Can the desire to do something in digital spaces, like social media, produce social changes that are effective, and can the Anthropocene concept accommodate these? I explore these two questions in my recently published article in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, “The contingency of change in the Anthropocene: More-than-real renegotiation of power relations in climate change institutional transformation in Australia”.
The Anthropocene, the era geologists are stating we are in as a result of humanity’s environmental impacts, is a contested notion. There is dispute over how we should define this era and whether it is even a useful idea. However, Cook et al (2015) argue that: ‘More important than the issue of its definition are the moral, cultural, and political challenges that the Anthropocene is amplifying.’ (Cook et al, 2015: 231). In the Society and Space article, I traced some of the challenges amplified by the Anthropocene, including how we respond to our understanding of our environmental responsibilities and whether we can do anything substantive in the digital realm about climate change.
We sometimes still talk about how digital spaces are not real, that they are functions of the virtual (Kinsley, 2014). The acronym IRL captures this as we say to Facebook friends or Twitter associates, ‘this would be different in real life’. And in some ways it would be different if we were face-to-face, or side-by-side, but that fact does not make digital spaces any less real. If anything, their excessive power – both corrosive and generative – forge them as more-than-real. And just as risky.
In 1987, Brian Massumi touched on the more-than-real idea once in an article on the simulacrum, talking to French theorists Deleuze and Guattari:
The reality of the model is a question that needs to be dealt with…The alternative is a false one because simulation is a process that produces the real, or, more precisely, more real (a more-than-real) on the basis of the real.
I think that Massumi is arguing that there is no real and simulation but rather that we make and remake the real from previous ‘real’ things. In effect, a simulation, or representation, is as real as the original ‘real’ – except that there never is an original. There is a technological point worth remembering in relation to Massumi’s more-than-real discussion: in 1987, the rise of the global internet was, of course, still only just coming into being, so the application of the more-than-real to this space was not on the agenda.
If we don’t take seriously the more-than-real, then we can miss recognising opportunities and instances of intervention within the Anthropocene. For example, the crowdfunding of the Climate Council, an Australian climate change information sharing institution, is a case of online action that achieved substantial change. One of the first things that the freshly minted Abbott government did in September 2013 was defund the then Climate Commission.
Figure 1: Screenshot of Dan Ilic’s tweet at the time of the Climate Council’s creation
Users of social media were quick to critique the cut and calls to create a new, independent institution were well received. People donated an average of $50 to make the Council an independent institution. Tweets of rebirth and reinvigoration in climate change action abounded (Figure 1 shows an example), while discourses of collective action and resistance of conservative governance emerged as well (see Figure 2)
Figure 2: @climate progress tweeted about collective action
It’s important to look to the broader context of this climate change action. At the same time as this crowdfunding was happening, an abnormally early bushfire season had begun and voters were still smarting from the election of a climate-denier to the highest political office. These factors played into and around the online activity that generated a new institution – the Climate Council (Figure 3) – and such interplay between the real and more-than-real is not unusual.
Figure 3: The Climate Council website, February 2016 (http://www.climatecouncil.org.au)
The degree of success for this particular online-driven change was extraordinary but its dynamics perhaps less so. There are numerous instances of the power of online action – for good and bad. But if we persist in seeing the online as not real, then we can fail to harness its potential, or heed its risk.
If we work against digital dualisms and appreciate that the more-than-real has potent forces, then it becomes clear that yes, online action for climate change can be significant. Understanding the multi-scalar and geographic factors that co-produce such effective action is one part of that work. I don’t believe that we live in an era of inevitable doom but we need to do more, and quickly, if we’re to take advantage of the contingency of change in the Anthropocene (Head, 2014).
Jess McLean is Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University.
References
Cook B, L Rickards, and I Rutherford 2015 Geographies of the Anthropocene. Geographical Research 53: 231–243.
Head L 2014 Contingencies of the Anthropocene: Lessons from the “Neolithic”. The Anthropocene Review, 1: 113-125. DOI: 2053019614529745.
Kinsley S 2014 The Matter of “virtual” Geographies. Progress in Human Goegraphy, 38 (3): 364-384.
Massumi B 1987 Realer than real: The simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guattari. Copyright no.1, pp. 90–97.
McLean J 2015 The Contingency of Change in the Anthropocene: More-than-real renegotiation of power relations and climate change activism in Australia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (online first) Doi: 10.1188/0263775815618963.
