Maya Indira Ganesh

SolarPunk and Going Post-Post-Apocalyptic

in re:publica 2018

Cyberpunks, they’re out pirat­ing data and upload­ing their brains into video games. Solarpunks are revi­tal­iz­ing water­sheds, map­ping radi­a­tion after dis­as­ter or war, and bring­ing back pol­li­na­tor pop­u­la­tions. And since all great spec­u­la­tive fic­tion is real­ly not about the future but about about the present, cyber­punk is about the pol­i­tics of the 1980s, right. It was about urban decay and cor­po­rate pow­er and glob­al­iza­tion. In the same way, solarpunk is real­ly about the pol­i­tics of right now. Which means it’s about glob­al social jus­tice, the fail­ures of late cap­i­tal­ism, and the cli­mate crisis. 

Big Data Bodies: Machines and Algorithms in the World

in Netzpolitik 13

I’m inter­est­ed in data and dis­crim­i­na­tion, in the things that have come to make us unique­ly who we are, how we look, where we are from, our per­son­al and demo­graph­ic iden­ti­ties, what lan­guages we speak. These things are effec­tive­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to machines. What is gen­er­al­ly cel­e­brat­ed as human diver­si­ty and expe­ri­ence is trans­formed by machine read­ing into some­thing absurd, some­thing that marks us as different.