Feminist Ecologies of the Internet: A provocation

By Ruth Nyambura

What would it mean for feminists to envision an internet that is feminist consider the ecological costs of the while so much silence abounds around infrastructure that makes the internet extractivism and its value chains, as possible? What would it mean to well as the human and ecological costs truly expand our visions of a ‘feminist that make the internet possible. What internet’ by meaningfully engaging do these silos of liberation politics say the lived realities of the communities about the state of our imagination where this infrastructure that builds for transnational, collective feminist the internet we seek to democratize organizing for liberation? is extracted from? How can feminists working on the intersections of ICTs and ecology constructively dialogue Whose feminist internet anyway? and build a cross-movement alliance that organizes for a feminist internet, critically centring questions of capitalism, colonialism and its afterlives of extraction, environmental racism, classism and ecocide? Paying attention to and making a radical commitment to an anticapitalist politics of ecology is also an extension of the class, gendered and race questions we have learned and are learning to ask. For example, what happens to how we do feminism “A dialogue, an urgent need for cross-movement organizing and solidarity! A This is a dialogue that is urgently needed if we as a global feminist community are to claim or declare a ‘feminist internet. when we interrogate who exactly gets to access the internet and which structures privilege or hinder this access? Majority of the mining operations across the world are in the provocation!” These conversations also have to go beyond the usual solidarity statements Global South, in rural communities, on Indigenous territories. and petitions support for mining affected communities, mainly based in the Global South. A good and necessarily difficult place to start is to interrogate why it is so easy to These are communities that continue to experience the violence of dispossession and myriad other forms of violations and harms that

stretch back to the colonial era. These communities also experience serious challenges in accessing the internet despite the fact that their lands, bodies and territories are often stripped bare in order to produce the minerals that make the internet possible.

In the last four decades of neoliberal globalization we have witnessed a general retreat from a deep internationalist and anti-imperialist politics - which would have addressed the flows of extraction and builds resistance and true alternatives - to a vague internationalist humanism- which largely operates in the realm of pitying those dispossessed by extractivism. At best, this exploitative politics promotes fair trade kinds of certifications schemes; at worst, it asks for a ‘kinder’ capitalism. In short, this speaks to the NGOization of radical movement building and organizing and the erasure and suppression of demands that go beyond singular policy changes with the goal being the dismantling of systems like capitalism.

So, who gets to claim a feminist internet and who doesn’t? A dialogue, an urgent need for crossmovement organizing and solidarity! A provocation!