Post #2484581

@emsenn@kolektiva.social we are going to quickly be facing the same thing here (data centers), so I'm both watching these conversations with interest and also asking a lot of the same questions. (Not that it's datacenters alone which require us to ask these questions obviously). Unlike yourself & many folks on here I am very tech-stupid, so my thoughts tend to run to low-tech concepts, which may or may not really be adequate to address what's happening. I think in some ways and in some places, small towns are more set up to meet the challenge of low-tech communication than larger towns or cities are. But I think about (and have seen it tried, sometimes successfully) adapting structures like the town hall, the flyering, even the door-knocking (depending on the neighborhood). When I think about de-growth, part of what I think about is just the scaling-down of communication, in the sense that the old, "one mouthy person gets on a soapbox and yells at a crowd" method, in all its iterations, seems played out. I'm sure you have way more insight into the actual science of communication than I do, and would love to hear more about communication + degrowth, but in this immediate sense, the thought of treating communication outside of tech as a challenge of mycelial spread, so to speak, instead of how to reach mass numbers all at once, is kind of where my mind is going. With that, I wonder about looking at things like what other kinds of orgs exist who could be called upon to raise the issue with their members, and what orgs they partner with, etc. Library boards, or even hobbyist groups, parent groups, anything where a quick n dirty (but not too dirty LOL) informative zine could make the rounds and then those folks be tasked with raising the issue to their other orgs, be they knitting circles or neighborhood associations. Iirc (and I may be wrong), it was more this kind of branching info-spreading that built mass participation in the Atlanta Forest movement than big platforms like Instagram or google. These methods definitely come with their own challenges, and as as they say, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, but I think the dual purpose of getting the info out there and at the same time bolstering people's neural pathways to different forms of communication than big tech, is important and hopefully some of these low-tech old-school options can still be revived. Anyway, hopefully I haven't just missed the whole point of what you were asking in your original post, and ultimately I don't really have any concrete answers to add, but this is a continent-wide issue (at least) and I'm very interested in these discussions. They are happening here as well.