Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While Japan continues to drive the high-tech smartification of agriculture, what is the role of digitalisation for a diversified, agroecological family farm in a rural part of Hyogo Prefecture?
We can collectively reclaim the daylight of our attention, our right to decide what matters and what we wish to tend to.
Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Despite promises to fix unjust land governance, a new study shows that digital technologies can further land grabbing and inequality.
Promoting economic growth is unethical because economic activity has overshot the carrying capacity of the biosphere and is degrading the ecological system.
The questions posed by the ecological crises – notably the climate emergency – are a series of provocations. These questions drive us back not only to intimate connections between our actions and the fate of the earth and our atmosphere, but to the intimate realm of our attention and capacity to care both individually and collectively.
The elements of our lifestyle which we most closely identify with tend to be off-limits to any critical discussion. This is one explanation as to why recent research on the impact of digital technology is missing from the popular ecological debate. But as 96% of British adults have a mobile device{1} the footprint of digital technology can no longer be ignored. From electronic waste to carbon emissions, it’s taking on a life of its own.
With well established markets, enterprises and memberships in a variety of sectors, the time has never been better for the co-op world to fully embrace the digital realm, helping take a wide range of fresh apps and online services to new heights through their investment and support.
Firstly, the city’s digital plans begin with instating a Digital City Agenda, setting out Amsterdam’s vision on cyber security, data sovereignty, digital participation and digital services, complex topics that cannot be solved overnight.
We have proposed a policy that would allow more sales of fresh homemade foods made in home kitchens with reasonable food safety requirements (such as safe food handling training, kitchen inspections, sanitary standards) and with the important condition that only certain types of legal entities could operate a web application or web platform that promotes sales of homemade food and takes a cut of each transaction.
How does our relationship with digital technologies alter our relationship with the future, with the present, and with our imaginations? It’s a question we’ve reflected on in various podcasts and interviews in this series. One of the books that most influenced me on this was Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Present Shock’.
In his book In the Absence of the Sacred, Jerry Mander points out that new technologies are usually introduced through “best-case scenarios”: “The first waves of description are invariably optimistic, even utopian.
