#Gaik 2025 (another go at 2025 abstract)

Prompted by this request, here’s a second go at an abstract for a 2025 critical computing conference (shorter than this one).

Precursors and implications of #Gaiak’s holistic Ecological Computing Manifesto

In this paper, we analyse the precursors and implications of #Gaiak’s holistic Ecological Computing Manifesto. This manifesto stemmed from #Gaiak’s reputation as an ecohacker with performance artworks of increasing audacity and frequency including street intersection outages, citywide power blackouts and the 2023 shutdown of global airspace. #Gaiak claimed she represented Earth fighting back from the tyranny of mankind. From a technical perspective, rather than being a fraud, as some have claimed (there was no deliberate hacking, instead the art célèbre were appropriations of serendipitously broken systems), we find parallels with the way global industries “collaborated” with Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes. From this perspective we argue that the increasing instability of the industrial computing machine and its brutal imposition upon delicately co-evolved human and natural systems, not engineered for such trespass, do point to a culpability of computing. We conclude that in response to this realisation, #Gaiak’s “Ecology of Things”, “Humanistic Metrics” and “Deep Ecosymputation” should be credited with prompting transformational changes in computer science.