[p2p-research] Fwd: Network Ecologies: The Ethics of Waste in the Information Society (info ethics call for papers)

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gavin Baker <gavin at gavinbaker.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 1:44 AM
Subject: Network Ecologies: The Ethics of Waste in the Information Society
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com


Mr. Bauwens,

I thought this might be of interest:

http://www.i-r-i-e.net/next_issue.htm

Vol. 11 - August 2009
Network Ecologies: The Ethics of Waste in the Information Society

The (emergent) transnational network of organizing around environmental and
social justice issues in the global networks of electronics production is
arguably the most vital area of 'network culture' when it comes to broader
ecopolitical concerns. Given the fetishization of
dematerialization-through-technology of an earlier generation of
cyberlibertarian theorizing, we consider these efforts to have significance
beyond the already broad array of issues related to the toxicity of
computers and its implications to workers, users, and the environment.

The contemporary environmental justice movement has already (and
successfully) criticized conceptual frameworks that consider
environmentalism a post-materialist luxury rather than a matter of survival,
and made visible the 'colonialism' of a wilderness tradition that had
underwritten territorial expansion across the US and in other parts of the
world. Yet while its organizational dynamic already involves questions of
historical and political epistemology, few people look to ecopolitics as a
vehicle to advance broader causes of (cultural, economic, political, social)
justice. Which is why, for this issue of IRIE, we would like to invite
suggestions on how our new (and old) networking machines might become the
pragmata of a new ecopolitics, true "matters of concern" (Bruno Latour) of
info-ethical reflection.

With this issue, IRIE, dedicated to the development of information ethics as
reflexive practice and conceptual horizon, aims to engage the broad range of
materialities involved in acts and processes of communication, information,
and knowledge production. This includes, but is not limited to, the very
instruments we employ, use, and discard in ever-shorter cycles of
consumption, outpacing our efforts to develop appropriate mechanisms of
disposal and recycling : from old television sets to LCD and plasma
displays, from old disk drives to flash cards and RFID chips. Used locally,
but designed, produced, and discarded across the world, the usage of these
instruments - things - raises a host of questions whose technical and
political questions are increasingly being explored, but whose info-ethical
dimensions deserve greater attention as they may requires us to revisit
cherished assumptions regarding the scope and desirability of
information-societal developments as we know them.

Electronics activism has already defined an agenda of environmental and
social justice, drawing on number of perspectives such as environmental
debt, environmental and resource rights, political and social ecology,
resource efficiency, and occupational health and safety. In addition to
giving rise to concrete initiatives in the areas of fair production,
procurement, and disposal, these activisms also encourage a re-appropriation
of notion of sustainability. Since the UN 'Earth Summit' in 1992,
sustainability has featured prominently in policy initiatives. And while for
some, it has been discredited by its vagueness and widespread subordination
to corporate visions of self-regulation it might be revitalized to refer to
the outcomes of (inevitable) ecological distribution conflicts, encouraging
ecopolitics to venture beyond consensus-oriented paradigms of environmental
governance. Such broader ecopolitical perspectives (or network ecologies,
the term we would like to suggest as an umbrella concept) can serve as an
integrative idiom to combine important vectors of inquiry that open up more
general descriptions of the contemporary conjuncture.

--
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com

Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is
always a vice.
   Thomas Paine



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