Christoph Becker

Insolvent (eBook, ePUB)

How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

How we can enact meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and justice. The deep entanglement of information technology with our societies has raised hope for a transition to more sustainable and just communities-those that phase out fossil fuels, distribute public goods fairly, allow free access to information, and waste less. In principle, computing should be able to help. But in practice, we live in a world in which opaque algorithms steer us toward misinformation and unsustainable consumerism. Insolvent shows why computing's dominant frame of thinking is conceptually insufficient to address our current challenges, and why computing continues to incur societal debts it cannot pay back. Christoph Becker shows how we can reorient design perspectives in computer science to better align with the values of sustainability and justice. Becker positions the role of information technology and computing in environmental sustainability, social justice, and the intersection of the two, and explains why designing IT for just sustainability is both technically and ethically challenging . Becker goes on to argue that computing could be aided by critical friends-disciplines that draw on critical social theory, feminist thought, and systems thinking-to make better sense of its role in society. Finally, Becker demonstrates that it is possible to fuse critical perspectives with work in computer science, showing new and fruitful directions for computing professionals and researchers to pursue.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: MIT Press
• Seitenzahl: 398
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Juni 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780262374651
• Artikelnr.: 65649777

Autorenporträt

Christoph Becker is Associate Professor of Information, Director of the Digital Curation Institute, and a member of the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. He is also cofounder of the Karlskrona Initiative for Sustainability Design.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Just Sustainability Design 1
I Is Computing Insolvent?
1 The Design of Sustainability 29
2 Just Sustainabilities and the Debts of Computing 57
3 The Myths of Computing 77
4 Problemism: The Insolvency of Computational Thinking 109
II Restructuring
5 Computing's Critical Friends 127
6 Software is Never Neutral: How Do Values Become Facts? 153
7 People are More Than Rational: Beware the Normative Fallacy 167
8 Problems are Framings: The Discordant Pluralism of Just Sustainability
Design 193
III Reorienting Systems Design
9 Leverage Points for Change: From Insolvent Computing to Just
Sustainability Design 213
10 Critical Requirements Practice 225
11 Searching for Just, Sustainable Design Decisions 255
12 A Silicone Ring: Social Responsibility and Collective Action 279
Conclusion: This Changes Computing 297
Notes 307
References 323
Index 371