Re-Imagining a 'We' Beyond the Gathering of Reductions

In this article Lila Athanasiadou and Goda Klumbytė engage in a conversation with Antoinette Rouvroy to revisit Guattari’s "Three Ecologies" and discuss their dynamics in and for the digital age. While a lot of the discourses on algorithms and digital future invoke catastrophic imaginaries of totalizing control, this conversation works with a propositional format, teasing out affirmative politics by pointing to spaces of potentiality within the environmental, the social and the mental realm. Starting from the environmental ecology and thinking of data as a waste, Rouvroy discusses planetary exhaustion as the result of the depletion of natural resources, forced labour practices and the assumption that data hold the answers to the problems posed by global capital. Proposing a space for material experimentation, she speculates on the potential of emerging subjectivities that remain irreducible to data flows. Within social ecology, Rouvroy advocates for the urgency to center digital policy as the space in which the new forms of institutions emerge in order to reorient the power of computation towards the commons. Lastly, within the mental ecology, Rouvroy reconceptualizes the legal subject as a performance that operates within the proliferation of asignifying data signs, reimagining a “we” beyond the gathering of reductions.