Remodeling Environments: Anthropological Perspectives on the Limits of Computational Models

Abstract

Computational models play central roles in the politics of the Anthropocene. Whether used to design seawalls or to project climate futures, we encounter them across a variety of sites of response to anthropogenic climate change and other environmental ills. In this paper, we reflect on the limits of contemporary computational modeling, particularly when it comes to representing coupled socioecological systems or human-nonhuman relations. Modeling practices naturalize specific assumptions about what counts as data, can be represented, and counts as legitimate knowledge regarding environments and their contents. They are also shaped by and reinforce contingent forms of computational logic and infrastructure that could, we suggest, be otherwise. As a result, their projections frequently grind against other ways of imagining environments and their futures, such as those developed through long-term inhabitation or embedded within different ecologies and infrastructures of knowledge production. They also materialize in infrastructures that can be part of the problem rather than the solution.

Towards the Development of an Anti-Colonial Critique of Climate and Disaster Risk Models

“…Second, this work builds on prior work in LIMITS which has used the notion of limits to examine and visibilize hidden costs and injustices within computing technologies and digital information systems. Prior work has looked at the limits of HCD [104], hidden human cost in e-commerce and gig economy [7,9], increased vulnerability in smart cities [13,80], the externalized energy cost of smart-farming [97], and the limits of computational modeling [53]. Our analysis extends [53]'s discussion of epistemological struggles in environmental models by focusing on a particular limit in contemporary environmental modeling.…”

“…Prior work has looked at the limits of HCD [104], hidden human cost in e-commerce and gig economy [7,9], increased vulnerability in smart cities [13,80], the externalized energy cost of smart-farming [97], and the limits of computational modeling [53]. Our analysis extends [53]'s discussion of epistemological struggles in environmental models by focusing on a particular limit in contemporary environmental modeling. Through our findings, we show how common practices of quantifying and building models tend to inherit and uphold colonial relations that ignore people's relationship to land, ecological impact of disasters, and long-term processes that lead to disaster vulnerabilities.…”

“…Lastly, research published at LIMITS has explored alternative approaches and paradigms to address the ecological limits, information limits, and material limits of existing technology systems [46,53,85] We share this hopeful orientation and use subsection 6.1 to imagine an alternate anti-colonial approach to disaster and climate risk. This discussion builds on research in LIMITS and HCI that draw on pluriversal designs [3,21,53], relational thinking [20,53], and non-anthropocentric worldviews [23,54].…”

“…Lastly, research published at LIMITS has explored alternative approaches and paradigms to address the ecological limits, information limits, and material limits of existing technology systems [46,53,85] We share this hopeful orientation and use subsection 6.1 to imagine an alternate anti-colonial approach to disaster and climate risk. This discussion builds on research in LIMITS and HCI that draw on pluriversal designs [3,21,53], relational thinking [20,53], and non-anthropocentric worldviews [23,54]. Our proposed anti-colonial tactics of specificity, relationality, and obligations can contribute to ongoing conversations in these communities on alternative approaches to environment such as eco-social change [42], eco-spirituality [18], and degrowth [99].…”

“…We also argue that a more thorough analysis of the relationship between contemporary environmental information must go beyond the evaluation of a single report but also must carefully attend to the situated practices surrounding the design, collection, analysis and distribution of such information. Finally, we connect our analysis and arguments to ongoing conversations in the LIMITS community about the role of computational modeling [53,64,85], ecological limits [78,85], and environmental justice [8].…”