[Open: Blank slide.] I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." [Slide: Title.] This talk is about social collapse, design, and practice theory. I'll start with two stories from US National Public Radio. The first is from Spain in 2012. > After saving money for years, Lola Sanchez was finally able to buy a car refitted with a ramp and space for a wheelchair in the back for her teenage son, who has cerebral palsy. > A nurse used to come each day to help with her son's care. That service was cut amid government austerity measures, though Sanchez still gets a small check every month. > "What I need is physical help, even more than money," she says. "I can't lift him on my own." > So earlier this year, Sanchez joined a local "time bank" that sends members to help with her son's care. She doesn't pay them. Instead, she reciprocates by using her handicap-friendly car to transport other disabled people in her community. > With Spanish unemployment near 25 percent, many people have more time than money to spend. So in the past two years, the number of time banks in Spain has doubled to nearly 300. Most have between 50 and 400 members. Some print their own currency. > Most of all, says Sanchez, they stress equality. > Most time banks nowadays operate online. You register for a profile — sort of like a Facebook page — that lists your work skills and the tasks you want someone else to do for you. > "Whatever you can imagine," says José Luis Herranz. "You can fix a car, or paint a wall, or cook some food, or even clean the windows." > Herranz helped start the time bank Sanchez belongs to in Madrid, late last year. The 27-year-old monitors the barter of services among members — about a third of whom are unemployed — and logs their hours online. The second story is from Greece. It ran this Sunday. > Volunteer gardeners from countries around Europe visited Greece's second largest city, Thessaloniki, on Sunday to work with local urban planting initiatives helping residents hit by the country's financial crisis. > Urban gardens — used to plant vegetables and make use of land left vacant amid a sharp drop in real estate prices — have sprung up across Greece since the crisis brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy four years ago. Austerity measures demanded as part of Greece's international rescue have created widespread unemployment and hardship. > The volunteers from seven European countries are from a France-based group, Kokopelli, that promotes seed variety. > On Sunday, they visited a disused army base where city residents have been allowed to create garden allotments, and organized a seed exchange. They brought seeds for potatoes, onions and beans. > Municipal authorities in Thessaloniki, a city in northern Greece of about 1.5 million people, have sought out disused plots of land owned by the military, the national railway company and other public agencies to set up dozens of allotment schemes as the national unemployment rate has risen to above 27 percent. > Retiree Sokratis Sotiriadis says he's grateful for the help. He is 62 years old and uses one of 40 allotments on a narrow strip of disused railroad land in Thessaloniki. > "In the summer, I get tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini, and it's great because the prices in the stores are too high for me," he said. "I don't know how else I would make it." [Slide: definition of collapse.] For us, "collapse" means "the breakdown of the arrangements by which people survive and build meaningful lives". Many of these arranagements are sociotechnical, so this is an appropriate topic for HCI research. When they break down it tends to cause a great deal of suffering, so this is also a *good* topic for HCI research. Most societies that have existed have collapsed. Proximate causes range from resource overexploitation to military incursion by foreign powers. But collapse, like death, is not defined by its cause. Collapse informatics comes originally from sustainable HCI. So we are interested in global environmental trends. Here are some. [3 slides: Plots of population, world GDP, etc.] There are two important things about these slides: the diversity of the variables on the y-axes, and the shape. If you read earth systems science, you know that it cannot go on like this forever. In our reading of the natural and social scientific literature, we find that our most cogent analysts of environment, economy, and society do think a collapse of the global industrial society is possible in the next century. [Slide: "oficina de empleo." ("File photo")] But collapse is relative, and the prospect of regional collapse is also worth looking at. It almost seems inappropriate to compare the 1994 genocide in Rwanda -- discussed at length as a social collapse by the geographer Jared Diamond -- to the current unrest in Greece and Spain. Spaniards are not slaughtering each other in the streets. The Greek government is reappropriating abandoned land to grow food. Both countries have physically functioning civil infrastructure. The collapse is economic. The dysfunction lies mainly in each society's financial and political institutions. Yet the suffering in Greece and Spain is real. HIV and malaria are resurgent after Greek public health budgets were cut. Half of young Spaniards have no formal job prospects. Greek suicides rose 20% between late 2009 and early 2012, with most attributed to economic desperation. On April 4, 2012, a retired pharmacist, 77 years old, shot himself on the steps of the Greek parliament, saying, "I'm leaving because I don't want to pass on my debts. I see no other solution than a decent ending before I start looking in the garbage to feed myself." [Slide: "collapse informatics".] We propose to use resources on hand now, including digital tools, to prepare for, or try to avert, future collapse, and to try to grapple with the consequences of collapses already underway. This effort calls for a broader and richer awareness of the complex social, political, economic, and ecological dynamics that lead to collapse. Two years ago in sustainable HCI, thanks to the work of Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir, Maria Håkansson, James Pierce, Eric Baumer, Carl DiSalvo, and Phoebe Sengers, we reflected collectively on the failures of historical environmental management efforts to impose solutions derived from simple models upon complex problems. We know now, quite well, that any serious efforts to take advantage of digital tools to support collective responses or preparations to collapse must take place "on the ground", in rich, embodied, embedded interaction with the social and biophysical contexts in question. But we do think that thinking ahead can improve our odds of success. In the paper, we consider practice theory as a tool for thinking ahead about collapse. [Slide: "practice theory".] Practice theory is a body of work in the social sciences that tries to explain social reality without saying either -- [Slide: "methodological individualism / methodlogical holism".] -- "there is no such thing as society" or, to simplify a little, "there is no such thing as free will". It gives special place to the body, unconscious learning, imtiation, and embodied habits in explaining how social order is reproduced. Ard Huizing and Mary Cavanagh summarize practice theory in three propositions. [Slide: "routinized embodied actions form the basis of human activity" / "material artifacts mediate our relationship with reality" / "knowledge derives from and exists within acting in the world, not abstractly".] The German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz summarizes it like this: [Slide: "practices are body/knowledge/things-complexes".] Presumably that's one word in German. Traditionally, practice theory has focused on the "here-and-now". This is a problem for us because we want to talk about the future. In the paper we argue that the focus on the here-and-now is not essential to practice theory, and that practice theory can help us think generatively about the future. We describe three strategies for broadening the scope of practice theory. [Slide: "do comparative work" / "do longer-term studies" / "checkpoint the future".] They are fairly straightforward. [Slide: habitus cartoon.] Practice theory also tends to see practices as habitual, routine, and unconscious. (The major practice theorist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term "habitus" to talk about this.) In this view, practices are usually reflected upon only in moments of crisis. But plenty of people -- some of whom have been subjects of sustainable HCI research; for example "bright greens", simple living families, ecovillagers, and activists -- do actively reflect on their practices. Some people do this in the context of their knowledge of local or even global environmental or economic trends. They ask themselves what kind of world they are building through their practices. [Slide: "changes in practices" / "reflexive practices" / "practices that aim to destabilize other practices".] So we are very interested in these kinds of things. And in the paper we talk about how we think practice theory can be extended to help us think about them. [Slide: "I see your lips moving but all I hear is blah blah zombie apocalypse French philosophers blah blah, tell me what you think we should be building already".] We hear this sometimes at CHI -- although, I think fortunately, less and less so over the last five years. In any case, this is a collaboration between theorists and builders, so we have some example projects. Two of these have had some design work done around them, but to my knowledge none are being built right now. So if you are looking for a dissertation-sized technical project at the intersection of sustainability and HCI, these may be of interest. [Slide: CCHI.] Here's one from the paper. This is the "Climate Change Habitability Index". The idea is to make a numerical index that helps people answer questions like: Can I continue to live where I live? If not, where can I go? How many people, if any, can the place where I live sustainably support? How do we muster the community to share resources with newcomers? If you believe climate change is real, and serious, which we do, you may agree that these will become important questions in the next few decades. [Slide: "internet quine".] This is not in the paper. It's from a computer scientist named Barath Raghavan. The idea is: can you build a physical internet infrastructure that is "simple, locally reproducible, composed of local materials and resources, easily repairable, affordable, and easily recyclable"? We think that is great collapse informatics -- or sustainable HCI or ICT4D -- work. We can do this kind of thing in HCI too, and we can even work with engineers like Barath. In fact, if you want to work with him, please talk to us. We would be happy to connect you. At the start of the talk I told a story about time banks; I'm interested to hear the talk later in this session on that topic. And of course, there are more examples in the paper. [Slide: Thomas Cole, "Destruction".] Rome wasn't built in a day, but it was sacked in a day -- a few times. But the conditions that made that possible built up over hundreds of years. And the collapse itself -- the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire -- took decades. (It's possible "decline" is a more appropriate word than "collapse".) In any case, this is the kind of time scale we want to look at. Developing the ability to see these processes at work in contemporary societies takes time and effort. To design for this scale we must see what the historians, geographers, and ecologists see. To use Aldo Leopold's phrase, we must learn to think like mountains. [Slide: "the sociotechnical and the social-ecological".] The people, practices, and contexts we study in HCI are affected by the dynamics of regional and even global processes with much longer time scales than those we normally consider. In sustainable HCI and ICT4D, we should pay special attention to these processes. The prefix "socio-" in our word "sociotechnical" usually means communities and organizations. But what about, for example, the institutions of international finance? To do work that faces fully the spectrum of outcomes between sustainability and collapse, we cannot afford to ignore social structures at that scale. And ultimately, all of this takes place within ecosystems -- not metaphorical ecologies of technological devices or sociotechnical practices, but literal biophysical ecosystems made of plants, animals, rain, wind, fossil fuels, and measured in terms of carbon dioxide concentration, soil health, flood frequency, and temperature anomaly. Even in sustainable HCI we have largely abstracted from these concerns, as if they were lower levels in an infrastructural stack. But such abstraction is untenable over the time scales in question. If we take the recent, if localized, history of politcal and economic instability, the long history of social collapse, and the literature on global environmental change seriously, we must design with an eye on the ways in which the infrastructures we usually take for granted in technology design are at risk. If we cannot do this, our work risks becoming irrelevant after the next bubble of financial speculation bursts, or after the next 100-year flood -- which, these days, are starting to seem more like 20- or 5-year floods. In such moments of crisis and periods of socioeconomic dislocation, what becomes essential? Water; four walls; a roof; a way to talk to your mother, who is on the other side of town, or the country; potatoes, onions, and beans. In fact, if we think climate change, peak oil, and other environmental threats that appear to be unintended but systematic products of our industrial way of life are real and serious, which we do, we need to think seriously about the possibility that systems designed in the next decade or two built on assumptions of infrastructural "business as usual" simply won't work in 50 years. The consequences of the dynamics referred to by the term "sustainability" will be felt over decades and centuries. That's the time scale we need to be thinking on to actually do work that matters in dealing with those consequences. The task of engaging effectively with processes that uniquely shape the lives of individuals but that unfold over decades or even centuries poses severe challenges to existing theory and method in HCI. But we should take heart, because taking such a long view -- and connecting it to the individual scale in a way that yields design-actionable insights that, when acted upon, benefit the individuals in question -- is something we as researchers are almost completely uniquely positioned to do. Collapse is probably not much of an investment opportunity. But it is an opportunity to grapple earnestly with some of the most fundamental, long-standing questions about technology, value, and the sociotechnical condition -- and, further, to do something about them. Such an opportunity is, I submit to you, a rare privilege.