Low-tech: what if we approached it as a Trojan horse strategy?

Anyone who has wrestled with a funding application will have noticed the emphasis placed on digital innovation. Ecology, by contrast, is often relegated to secondary criteria. So here you are, encouraged to perform a balancing act: imagine a frugal creative AI system or an eco-designed artistic metaverse. Our house is on fire, yet we are being asked to worship Big Tech. So how do we find a balance in the face of these conflicting demands? Using low-tech as a Trojan horse could be one solution.

Since LLMs were brought to the consumer market, France has sought to break free from the techno-power of Big Tech and chart its own AI strategy. This is what is known as a “digital sovereignty” strategy, whose stated goal is to safeguard and protect France’s technological interests, rather than those of French people. This is also at the heart of France 2030 calls for projects, with one focus dedicated to mastering data and infrastructure. But how could low-tech provide the ideal tactic for bringing ecological concerns back into these investment policies?

Low-tech advocates taking back control of our tools, offering technologies that respond to the environmental emergency while strengthening our ability to act. They allow us to understand how our technologies work, adapt them and repair them. In this sense, they resonate with the concept of “technological sovereignty.” A notion developed by Margarita Padilla and inspired by Via Campesina’s “food sovereignty,” its aim is to guarantee the technological autonomy and independence of populations, rather than states.

Being low-tech means protecting and controlling our data. Being low-tech means mastering the technological tools we use. This is precisely what the state’s “digital sovereignty” strategy promotes. But being low-tech also means fostering conviviality, knowledge sharing, open source, empowerment and ecology.

A window therefore seems to be opening to reconcile ecology and technology through low-tech. A window that could make it possible to embody a genuine “technological and ecological sovereignty” by hacking “digital sovereignty.”

And since the term has a bad reputation, we have just one piece of advice: hide behind technological liberalism, use its language and never say that you are doing low-tech. Just do it. You can easily explain how you are responding to national expectations around digital sovereignty, while ultimately proposing technologies that serve artistic creation and respect the environment. Technology that is not sovereign for the state, but for audiences and artists.

Inès Selmane is pursuing a PhD based on the hypothesis that combining digital art and low-tech could open up new technological practices described as ecosophical, in the sense developed by Félix Guattari: practices that respect the environment and our mental health while returning technological power to communities.