The accelerated and unchecked pace of development of digital technologies is notably problematic. International Organisations like the United Nations are increasingly describing the ill implications of technologies to be as challenging as the effects of climate change. These are indeed intertwined matters. Recognising such issues in high-level discussions is crucial to ensure influence over institutional policies and the plans of development organisations worldwide. Too little, too late, perhaps. And still, it's slightly better than doing nothing amid times of rising uncertainty. Leveraging these diplomatic developments can help promote discussions on ground level and facilitate the coordination of action from the edges, engaging communities and addressing their everyday concerns. Unlike local dominant classes and political agents, communities are typically the most vulnerable to the impacts of extreme climate events. By the same token, local populations witness first-hand the marvels and horrors of the growing economic informality fuelled by digital platforms.
The scale of change brought about by accelerated digitalisation and the climate events now reaching tipping point (or possibly surpassed it already) frequently seems to remove agency from humans at a local scale. The high complexity of such conditions is often formulated as a yes/no question: will you submit to using these digital technologies, or try to avoid them altogether? Will you keep purchasing unsustainable products, or stop buying things at all?
To most of the world's population, those questions are tricky at best. Acquiring devices and consuming media are – unfortunately too much – embedded in culture, typically representing inclusion and aspirations for a better future. For matters so complex, then, the discussion shouldn't be only about refusing things or embracing them acritically. We should rather be asking, for instance, what kinds of digital technologies will be positive and under which conditions: for this group of individuals, for that community, for those social demands. What possible uses of such technologies will promote the common good? Likewise, climate action should not be about adopting a predefined set of behaviours coming from the fringes of wealthy nations. Instead, they should be faced by establishing (spiralled?) productive dialogue with traditional practices, modes of living, and power dynamics to co-create sustainable and thriving futures.
It is clear that the world won't stop moving towards digitally driven societies in the foreseeable future. That movement, however, should lead to more environmentally appropriated modes of producing, understanding, and living. And the transition has to be inclusive, fair, and regenerative. This text contributes to such vision by promoting a deep dive into lessons learnt in projects developed over the years.
Local impacts of digital technologies
Too often, new technologies impact communities in ways that are disrespectful of local societal values. In a study I co-led in 2021, experienced leaders of Brazilian community-oriented digital inclusion projects were asked about the current significance of technologies for the groups they worked with. Along with a shared concern with the lack of long-term dependable policies, a lack of engagement with territory and culture was mentioned as a central obstacle for appropriate uses of technologies. In other words, technologies are perceived as imposed realities, colonial and monolithic. That however is not determined by objective characteristics of the digital. Rather, it is a consequence of seldom questioned ideological assumptions which deserve to be unpacked.
The majority of programs promoting the adoption of digital technologies among excluded populations subscribe to a quite narrow worldview. They frequently focus on equipping and training individuals to compete in an abstract labour market – which usually doesn't even exist in local settings. One side effect noted by participants of the ID21 study is the fast brain drain: youngsters educated on competition-oriented grounds and focused on individual professional success will frequently end up leaving their communities, seeking opportunities to grow, learn, and earn more in urban centres.
In other words, instead of improving living conditions in communities, projects that adopt that vision end up removing some of the most talented, creative, and dedicated young people from their places of origin. It is a phenomenon akin to the effects of mass education depicted in the documentary “Schooling the World – the white man's last burden” by Carol Black: the aspiration of a mono-dimensional idea of progress causes accelerated and precarious migration of the younger generations to larger urban centres, and in consequence leave a generational gap in knowledge and work capacity in their communities of origin. At least parts of that knowledge are lost forever, since its customary reproduction through embodied practice, periodic rituals, and oral transmission has no place to happen any more.
The dissemination of digital communication technologies is changing the world radically. Such technologies certainly bring obvious and immense advantages. Families living apart can keep closer contact through messaging platforms and video calls. People in communities distant from urban centres can find educational and economic opportunities. Groups that some decades ago could not afford equipment to document the growth of their kids, the fruits of their labour, or expressions of their culture can now use devices to record, photograph and film their realities. Minorities and underprivileged groups can find support and care among remote peers to face bullying and exclusion in their everyday lives. In some fields of activity, talented newcomers can find better paying work without leaving their homes.
On the other hand, as is widely known, there are multiple negative consequences of digital technologies. The intentional spread of false information, along with hyper-targeting based on design failures of social media, interferes with democratic processes worldwide. The space for public discussion easily turns into a toxic environment, leaving little hope for conversations conducive to building bridges between divergent positions. Mobile communications are used in unmonitored parts of the world to empower criminal activity such as illegal mining and deforestation. Unchecked gig platforms naturalise suboptimal working conditions and create new layers of labour precarity. Children, teenagers and young adults are exposed to an immense volume of unhealthy contents, which sometimes drives them to harmful behaviour onto themselves and one another. Low awareness of the risks of data leaking makes people – especially the elder – prey to new and dangerous criminal scams. Not to mention the immense negative effects of the production of digital devices and infrastructure, and their inevitable discard some years in.
Under the influence
For children and youngsters, the wide adoption of digital social media, particularly in localities and cultures with little awareness of the depth of the change, leads to remarkable distortions. It is not uncommon to see parents posting images and videos of their own children, ignoring that such media will be out there potentially forever. They are generally unaware that such images can be used to train large language models, or be used for even worse intentions. Furthermore, the general acceptance of a culture of spectacular exposition brings notable confusion to youngsters' hopes for the future. The image of “social media influencer” is already considered a desirable professional activity by many children and teenagers. In Brazil alone, there were in 2022 estimated over 500,000 digital influencers, and the numbers keep growing.
Again, the argument here is not one of refusing young people the right to access, learn about, and use digital technologies. There is, however, an urgent need to promote the critical appropriation of technologies with eyes on the common social good and the collective building of regenerative futures. The question is not whether to use technologies, but which technologies, and when, and how. Furthermore, it is important to reflect on the extent to which an emphasis on pre-formatted visions of competitive individual success has a psychological influence on youngsters and influences them to break ties with their community and their ancestors’ culture.
Understanding the potential harms and disadvantages of a passive and acritical adoption of technologies is the first step to start addressing their effects. But we also need to go further, and find socially aware and environmentally apt ways of creating and using such technologies. It's about engaging with stakeholders to reframe the conversation – from a superficial check of who has access to technologies and who doesn’t to a more nuanced open reflection focused on care, communities, alliances, and time cycles.
Work, poverty, technology
Access to digital technologies is often associated with economic inclusion for youngsters. In other words, there is the understanding that a young person should acquire technological skills to help them find a position in the labour market. They are, as some say, working to increase their “employability”. That assumption is arguably true in comparative terms: if two competing individuals have different levels of technological skills and are similar in all else, it is likely that the one possessing the most familiarity with digital means will have an advantage. But there are many more factors to consider.
In many parts of the world, aspiring to find a stable work position is a distant dream. A high proportion of the labour offer is based on informal, temporary, or seasonal arrangements. The emergence of platform work has further accelerated and naturalised such instability. Rather than a particularity of developing nations, the trend of increasing work insecurity seems to be taking place everywhere. Under such unstable conditions, survival requires indeed some proficiency in the use of technology. In particular for marginalised groups, people coming from low-income families and neighbourhoods, and also migrant communities in wealthy nations. A working smartphone with a data plan is not only a means of communicating with relatives and friends, but a way – sometimes the only way – to get offers for gig work.
That scenario paints a picture quite different from the aspirations expressed by many “digital inclusion” programmes. It is not that youngsters from marginalised communities will be able to use technologies to participate as innovators in a global information economy. Most of them are not becoming agents of change, eventually transforming their communities by becoming knowledge workers. Rather, they usually get chained to an exploitation machine that requires individuals to invest whatever slight margin they make on acquiring functional devices and data plans. And that is only the first investment to enter a marketplace where they will sometimes need to buy a motorcycle or a car, or even rent one from an intermediary under questionable conditions. So much for stable employability, one should say.
Poverty is an uncomfortable topic, as it tends to drive our attention to what is missing, to what is absent. In such superficial meaning, poverty is largely defined by scarcity. Of course, in recent decades, the academic and institutional conversation about poverty and social justice has evolved significantly. No longer a question only of earning enough money to go through the month, the notion of poverty is being gradually reframed to include considerations about access to housing, health services, decent food, education. International agencies and governments are adopting indexes such as HDI and Gini to go deeper into understanding the living conditions of populations beyond how much they make. In some policy circles, culture and entertainment are gradually being considered as part of the basic human needs and incorporated in policies for poverty mitigation.
And yet, the public opinion seems to adopt a quite narrow understanding of poverty. Many equate poverty with low income. It is typically understood as an individual issue, at best a household-level thing. Parts of society will blame poor people for being poor, or treat such a condition as an accident, never discussing the reasons for systemic poverty. Then, when it comes to elaborating on ways to use technology to overcome poverty, the assumption will frequently be about increasing individuals’ ability to get better-paying jobs. The jobs alluded to in such conversations, however – knowledge work with higher salaries – are usually nowhere to be seen. Particularly in small towns, rural areas, or in the impoverished peripheries and slums of megacities. Actually, even those privileged enough to find work are constantly haunted by the threat of lay-offs and the accelerated gentrification of urban areas.
In parallel, there is another trend in education circles – different in terms, but essentially similar in world-view. What if, some organisations ask, we use technology to promote entrepreneurship? Accepting that there are not enough jobs, and agreeing that every person in the world can be creative and innovate, why not educate those who need on how to start their own businesses? The idea makes sense in many cases. But there are obstacles as well, and one of them is quite similar to access to jobs. Using technologies is only part of what makes a venture succeed. If you are not considered adequate – if you have the wrong accent, the wrong clothes, the wrong skin colour, the wrong postal code, the wrong network of contacts – technology can perhaps temporarily leave those aspects aside. They will be there, nonetheless, ready to re-emerge at some point. There are exceptions, of course. But that's what they are: exceptions. Especially in places that feature a high concentration of wealth and power around dominant elites, entrepreneurship feels quite similar to looking for non-existing jobs. Frequently even worse, in fact.
For the perspective adopted in this text, the problematic issue on the above approaches is the promotion of entrepreneurship and employment as individual actions, as a matter of joining a game of fierce competition without questioning its underlying assumptions. It's often about teaching young people that they should attempt to climb the social-economic ladder by outcompeting their peers. Indeed, a great deal of youngsters' creativity, work time, and energy put into individual attempts of overcoming exploitation will transform themselves into exploiters, to echo Paulo Freire's take on the oppressed internalising the values of oppressors. That type of entrepreneurship does not reduce scarcity. It may at best change roles, making a few victims of scarcity into its next perpetrators.
Work is a constitutive aspect of humanity. Some say that we as a species are hardwired to undertake efforts that effect change in the world. Work is also understood to be the most effective way out of poverty. But we should ask ourselves: what kinds of work can build brighter futures for the majority of the world? And starting from that, let's wonder how can that kind of work take place, be recognised and rewarded, promoting cooperation and inclusion.
Purpose
Over the centuries, the meaning of work has been analysed from diverse perspectives – political, psychological, cultural, and many others. Work has been described as the continuous effort to improve the human living conditions, to master nature, to serve the will of deities, to overcome scarcity, to survive, to create meaning in the world. For the objectives of this text, though, let's stay at a relatively superficial level and treat work as a combination of acting in the world and understanding it. Those two aspects are simultaneous, not sequential, and take place within a scenario that combines society and nature.
Even though work is central to the human experience, a large part of the world’s population cannot afford to ask themselves a simple question: why do we work? On an individual level, it sounds rather banal to be asking that. And yet, such a line of reflection may seem dangerous to those in power. If workers could satisfy their basic survival needs, would they submit to everyday precarity and oppression? The answer is quite obvious. At a systemic level, then, it is urgent to raise that kind of question.
Some days before finalising this text, I was experimenting with the typewriter I found in the streets of Berlin some years ago and found an interesting wordplay, in Portuguese: trabalho consentido X trabalho com sentido. It doesn't sound that neat in English. Something like work by consent vs. work with a meaning. Wordsmithing aside, the idea was to reflect on the fact that making the world better requires work. Meaningful work, for those who agree with such purposes. However, the current reward mechanisms rarely point on that direction.
David Graeber discusses bullshit jobs, in which people accumulate layers and layers of tasks that are performative at best. Many young people who succeed in getting a job will tell stories of how pretending to be working is often more important than achieving any concrete goals. Rather than innocuous, though, a great part of work has in fact concrete results. Unfortunately, such results frequently involve destroying, or sustaining the destruction, of basic living conditions for humans and other species. That is true of a considerable part of industrial work, whose consequences include the environmental and political impacts of mining, the displacement of populations, the accelerated migration to urban centres, and the growing generation of waste. Further, these activities are sustained and reproduced by many other professional activities in marketing, media and other fields that further intensify a culture of consumption with no attention to its social and environmental effects.
The way the world has organised around industrial production over the last few centuries was widely criticised by Ivan Illich. He proposes to counter a productivity-oriented industrial era with the notion of a convivial one. Conviviality would be the basis for redesigning society under just and regenerative principles. In such a scenario, one can say that entrepreneurship – the ability to reorganise work towards intentional goals – is still necessary. There is, after all, a lot of redesigning to do if we are to improve the quality of life for the world population under convivial terms. It has to be a kind of entrepreneurship which is aware of its environmental impacts, and replaces individual competition for community cooperation.
The economist Mariana Mazzucato proposes a mission-driven economy, oriented towards purpose rather than profit. And there are a multitude of potentially laudable purposes to concentrate efforts on. Any honest account of the present conditions will agree with the UN assessment mentioned earlier in this text: the digital transformation and the effects of climate change are an unavoidable reality. How to shape them under convivial and purpose-oriented terms?
Berlin-based nonprofit Tactical Tech has developed an initiative called “What the Future Wants”. Their project partners conducted workshops with youngsters from 51 countries, co-creating resources that discuss critically the reality and effects of digital technologies on their lives. One of the outcomes of the project was the creation of an openly replicable exhibition for teenagers that draws attention to some harms and dangers of using digital technologies. It succeeds in bringing such conditions a bit closer to the everyday reality of children and teenagers in very diverse localities. Can a similar effort be made that connects to the effects of climate change as well? Further, can we think of new forms of being tactical that go beyond identifying and protecting from harms, and advance on creating more convivial futures?
Climate effects
This text feeds from past and present initiatives that successfully combine local sensibility and social embeddedness, and a translocal and systemic world-view. There are many examples of such: the Brazilian Waste Pickers movement (MNCR); the network of Pontos de Cultura; the global movements of social innovation and critical making such as GIG network; organised social movements in cities and rural areas; the enduring remnants of the World Social Forum and its proposal of another possible world; the Zapatistas, among others. They all combine acute awareness of territory, society, and culture with the ability to prefigure and enact better realities, and to communicate them.
Even though the climate crisis is a result of complex global dynamics, its effects over society are often hyper-local. Rivers dry out, fires spread, smoke covers the sky. Three days of heavy rain make cities drown, cars float, homes and schools be destroyed. Landslides block roads and stall the economy. Disappearing fishing stock makes it impossible to earn a living off the sea, increasing informality and crime. The summer is too hot, or sometimes cold. The winter is too cold, or sometimes hot. Crops are lost, grocery prices go up. Populations are displaced fleeing from drought and war, ending up in big cities that cannot assimilate them.
Wherever those impacts are felt, there are certainly young people around. Even as they are impacted by more information than any previous generation, there is also an acute sense of inaction. I'm recently getting interested in the notion of climate fatigue: the feeling that anything one can do won't impact the pace of change for the worse. It's relatively different from the climate anxiety of my (and also the last) generation… that Cassandraesque attempt to draw attention, to make people look up, to convince authorities to declare a climate emergency. In turn, climate fatigue is a sense of acceptance, of accommodation.
One could contend that movements like Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion signal the opposite: a growing interest in climate action from younger generations. Whilst that might be true in some contexts - particularly, European cities -, my feeling from the ground is that things are considerably different in the majority of the world. Youngsters sense less agency the further they are from global economic centres. It's hard to feel empowered to fight climate change when your family is struggling to survive. In keeping with the neoliberal paradigm, that account is arguably true: no individual action will improve the state of things. But that is one more reason to insist on community-oriented action, on cooperative purpose-driven entrepreneurship rooted in social relationships.
To combat digital passiveness and climate fatigue, we need to start from challenging other kinds of poverty than just income inequality. We need, of course, to overcome the poverty of opportunity: young people need to have the chance to change things. There is here an important parallel to be made with the notion of functional literacy. More than decoding forms of letters, reading should be about making sense, understanding the world critically, creating autonomous views and courses of action. The same is true to opportunity literacy: people have to learn how to identify opportunities, decide if they are interested in them, and know how to act. And we need also to challenge the poverty of imagination. That is, opportunities are not only job ads or small business funding. It should not only be about potential ways to generate profit. One has to dare dream with other futures. Inclusive, just, collective, fun, and regenerative ones. With a critical yet convivial appropriation of living conditions.
Climate-related work is inevitable for the coming generations. Be it converting and retrofitting infrastructure, building for resilience, identifying and improving bioregional dynamics, manufacturing ecodesigned products, or other future-oriented tasks. The same is true for the unfortunately growing need for recovery-oriented activities such as rebuilding neighbourhoods destroyed by fire, water, or war; handling the immense volumes of things discarded every day to keep materials in use for as long as possible, and others. The underlying question is whether society can change from a disaster relief mentality towards a disaster prevention one. Sisyphean repair, or convivial regeneration?
Towards convivial climate work
Again, to make a point clear: a considerable part of work currently underrated is, in fact, crucial climate action, albeit largely unrecognised as such. It is easy to see how reforestation, organic farming, and environmental education are climate-related work. But preventative maintenance is likewise so. Smartphone repair is climate work. Construction and renovation can be climate work, if principles of building for energy efficiency, circularity, and resilience are adopted. It is necessary to raise awareness about that fact, opening up to the imagination of future workers, and helping them to organise their desires and around work conditions. Further, we need to create the tools to educate them based on regenerative and convivial world-views. Digital tools are part of that puzzle, but not the ultimate solution. In fact, networked technologies will arguably be more effective as they disappear in the background. As they turn ordinary, as suggested by David Nemer.
Sustainable social justice and poverty alleviation demand long-term and systemic commitment that transcends short-term fixes and superficial remedies. This commitment must be rooted in a profound understanding of local community needs, aspirations, and challenges. It requires active engagement with people, fostering a sense of ownership and empowerment among individuals and groups. Additionally, translocal exchange and collaboration are crucial for expanding the reach of communities and allowing them to share knowledge, trade legitimacy, and seek resources in common.
The way forward lies in embracing collective initiatives that combat climate fatigue with meaningful and convivial social-environmental work. By recognising and nurturing generational efforts toward social justice and poverty alleviation, we can overcome the blockages of individualism and harmful competition. It is through supporting community-led initiatives, facilitating dialogue and learning, and promoting opportunity literacy that we empower local groups to take ownership of their development and drive positive change from within. By doing so, we create a more just, sustainable, and convivial future for all.