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i. Who are Technologies Designed for
umwelt
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Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of “Umwelt” to describe the subjective nature of the way different organisms experience the world. 49 Anthroponormativity, established with the colonial standard as the anthropos here, in its absurd attempt to define the world through the lens of the “normative” human, rejects the idea of a subjective umwelt and instead tries to project its own essentialist categories to define who gets to be a “being” and how they interact with their surroundings. Uexküll explains the essence of umwelt as the limits of perception given by the organism’s senses. 50 However, humans have the capacity to extend their senses through the use of technology. Heidegger’s idea of enframing discusses this distortion of the true nature of the world through technology, which may extend humanity’s perceptual abilities, but is also tainted by an inherent bias to view the world according to human terms. 51
Historically humans have viewed Nature through an anthropocentric lens. The words “ecology” and “environment” themselves have roots in words like oikos meaning home, or environ, meaning surroundings. The categorical separation between humans and everything else implied by these terms has enabled humanity to project its consciousness on nature in whatever way is convenient— whether through the use of the words “nature” or “natural” to argue for heteronormative ideals, or the Romantic image of nature as presented in the paintings of Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and others that shaped the Environment Conservation movement in the Western world. 52 Mythologies have pointed at many versions of Nature as an entity, sometimes even taking human form—Mother Nature or Gaia. They are attributed with feminine features in perpetuation of gender roles to assign fragility. Feelings of wrath and love are used to describe Nature and contribute to the anthropocentric thought that “she” needs to be protected by us or from us. 53 So, with the blindness invoked through the domination of the narrative of the oikos, the limited space that humans occupy on the planet is mistaken for the larger planetary reality. Technology enables the oikos to exceed the limits of the Umwelt, but the oikos is itself a fabrication that is limited.
49. Jakob Von Uexküll, “An Introduction to Umwelt.” Semiotica 2001, no. 134 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2001.017. 50. Uexküll, 147. 51. Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.(New York: Garland, 1977) 52.Max Oelschlaeger, “The Roots of Preservation: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Hudson River School,Nature Transformed,”National Humanities Center, accessed June 29, 2020. 53. Oelschlaeger
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who is technology for?
With the revelation of the disconnect between the human and planetary reality, it becomes necessary to mention that this misunderstanding itself is rooted in capitalist-centric philosophy. The Anthropocene debate reveals that the oikos was always meant for the colonial standard and was achieved by the exploitation of the other. This means that the technology that was developed to exceed the human umwelt, put human space, universally, in danger, even though the technology was developed and deployed by those who have been the oppressors for centuries. At the same time, this technology puts the people in the Global South disproportionately at harm, and is never designed for them. For example, Google Earth as a mapping technology allows one to find the smallest nook in the “developed” world, but as Mayukh Sen puts it,“Google Earth is not a vaccine for everyone’s homesickness. For those of us whose corners of the world are considered ‘remote’ or ‘uncharted’ from an essentialist white, Western perspective, the interface is far from seamless.” He makes this statement after he could easily find his address in New Jersey, but could not find his ancestral village in India. 54
Surveillance technology such as facial recognition and genetic testing has allowed the biggest human rights abuses to occur. The Chinese government has close to a million Uighur Muslims in “reeducation” camps and was able to do so through unbridled surveillance technology. 55 The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a non-profit was able to find 24 pages of leaked documents proving the existence of these camps that the Chinese government continues to deny, and revealed the use of mass-surveillance technologies to identify and arrest minorities in the country. 56
“The ICIJ reports that the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a policing platform, is used by the police and other authorities to collate personal data, along with data from facialrecognition cameras and other surveillance tools, and then uses artificial intelligence to identify categories of Xinjiang residents for detention.”
“The documents also say that the Chinese government ordered security officials in Xinjiang to monitor users of Zapya, which has about 1.8 million users, for ties to terrorist organizations. Launched in 2012, the app was created by DewMobile, a Beijingbased startup that has received funding from InnoSpring Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Bank and Tsinghua University and is meant to give people a way to download the Quran and send messages and files to other users without being connected to the Web.” 57
54. Mayukh Sen, “Dividing Lines,” Real Life, March 27, 2017, https://reallifemag.com/ dividing-lines/. 55.Catherine Shu, “Leaked Chinese Government Documents Detail How Tech Is Used to Escalate the Persecution of Uighurs, TechCrunch” (TechCrunch, November 25, 2019). 56.Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” The New York Times (The New York Times, November 16, 2019). 57. Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, 2019.
