During the meeting we looked at modern ways of using data and datification technology in social movements, with a particular focus on environmental movements that address human impact on climate and environment in the Anthropocene. The starting point of Bartosz Ślosarski’s presentation was the recognition that the dataification of society has a real impact on the way the politics of protest is practiced, both through the development of technological infrastructure, but also resulting from this cultural imperative of data, of which Dataism theorists and researchers from fields science, technology & society..
Data is nowadays contested as a potential source of surveillance and as a means of action through which visualizations of social and natural problems are created. The use of data also serves to legitimize political actors, including grassroots movements, in a catapulted and quantified society. The presentation will include examples of social movement organizations such as Greenpeace International, which works with IPCC climate change data, the Fridays for Future movement, which quantifies its mass power on a global scale, and the Polish Smog Alarm, which is creating its own air quality measurement infrastructure from the bottom up.
