Making a Difference that Matters: A New Materialist Approach to Environmental Education in the Age of Algorithms

Abstract

Civic environmental education has promoted agentic citizenship that drives institutional change to tackle complex socio-ecological problems. Therefore, it matters whether or not this education itself allows for agency and change, and what type of ontology and ethics it entails. As agents of educational, civic and institutional change, New Materialist and Deleuzoguattarian ontologies and ethics reveal the relational power of collective agencies that are never only human – in particular, everyday practices – to make a real world difference that matters. In short, they allow for the power of micropolitical non-resistance, embedded with the creative potential of everyday recalcitrance, to alter the on-going implementation of institutions and their constraining effects. But this is a choice to adopt relational ontology as ethics in action. In this study, I develop and argue for a New Materialist approach to environmental education in the age of algorithms. I do this by exploring and analysing how complex real world agencies and changes come to matter from within the on-going transitions to energyreliant algorithmic capitalism, algorithmic governmentality, and societies of volunteered civic ‘control’ (Deleuze 1995: 174), or self-regulation to others’ ends. To this end, I interviewed independent game developers based in Finland, and applied relational ontoepistemology, or onto-ethico-epistemology, that functions as not only a conceptual approach for understanding agentic phenomena, but also a methodology for finding out about the intra-actions they entail. My findings show that the transition to smart grids for electricity distribution holds out the promise of civic energy autarchies, namely, selfsufficient local electricity networks based on renewable sources, low demand and citizen participation, but it has served to deliver so-called ‘civic climate resilience’ as a means of self-regulation to others’ ends, or control. 21st century control can best be countered not by oppositional resistance, but by relational non-resistance, which makes a difference that matters from within cramped civic existence as part of algorithmic capitalisms and societies of control.