A decolonised technology for the international Green New Deal will mean abundant investment in education and research for local skills to develop our own green digital commons, where data from the public sector is used towards green policies benefiting the people, and where procurement privileges local, green companies that respect social justice and human dignity, making their source code available and their algorithms auditable.
A Global Green New Deal must encourage digital social innovation, and, instead of granting million-dollar contracts to Silicon Valley, should institutionalise it at the community and citizen level to guarantee its scalability and permanence.
Autonomous and linguistic communities will be encouraged to develop their own technology and digital content and to preserve and export their cultures to a new digital and green environment. Public policies will guarantee that the adoption of technologies at a massive scale does not create further inequality, exclusion, or imposition of values and practices that are foreign to the host communities. Instead, it will be an opportunity to rescue and develop further local knowledge, and find the solutions our planet urgently needs, scale them and repurpose them in other countries, without the innovation barriers imposed by the current intellectual property system.
Much has been written about the huge opportunities for capitalist firms to profit from the Green New Deal due to necessary technological breakthroughs to combat the Biological and Climate Emergencies. Monetising climate-breakthrough technology could be a reasonable incentive to bring it about.
Those countries which have an intellectual property regime favourable to capital and an asymmetric colonially-originated access to (English-language) knowledge have a large advantage. This will then imply increased concentration of wealth in the North and new colonial dependencies for the South, but also a very slow planetary-wide deployment of these technologies because financial yield would be prioritized over access.
With the international DGND money available for the investments, inventors (even in the North) could be compensated for their research (similar to how the Medicine Patent Pool works today) and the developed technology could become part of the public domain, so that people in the South can adapt, replicate and apply climate-breakthrough technology quickly, cheaply and on a massive scale, so needed to combat the climate emergency.
Decolonisation of technical standards also imply declaring them as public goods and decolonising the accreditation infrastructure onto national and regional epistemic communities. These tensions around technology transfer have already been at the forefront of the UN biological diversity and climate conferences and conventions for the last three decades; a Digital Green New Deal would quickly favour the position of the South on this matter.
Rooted in the local, in the decentralised and in the digital commons logic: those are the characteristics of the policies that will defeat digital colonialism and that could demilitarize, decentralise, if not dismantle, the power of Silicon Valley.
Final words
Only Progressive International forces acting in full coordination can bring about this change. We cannot lose sight of the structural transformations that are required.
Bio-ignorant and patriarchal capitalism must be reformed at its essence: accounting. The law-firm-ran privatized arbitration-based dispute settlement framework must be dismantled and a commons-based binding human-rights judicial system with universal jurisdiction must be enacted.
Money should be decolonised, and central banks should be yanked from the tentacles of bankers and put at the service of the public good. The digital commons should be recovered from the military and surveillance alliance of the extractive big tech giants.
We must challenge academia and media to reveal the true workings of the capitalist system, we cannot continue to get lost where the transformational battles must be fought. We have outlined some of the key gatekeepers of the colonial past, it is now time that we face the rogue forces against humanity head on.
An international, digital and feminist Green New Deal that decolonizes our future is our species’ hope.
Print
Renata Avila Andres Arauz | Radio Free (2020-06-08T08:28:25+00:00) Decolonise our future. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/08/decolonise-our-future/
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