Digital Utopias

Our existence in this world is moving online. Whether you work a hybrid job, spend your free time doom-scrolling various social media accounts, or FaceTime your friend across the world during your lunch break, many of our daily activities are increasingly augmented with digital tools. Unsurprisingly, these changes are not neutral across the board. The underbelly of digitization—increased surveillance, shadow-banning, and cyber harassment, just to name a few—only perpetuates pre-existing disparities across marginalized groups.

It’s easy to feel that our participation in the digital economy, our presence on social media, and the sharing of our personal data no longer is a choice we opt into, but rather a necessary evil of being a participant in today’s world. As tech conglomerates cling to their monopolies over entire industries, we risk becoming apathetic to our own role in constructing digital worlds. Yet digital tools and the technologies behind them are not inherently evil, they are imbued with the values and biases we build into them.

How do we take control of the technologies that increasingly shape our world—imbuing them with values we wish to promote—to create digital spaces we actually want? How can we make a more feminist digital future?

The partner organisation for this track is Kritik Digital. Read more about their work by clicking here

The external mentor for this track is Maia Kahlke Lorentzen. Read more about her work by clicking here.