. Finite media: Environmental implications of digital technologies. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
- Kristin N. Dew and Daniela K. Rosner. 2019. Designing with waste: A situated inquiry into the material excess of making. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 1307–1319.Google Scholar
- Paul Dourish. 2010. HCI and Environmental Sustainability: The Politics of Design and the Design of Politics. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’10), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–10. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1858171.1858173Google ScholarDigital Library
- Paul Dourish. 2017. The stuff of bits: An essay on the materialities of information. MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Joseph Dumit. 2014. Writing the implosion: teaching the world one thing at a time. Cult. Anthropol. 29, 2 (2014), 344–362.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Paul N. Edwards. 2010. A vast machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. Mit Press.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nathan Ensmenger. 2018. The environmental history of computing. Technol. Cult. 59, 4 (2018), S7–S33.Google ScholarCross Ref
- V Forti, C.P. Baldé, R Kuehr, and G Bel. 2020. The Global E-waste Monitor 2020: Quantities, flows and the circular economy potential. Bonn/Geneva/Rotterdam.Google Scholar
- Jennifer Gabrys. 2016. Program earth: environmental sensing technology and the making of a computational planet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
- Colin M. Gray, Yubo Kou, Bryan Battles, Joseph Hoggatt, and Austin L. Toombs. 2018. The dark (patterns) side of UX design. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14.Google Scholar
- David J. Hess. 2018. Social movements and energy democracy: Types and processes of mobilization. Front. Energy Res. 6, (2018), 135.Google Scholar
- Lara Houston, Steven J. Jackson, Daniela K. Rosner, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Meg Young, and Laewoo Kang. 2016. Values in repair. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 1403–1414.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bran Knowles, Oliver Bates, and Maria Håkansson. 2018. This Changes Sustainable HCI. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’18, ACM Press, Montreal QC, Canada, 1–12. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174045Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maria Puig de La Bellacasa. 2017. Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. U of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
- Christophe Lécuyer. 2017. From clean rooms to dirty water: labor, semiconductor firms, and the struggle over pollution and workplace hazards in Silicon Valley. Inf. Cult. 52, 3 (2017), 304–333.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Josh Lepawsky and Chris McNabb. 2010. Mapping international flows of electronic waste. Can. Geogr. Géographe Can. 54, 2 (2010), 177–195.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jen Liu, Daragh Byrne, and Laura Devendorf. 2018. Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173614Google ScholarDigital Library
- Laura U. Marks. 2020. Let's Deal with the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media. Afterimage J. Media Arts Cult. Crit. 47, 2 (2020), 46–52.Google Scholar
- Nassim Parvin and Anne Pollock. 2020. Unintended by Design: On the Political Uses of “Unintended Consequences.” Engag. Sci. Technol. Soc. 6, (2020), 320–327.Google Scholar
- David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. 2002. The Silicon Valley of dreams: Environmental injustice, immigrant workers, and the high-tech global economy. NYU Press.Google Scholar
- Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, Hasan Mahmud Prottoy, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. 2019. The Breaking Hand: Skills, Care, and Sufferings of the Hands of an Electronic Waste Worker in Bangladesh. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniela K. Rosner and Morgan Ames. 2014. Designing for repair? Infrastructures and materialities of breakdown. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, 319–331.Google Scholar
- Katie Shilton. 2018. Values and ethics in human-computer interaction. Found. Trends® Human–Computer Interact. 12, 2 (2018).Google Scholar
- James H. Smith. 2011. Tantalus in the digital age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and “movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Am. Ethnol. 38, 1 (2011), 17–35.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nicole Starosielski. 2015. The undersea network. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
- Emma Strubell, Ananya Ganesh, and Andrew McCallum. 2019. Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in NLP. ArXiv Prepr. ArXiv190602243 (2019).Google Scholar
- Nantina Vgontzas. 2021. Toward Degrowth: Worker Power, Surveillance Abolition, and Climate Justice at Amazon, Forthcoming in New Global Studies, Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3981869 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3981869Google Scholar
- Kelly Widdicks, Mike Hazas, Oliver Bates, and Adrian Friday. 2019. Streaming, Multi-Screens and YouTube: The New (Unsustainable) Ways of Watching in the Home. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Towards a Material Ethics of Computing: Addressing the Uneven Environmental Stakes of Digital Infrastructures
Recommendations
From ethics washing to ethics bashing: a view on tech ethics from within moral philosophy
FAT* '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and TransparencyThe word 'ethics' is under siege in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or handsoff governance, "ethics" is increasingly identified with technology companies' self-regulatory efforts and with shallow ...
An ethical framework for evaluating construction materials
ETHICS '14: Proceedings of the IEEE 2014 International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science, and TechnologyThis paper provides a framework to evaluate the ethical implications of using different construction materials. Knowing information about the product lifecycle is crucial to identifying key environmental, social, economic, political, and practical ...
Subjectivity and information ethics
In “A Brief History of Information Ethics,” Thomas Froehlich (2004) quickly surveyed under several broad categories some of the many issues that constitute information ethics: under the category of librarianship—censorship, privacy, access, balance in ...
Comments