Last month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Digital Ethics Forum in Turin. The event was organised by Sloweb, an organisation founded in Italy to promote a more ethical and environmentally friendly approach to digital technology, inspired by the Slowfood movement that started in Italy in the 1980’s as a response to the emergence of fast food. Slowfood promotes a food system with three core principles, of being good (in terms of quality, flavour, and seasonality), clean (sustainable and kind to the environment), and fair (accessible pricing and dignified conditions for producers). Sloweb takes a similar approach to the digital information that we consume, promoting an Internet that is lean, clean and fair.
Every two years, Slowfood organises a big international food festival in Turin to celebrate and educate people about the Slowfood movement, called Terre Madre del Gusto, and this year’s Digital Ethics Forum was co-located in Turin as part of the bigger festival. When I was invited to speak by Sloweb co-founders Nicola Bonotto and Pietro Jarre, the opportunity to travel to such an amazing city and meet up with like minded friends promoting ethical approaches to digital was unmissable.
I took part in a session with Gerry McGovern, author of the landmark book World Wide Waste and more recently 99th Day, and Thorsten Jonas, founder of the Sustainable UX Network (SUX) and it was an honour to present alongside two people who I have so much admiration for.
Gerry talked about the physical nature of our virtual world and the incredible toll it takes upon not just our Earth’s natural systems but also indigenous and marginalised communities around the world. It was a powerful call to pause and question our incessant greed and hunger for ever more digital consumption.
I then gave a talk titled ‘Salt, Fat, Sugar, Data’ that picked up on the thread of this of never ending digital hunger and explored the parallels between the human food system, which has gradually shifted from a sustainable natural system that deeply nourishes us to an industrialised system designed to cultivate addiction to empty, high profit foods. I highlighted how the same pattern has played out in our information systems, leading us to today’s world where we are addicted to constant snacking on low quality information that drives corporate profits. I hope to write another article in the near future to share this story in more detail.
And then Thorsten picked up the AI thread talking about the true price of AI, a theme that had been explored at the previous day’s SUX session. He talked about how we have the power to shape our own interactions and usage of AI and not simply be passengers. A key part of this is to recognise the innate wisdom that we have as human beings, including our ability to tune in to “weak signals” that are sometimes more important than the hard data that is accessible to an AI, and that when we outsource our own roles to an AI we actively de-skill ourselves and make ourselves more dependent on AI in the future. Perhaps the most powerful message of the session was these four words — “Brain first, AI second.” And yeah, I added that emdash myself!
More broadly the Digital Ethics Forum had an incredible range of sessions in both English and Italian, covering topics from ‘Human Rights in the Age of AI’ to ‘The Right to Repair’ as well as case studies of digital projects pursuing ethical practices and uses of digital technology. And to top it off, unlike the food festival that mostly happened outside in the forum of street markets, the Digital Ethics Forum took place in an arthouse cinema where a range of films relating to the ethical use of digital technology were screened in the evenings. Speaking of which, there is a Sloweb documentary currently in production, so watch this space!
Following in the footsteps of Slowfood, the Sloweb movement is growing in momentum and spreading beyond Italy, so if you want to get involved then do check out their website and get in touch with them to see how you could collaborate.
It can feel overwhelming in these times of rapid AI acceleration, but coming together as a community to develop and promote more ethical approaches to digital has never been more important.
