Funded by the Swiss National Research Fund, Discarded Digital is a field research project conducted by Nicolas Nova, Anaïs Bloch and Thibault Le Page about the use/re-use/repurposing of digital technologies from the recent past. Both an inquiry into the second (and probably third) life of digital rubbish and an exploration of alternatives to e-waste recycling businesses this project aims at (1) documenting lesser known practices in the field of art, design and preservation, (2) grasping the kind of artifacts that emerged from them, and (3) understanding the skills they rely on and the knowledge they produce.

The logic of the surveillance-driven information economy demands systems for handling mass quantities of heterogeneous data, increasingly in the form of knowledge graphs. An archaeology of knowledge graphs and their mutation from the liberatory aspirations of the semantic web gives us an underexplored lens to understand contemporary information systems. I explore how the ideology of cloud systems steers two projects from the NIH and NSF intended to build information infrastructures for the public good to inevitable corporate capture, facilitating the development of a new kind of multilayered public/private surveillance system in the process. I argue that understanding technologies like large language models as interfaces to knowledge graphs is critical to understand their role in a larger project of informational enclosure and concentration of power.

What ideological, social and biophysical factors have precipitated the current environmental crises? What leverage is available for transformative practices and imaginaries to overcome the continuous growth of our energy consumption? The Post Growth Toolkit invites us to challenge the dominant narratives about growth and progress, and re-envision social metabolism through an understanding of the energy it requires, reconnecting human survival with the living, material qualities of the biosphere, drawing on ecofeminism, indigenous knowledge, environmental accounting and historical materialism.