Do we have the right to critique if we are a participant within the systems we are critiquing?

As I make my final move off social media I have been sharing a lot of the writings and explorations I have been doing lately. The purpose is to share the depth of the work I am moving toward, to get aligned followers on Instagram to follow me off the platform, and to also illuminate some interesting inquiries I have been having around the space of social media to a larger audience...one last time. A kind of last hurrah before most of what I have to say will likely become harder to access for the masses.

Yesterday I posted about my article Your Anti-AI Post Has a Carbon Footprint Too and I got some interesting questions in my comments. I truly loved receiving these comments because this means my article resonates on some level and that it also triggered some deeper thinking around these topics and this is exactly what I hoped for. Because this kind of conversation is so essential and so needed. But because this is such a complex topic and because conversations are much more rich when they are dynamic, I honestly didn't feel like I could just give a quick comment-sized response. Arguably a blog isn't totally a dynamic conversation either but it is the best I can do at the moment.

Here are some of the questions as I understood them, and my responses.

Question: Are we are allowed to criticize AI if we use the internet?

Answer: If you're not arguing for purity or perfection, which I am not, then yes...we are definitely within our right to criticize it. Of course, if we are using the internet at all these days it is basically impossible to not be engaging with AI. But there is a difference between sending an e-mail or reading a text-heavy webpage and streaming hours of high-resolution video or endlessly scrolling algorithmically created social media. They aren't equivalent in their resource intensity or in the way in which they also encourage consumption. In terms of their resource intensity, it is like comparing constant private air travel to traveling daily on public transport. Both have a carbon footprint but one obviously has a lot more room for improvement than the other. Becoming mindful of frequency, scale or alternatives are not irrelevant.

We can start asking ourselves questions like what kind of system am I participating in, how resource intensive is my participation, what does the system incentivize, and is my participation aligned with the values I'm publicly expressing? Asking things like what can I change? What can I consume less of? What alternatives exist? Where am I willing to accept some inconvenience or question default ways of being in order to live more consistently with what I believe?

Question: Isn't any kind of awareness around the impacts of AI important, even if they are delivered through a resource-intensive platform like social media?

Answer: Awareness isn't the same thing as transformation and this is where social media I feel falls flat. Sure, it's the loudest platform but it inherently keeps people in a cycle of consumption, comfort, and numbness rather than getting uncomfortable enough to question and start acting.

I think most people at this point know that AI has an environmental impact so I honestly don't know if more informational posts are going to do much. I also don't know if people have connected the dots that social media has an environmental impact as well, which was a main reason for my post. From what I can tell, it does not seem like people have made that connection. I would also argue that even if they have connected those dots, knowing something in the abstract isn't necessarily the same as understanding the systems behind it or allowing that knowledge to influence our choices. My intention with this post was to expose what I think many people haven't considered.

Question: Are we even allowed to criticize if we ourselves are not living zero-impact lives (essentially off grid)? Otherwise it becomes a rabbit hole where essentially most actions could be claimed as having a carbon footprint.

Answer: I'm not arguing for perfection nor am I claiming my own footprint is zero. I do participate in systems whose ecological costs I don't always have the ability to avoid but I do try to remain as conscious as possible and always attempt to do better in the best ways I can. But I don't think it is helpful to abandon discernment and say "Well everything has a footprint so nothing is meaningfully different." To me, this is a dangerous way of thinking. This means you can't criticize industrial agriculture unless you grow 100% of your own food. You can't criticize fast fashion unless you make every garment you wear. Etc, etc. Participation in a system doesn't eliminate our ability to question the system.

I am not outside the system I'm criticizing. I'm absolutely implicated as well. And that's precisely why I think we should keep questioning them. Because we are part of it. If we don't like it...what are we going to do about it? Are we going to bitch and moan in an almost masturbatory way on resource-intensive social media? Or are we going to use our energy to take aligned action?

And I just want to say that living off-grid isn't a prerequisite for ecological critique.

This brings me to another question that wasn't explicityly asked but I feel like it is important and relevant...

Question: How is my simple individual impact of making one post on social media going to make a difference when we know the biggest climate offenders are big corporations and governments?

This is such a valid point but there is a crucial distinction between individual impact and individual participation and this distinction lies at the heart of my post. Directly we can look at what resources our choices consume...and honestly, on a grand scale it is not nearly enough to make or break our climate reality. But systemically we can start to look at the systems we are helping sustain through our participation, consumption, attention, money, data, labor, habits, and normalization. Because the vast majority of environmental destruction is systemic, industrial, and corporate, it is true that individual footprints can look almost meaningless beside the scale of those systems. But those systems don't operate in a vacuum.

A system doesn't exist independently of the participation that sustains it. So the goal isn't really about becoming impact-free which is impossible at this point in time. Also it's worth noting that when we require purity and perfection we go down a pathway that leads to guilt, defensiveness, and ultimately paralysis. But knowing that our participation is helping to sustain these systems we can instead start to learn to cultivate consciousness around our participation and become more deliberate about where we place it. And this is where our responsibility and agency begins, where we can work to reduce harm with our own actions. We can't opt out of every harmful system, but we can become more discerning about what we consent to, what we support, what we normalize, and what we help reproduce.

We can ask where we have the ability to participate differently?

But I don't think our lack of purity should become an excuse to stop questioning. If anything, it should make us question more deeply. Because, as I already stated, we don't have to be completely outside a system to begin withdrawing our participation from it.

We can consume less, choose alternatives, refuse some conveniences, put our money and attentions somewhere else. We can stop normalizing things simply because they're ubiquitous. We can ask whether the convenience we're receiving is worth the ecological and social costs being externalized somewhere else. And we can keep asking these questions of ourselves, not just of others.

I don't expect my individual choices to dismantle enormous systems. But I also don't believe enormous systems change without people gradually withdrawing their consent, participation, attention, and dependence from them and then building something different in their place.

Conclusion: I've come to realize all of life is a relationship or a series of relationships. If we want these relationships to support systems of health and harmony, where everything can thrive (which is not the current state of world), then these relationships requires continual examination, adjustments, creative solutions, reciprocity, and a willingness to notice when our behavior and our values have fallen out of alignment. My goal is to help people do just this. I know not many people will understand it or even want it. Our modern society has us operating from a place of extreme comfort, where the need for constant pleasurable stimuli and to never feel pain have left us blindly consuming and supporting the systems that are killing us all. But I know that the more people there are who are willing to do this work...to question, to refuse participation, to adjust and, to get creative...the more we will be able to find collective healing world-wide.

NOTE: There was one last question that said something like, "Can't social media just be for fun?" This is such a deeper topic that I think I will need to create another post for it at a later time. If you also have this question and see this exploration as making mountains out of molehills, I encourage you to check back. I'll link to it here once it is written.