Peasants and Informatics, Vegan and Biotech, are the topic of this Genes and Cultures conference.
This place is to explore together the congruence of a number of difficult to sort out occurrences, from veganism to silicon valley investments in Biotech or from the goods of digital community organisation and the colonisation of rural space by automated machines drones, precision mapping and precision data analysis, as explained in Nyeleni newsletter #37.
By collecting sources of information in this conference I will try to approach this issue as an extension of my experience with free software and open source communities. The goal here is to understand the complexity of the situation and while acknowledging the technological problematic, never loose the political scope, that is with or without technology we are looking to:
address the relation of domination embedded in capitalist system that affects peasants and nature all over the wold but mostly in the global south.
acknowledge and foster the autonomy of communities and independence of individuals, freedom of thinking out from ideologies and imposed beliefs.
envision a non-essentialist relation to technology that puts it to the service of people, that includes knowledge transmission, autonomy, acknowledgement of the diversity of needs.
Some resssources who question technology in a very interesting way, but that I put in doubt either because of their lack of technical knowhow or because of their discourse:
For example: Technologos who argues about the eschatological intrinsec nature of technology:
A la différence d’autres, nous pensons que la technique est porteuse d’une eschatologie, elle vise un “but ultime” : créer sur terre l’équivalent de ce qu’on appelait autrefois “le paradis” et que l’on situait dans l’au-delà : ce que l’on appelle aujourd’hui “bonheur” et que l’on exige d’obtenir ici-bas, maintenant, tout de suite… et pour soi seul s’il le faut. source: TECHNOlogos
Et par ailleurs la problématique d’une approche qui ne serait que théorique et critique, sortie de la réalité des situations existantes, donnant lieu à une analyse vague et vraiment peu factuelle: https://technologos.fr/doc/res/Critique%20de%20l’alternumérisme.pdf
