Roisin Markham

This week I’m going deeper to the questions that help me navigate where I spend my resources. For those of you new to my work I live with questions. I refer to it as cultural thinking.

This morning I’m sitting with if digital infrastructure has become the organising conditions of our society? After 3.8 billion years of life on earth us humans choose to sit behind a computer screen 9-5, or sit staring transfixed at a screen that used to be a technology for conversations.

On Saturday I went to visit the local Little Tern Protected Nesting project site near where we live. The National Wildlife Parks Ranger that meet us is part of the team building and stewarding this rare breeding site for Little Terns. The aim of the project is to increase success rates of breeding. It seems to be working, the project is in year four,

I got to see a tiny Little Tern chick. Learn so much through conversation with the ranger.

The sun was shining, the sea sparkled the way I love. As I walked away from such an enriching experience all I could think was I choose to work behind a computer?

Recently I’ve found myself revisiting cognitive off loading, societal shaping of technology, sharing stories of old and my work experience from paper filing to big tech, digital innovation and transformation to our current age of social media and AI, I’ve taken out the sieve and am milling.

In 2013 I asked

in 2019 I began exploring – How do we create futures worth living into?

Something shifted last year moving this question to a statement 2025 – creating futures worth living into.

Over the past couple of months I’ve come back to the tech impact on our lives, possibly a cross fertilisation of 2013 Q1 with Q4. It’s been married with trying to break up with google, open source technology options, freemium is not a business model that supports living systems, technology as a death eater, escapism and techno entrapment, policy rich implementation poor and alarm buttons.

As a technologist the speed of tech excites and horrifies me. The lack of ethics has always been an issue, that’s my lived experience since I began working in tech in the 1990s. What we see now with speed of AI is the magnification of everything: foreign policy, death, destruction, wealth accumulation, visibility of the supply chain and systems in which we live. We are also loosing our connection to ecosystems and in general losing wild species and places.

Techno entrapment, I may have just invented that word. It seems to sum up where we are and what I notice.

I’m niggled by the idea that through efficienc gains from tech we are being cognitively impacted. Think of it like a sleight of hand ‘oh, shiny fast tech, easy and seamless to use’ here’s all the time you’ll save oh and look it gives you more time to… doomscroll, increase anxiety, stop actually talking to people, be in your own bubble, spread hatred and isolation, oh and the antidote to all this is buying this thing we are pushing to you.

Algorithms will be the death of us.

Bear with me while I develop and put my thinking into carrier bags. I plan to delve a bit deeper through a series of blogs, some zines and who knows what else. Let’s see what emerges from this piece of cultural thinking. If you are here reading this join in, my blogs are not meant as monologues.

thinking/writing line

I am interested in the ways technology shapes society with such fluency that we often stop noticing the terms on which it is doing so. We are offered efficiency, convenience, connection increasingly accepting speed, access without understanding or nuance, data and privacy loss without a thought, and hyperconnection without care.

What is lost in that exchange is not always visible, especially not at first. We get locked in to familiarity and it’s hard to break that. How many of us are making active decisions about the tech we are using?

Gaza and the televised genocide has revealed so much to us and continues to not just destroy the land, societal infrastructure, the murder of people, families and generations but demonstrates globally that the UN Human Rights charter and the instruments around it need to be strengthened for this century. The Palestinian country, culture and people should be able to live and thrive. In what ways is technology shaping their reality? The machine of war roars into action, innovation in safety and security = precision drone and AI accelerating the death and destruction. Increase global spending on security. Who benefits? Follow the money.

I digress but I will come back to power, politics and digital in this series.

Techno-entrapment

It appears slowly, in the thinning of attention, the erosion of trust, the weakening of critical gates, and the sense that we are living through a system that is moving faster than our capacity to hold it.

What starts as convince moves us further away from capability to dependency, to a system that offers us no other choices. The flattening of options to binary choices.

Questioning this matters even more in an age of polycrisis: climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, geopolitical destabilisation, authoritarian drift, post-truth culture, inequality, displacement, digital first generations and how they learn or discern, plus our economic systems that no longer seem able to support life.

Through my Doughnut Economics work and economic literacy public speaking I ask – what is our economy in service to? I’ve suggested different approaches over the years; post-growth, decarbonisation, eradicating poverty.

Our societies and the economies that sit inside them should they not be in service to life? to all life.

Next in this series:

Cognitive offloading and the hidden cost of speed

Working towards understanding

• my thinking, what I suspect
• doing a critical analysis and broadening of that
• refining my understanding
• sharing what I’m learning as I go
• and the so what…

You or someone you know may work or have knowledge in this space, or like to discuss some of this. Let’s find ways to connect and weave this work. Maybe some of this enquiry is shared thinking work.

If technological acceleration is reshaping human and ecological conditions of life, what must we understand if we want to create futures in which people and living systems can flourish? or at least find balance.

On some level it’s basic right:

• do no harm
• care at the core
• 30% back to nature (to let it recover).

Tomorrow, 15 June I’ll be at the National Economic Forum if your there come say hi.

Till next week. Have a good one.