When the young American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented the Green New Deal stimulus plan to avert the consequences of global climate change in March 2019, she met with crushing criticism from many sides, including from the ranks of her own Democratic base. Her plan, which took both its name and its ambitions from Roosevelt’s New Deal of the Great Depression, wants to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions completely by 2030 by moving the entire American economy from fossil fuels to alternative sources and by ensuring that “all existing buildings will be upgraded to become energy efficient”. Alongside that, it demands public healthcare, affordable housing, quality education and guaranteed jobs for those who lose their work in the process.
The far-reaching scope of the plan reflects the idea that planetary ecological processes are inevitably interconnected with economic and social questions. Implicitly, this “Manhattan Project for energy” joined the attempts to put into practice countless warning scientific models and theoretical essays on the Anthropocene, and to do so straight away on the highest floors of American politics.
The holistic lenses through which the Green New Deal looks at potential solutions to the approaching ecological crisis are needed. As the leading supporters of Ocasio-Cortez’s plan claim, among them the influential intellectual and political dissident , there is no way back any more. We have to act immediately and accept that climate change will fundamentally affect the lives of our children and grandchildren. The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in 2018 stresses that the rise in global average temperature must be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. That requires us to cut CO2 emissions by a full 45 per cent by 2030 and to switch completely to energy from renewable sources by 2050. Such radical changes can only be made through planet-wide coordination, backed by a clear and unifying vision. And that vision was supposed to be the Green New Deal, which did spark an important international debate, but in the end did not win a single vote in the American Senate.
On the one hand, it is clear that Ocasio-Cortez and her supporters came up with a motivational manifesto rather than a legislative document; it ran to a mere fourteen pages and did not go into the details of how to implement the individual points. And they were not trivial points. The plan de facto contained the need to enact state healthcare, an unconditional income and revolutionary technical interventions in the energy sector. It is no accident that the Democrats have so far failed to push through even one of these points on its own. The Green New Deal thus tries to push through the most radical changes in the history of the United States without first securing among people support for its basic premise: that climate change exists and that its main driving force is human activity.
Climate change easily matches the other dangers humanity faces: the destructive power of nuclear weapons, or the negative impact of artificial intelligence on the labour market and on democracy, and, at the moment of singularity, potentially on the whole of humanity. Although there are many disputes, scientific variables and possible solutions in the questions of nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, unlike climate change nobody questions that they are dangerous and could cause a catastrophe of global proportions. How, then, can we explain that a large part of the population still rejects a fact that is supported by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community and systematically confirmed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Politics and ideological interests undoubtedly play an important role, yet in this text I want to focus on a less discussed angle, one that is the close domain of artists, designers and also modern technologists. This angle concerns the form of representation of global, massively distributed complex systems, among which we can count climate change.
When we talk about nuclear weapons, we all picture a concrete image (a bomb, a mushroom cloud) or an event (Hiroshima or Nagasaki). Thanks to science fiction literature and film, and recently also to the well-made series Chernobyl, produced by HBO, and Black Mirror, most people can imagine concrete objects or events that have happened or could happen if modern technology slips out of our hands. For the human mind, objects and events naturally serve as graspable placeholder icons on the desktop of our mind, which represent complex technical phenomena in a simplified way and at the same time, through their aesthetics, help explain how the destructive power of these threats works.
For climate change we would be hard pressed to find one coherent icon. And that is because climate change is neither an object nor an event, but a dynamic system that cannot be localised in one place but is distributed across the whole planet. Its complexity and feedback mechanisms often lead to paradoxical results, where warming causes cooling, drought and heavy rains at the same time. The non-locality of climate change then makes it almost impossible for an ordinary person to grasp the whole range of global changes: they may picture melting glaciers, but less so the irrigation problems of Indian agriculture, the lack of drinking water on the African continent, which worsens the waves of migration to Europe, or the fall in GDP of 1.2 to 20 % in certain American states for every 1 degree of warming.
The problem with the form of representation of climate change lies in the fact that climate change, much like the capitalist economy, is a non-object that is not phenomenologically accessible to direct perception. At the same time, climate change is a non-linear system that produces many feedback mechanisms and newly emerging, unpredictable properties which, without sophisticated scientific models, we simply cannot picture in our heads. If we cannot imagine something, it leads to a lack of understanding. And that, in the marketplace of ideas, opens up room for simplifying and ideologically satisfying explanations, which we call conspiracy theories.
But it is not only ordinary people who are to blame. Experts and activists alike lack the scientific and political imagination that would present such a complex problem in some other way than in words and texts. Natural language is a medium hundreds of thousands of years old, with a strictly linear and low data “bandwidth”, and is therefore the least suitable tool for explaining complex, non-linear distributed systems. By analogy, it is as if we wanted to watch a high-definition film in a cinema by having someone describe to us in words what is happening on the screen. Yet that is exactly how information about climate change reaches most people: in words.
What is the alternative? The well-known folk aphorism that a picture says more than a thousand words can help. It points to the fact that the human mind understands reality more, and often better, than it can express in mere words. When we see a familiar face from a distance on a busy street, we have recognised it, but we cannot say how. Similarly, master craftsmen or music teachers pass knowledge on to beginners in words, but when they come to explaining exceptional performance, they have nothing else left in their repertoire than to show the right technique directly and ask the pupil to imitate it as closely as possible. Bruno Latour, in his text on visualisation and cognition, points out the rhetorical power of images, and the fact that engineering, botany, architecture, mathematics and other fields need, to describe their subjects fully, a visual medium that goes beyond mere texts.
The images I have in mind in this text are not just any images. They are not static images that imitate something that exists. On the contrary, they are dynamic and interactive images that construct something that did not exist until now. A new view of reality. And they must be a tool that leads to better understanding.
Cognitive science and psychology often work with the notion of a “mental model”, as a subjectively constructed mental image of a certain slice of the world which informs us which subsequent actions and types of behaviour are relevant and rational for us. The political aesthetics of the British political theorist Nick Srnicek, who drew on Fredric Jameson, then uses the concept of “cognitive mapping”. Unlike the “mental model”, cognitive mapping points not only to the final result (the model), but to the very process of the subject’s active construction of a grasp of the world. We all give ourselves over to cognitive mapping when we find ourselves in a new city or when we use a new technology: we find out where we are and what we can do. Both urbanism, where the concept of cognitive mapping originally comes from, and the designers of user interfaces have to design their solutions so as to make cognitive mapping as simple as possible for their users. They help themselves to that end with various functional and aesthetic techniques, signs and symbols that define the appropriate and permissible actions of the human-user. If we follow them and the designers have done a good job, things work for us, we are in control of them and we feel that they help us understand.
History is full of examples of new technologies and media mediating paths to a new understanding of the world. The history of technology seems to me, to a large extent, a history of new forms of representing the world, which brought new forms of thinking into the collective consciousness.
For instance, the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan attempted a systematic study of the cognitive changes brought about by media technologies. McLuhan pointed out how the introduction of the phonetic alphabet in ancient Greece triggered fundamental changes in oral culture, and how society began to move from a mythical, narrative style of thinking to linear and sequential reasoning. Writing made it possible to externalise thought processes and express them explicitly. Thanks to the permanence of writing, thoughts became the object of theoretical reflection, which resulted in the development of logic and later in the birth of Western science. Arabic numerals and advanced mathematical notation became the user interface to the universe of mathematics and enabled mental operations that were simply not possible with Roman numerals.
When the Scottish engineer and economist William Playfair decided at the end of the 18th century to use a chart with a time axis instead of the classic tabular presentation of data, he created the first infographic and changed our intuitions about how we think of the development of data over a period of time. While the data Playfair used were publicly available, it was only their visualisation over time that actually led to new knowledge.
Last but not least, the graphical user interface led to the massive spread of computers among non-technical users. It did so by hiding all the complexity of the hardware and, instead of rewiring cables or typing code into the computer’s command line, offering the metaphor of the desktop, clicking and dragging icons, that is, activities that draw on our natural intuitions about how the world works and how we handle physical objects.
The success of statistical charts and of the graphical user interface rests on principles championed by the brilliant engineer and designer Bret Victor: if we want to understand complex systems, the worst thing we can do is talk about them. Instead, we should model systems or “play” with them, in the sense of direct manipulation of the objects and space around us.
It is no accident that the same idea was held at the dawn of the computer age by the first pioneers, Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart. These authors feared that the modernisation of society would bring an information overload that would paralyse the biological limits of our decision-making abilities. In their view, the complexity of the world could become graspable again if we created new forms of representing information, and if an ever closer symbiotic relationship between human and machine led to the augmentation of the human intellect. All three imagined this future role of computers, and of technology in general, above all as a revolution in information visualisation and in the creation of revolutionary user interfaces.
If we return to the issue of climate change, we will hardly find a better way of obtaining data than the one offered by the methods and procedures of contemporary modern science. But if the history of technology as forms of representation and cognitive tools tells us anything, having the data alone does not automatically lead to knowledge. Data must be represented, interpreted and placed in a wider context.
And this is precisely where room opens up for much more intensive interventions by art and speculative design. These fields are exceptionally well equipped to transform raw data into new forms of visual, but also auditory or tactile, representation. New projects should better represent the global symptoms of climate change as they touch people in their immediate context: they could explain what the rising price of certain foods in the local shop has in common with floods or harsh droughts thousands of kilometres away.
Or, conversely, we need projects that would regularly mine personal data in the style of the quantified self (Quantified Self) and social data from social networks to represent how people’s local activities have an impact on a global scale. I myself remember how my opinion of sustainable consumption was shaped by an infographic mapping how, by buying animal products, I contribute to the consumption of hundreds to thousands of litres of water needed to raise a single head of cattle.
On the way to a better representation of complex systems, the fields of human-computer interaction and information design also seem to me to be natural partners.
For example, the joining of human-computer interaction with cybernetics produced one of the boldest projects ever: Project Cybersyn, between 1970 and 1973, under the socialist government of the Chilean president Salvador Allende. Allende’s plan was to nationalise the economy and produce affordable goods for the whole of society. After a year, Fernando Flores, Allende’s head of the state agency CORFO, decided to call in Stafford Beer, the leading British cybernetician, to help Chile create a modern, cybernetics-based alternative to classic centralised planning. Beer proposed connecting factories and other sites involved in economic production by means of Telex teleprinters and an IBM computer. In doing so they created the first “socialist internet”. Through it, data on production, workers and so on flowed into software that analysed the data statistically and modelled future predictions and recommendations. These were finally displayed in a futuristically designed operations room resembling the sci-fi bridge of the Star Trek starship. The data gathered there on the state of the economy were displayed regularly in real time. The user interface gave the operators visual feedback on the economic complexities of the parts of the country connected to Cybersyn. On the computer’s recommendation, the operator-managers were then to set economic interventions in motion.
After the violent political coup, the new right-wing government had no sympathy for this socialist experiment. That did bring about the formal end of Cybersyn, but the project as such had many problems anyway: from the ill-considered delegation of decision-making powers to the local level to insufficient network speed and computing power. Yet the ideas of the radical Cybersyn about how to grapple with the complexity of the world can be found all around us today.
In her history of the display of complex data, the media theorist Shannon Mattern mentions, alongside the classic multi-monitor terminals used by professionals in the financial sector, projects that apply cybernetic principles and data analysis in top-level politics and city planning. She mentions, for example, the iPad app “No. 10 Dashboard”, which former Prime Minister David Cameron had custom-made for himself. This app gave access to data on the financial sector, housing, employment or current public opinion. According to the Guardian newspaper, David Cameron let it be known that he could run the government remotely from his smartphone.
Mattern goes on to describe how many cities have begun to use a form of digital “dashboard” to visualise important urban data. In 1999 the mayor of the American city of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley, under pressure from rising crime and high taxes, introduced the CitiStat application for the internal quantitative monitoring of political accountability. In 2003 part of the application and of the statistical data was made available to the public over the web. Other American cities and states brought out their own versions of the dashboard for tracking urban data. In Europe, Vienna, Bologna and other cities then initiated the “urbanAPI” project, whose aim is to provide standardised software for the analysis, visual representation and also management of the urban environment and socio-economic activities across cities.
These urban dashboards and city interfaces do nothing less than extend our natural cognitive and perceptual abilities, bringing the city closer to us as one whole, interconnected organism.
Many people already have similar apps installed on their smartphones. But I want to imagine that, with the same care and passion, we carry clear information about the state of our planet in our pockets at every step. I want to imagine the moment when not only selected cities of the Western world but all cities will be an open, smart, digital and programmable platform that, alongside tourist information, gives everyone equally clear information about the sources and causes of their carbon footprints, food waste, water consumption, animal farming and so on.
Why stop at mobile apps? Virtual and augmented reality applications can raise the rhetorical power of visual representation even further. Instead of our watching two-dimensional screens, these technologies could carry the complexity of climate change into the everyday surroundings we know well. Let us imagine an AR/VR app that someone launches somewhere on a waterfront in Amsterdam, and in augmented reality sees what the streets of Amsterdam will look like in 50 or 100 years, when the ocean levels rise. What is more, the app’s parametric settings could show several possible future scenarios depending on the amount of CO2 emissions.
If, in order to raise a city’s energy efficiency, more radical urban changes are desirable, it is always easier to prototype such changes in hyper-realistic virtual reality than in our “cumbersome” physical world.
In such cases, intangible data and scientific findings acquire a tangible physical form – a body – with which it is possible to interact and to form an intimate relationship, one that shows concrete answers to abstract questions and can evoke emotions.
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The political aesthetics of climate change demands from artists and designers solutions that are utopian but at the same time pragmatically oriented. Innovative approaches to the representation of data must go beyond what has so far been considered the status quo in communicating climate change. Yet they must still bear in mind that the aim is not l’art pour l’art, but an effort to extend people’s capacity to see a dynamic, complex, planet-wide system, that strange non-object we call climate change.
Given the controversies surrounding climate change, the fears of the first pioneers of the personal computer that we would not be able to cope with the flood of data may seem partly fulfilled. We produce more data than we can process. Human rationality alone is not enough for Big Data, and so we take refuge in conspiracy theories.
Yet the vision of the first computer pioneers was thoroughly techno-optimistic. In their eyes, the approaching symbiosis of human and technology was not a dystopia that would rob us of the last pinch of what is human. Quite the opposite. They rejected the imagined authenticity of an unspoilt human nature as false, for since the late Palaeolithic we have been an organism that formed an intimate relationship with technology in order to survive. We are thus entirely natural cyborgs.
What we need, though, are new forms of representing data and the complexity of the world that will help us make the right decisions in an anthropocentric age, when humans, technology, climate and nature are more intertwined than ever before.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the best artists and designers, women and men, were politically engaged in creating visual propaganda. From the second half of the twentieth century we see the talent of these fields begin to be used massively in the newly emerged commercial sector of public relations. In our 21st century, art and design, above all their unique talent for creating new perceptible wholes out of the complexity of disparate elements, must move into information design and human-computer interaction. Into the creative making of various forms of urban dashboards and technological interfaces that will augment our intellect and allow us to grapple with information overload and decision paralysis. What else should art and design augment our intellect for, if not for dealing with the greatest threat of the 21st century, the one that endangers our children and grandchildren?
I wrote this article for the magazine Živel, whose new issue, number 40, comes out in March 2020.