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As of 13 February 2023, South Africa declared a national state of electricity disaster. In this paper we consider the impacts of global tech giants on the land, environment, people, heritage, and the technological landscape in Cape Town, South Africa. Our methods consist in long-term ethnographic fieldwork (Waltorp 2010, 2019, Waltorp et al 2022) and decolonial design anthropological approaches (Kambunga 2023) as we work with a group of local assistants and critical friends (www.digisatproject.com). We start from the controversy surrounding Amazon Web Services Headquarters: In 2021, the Observatory Civic Association and the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoi Indigenous Traditional Council filed an urgent notice with the High Court of South Africa to interject the construction of the Amazon River Park development on sacred land, where confrontations between the Peninsula Khoekhoe and the first Dutch settlers took place (genesis of colonialism in South Africa), and one of the only natural floodplains in Cape Town. Respondents argued that the site has no visible heritage significance, and the interjection will hinder economic development and job creation, an urgent concern, with Cape Town home to the most data centres on the continent. Data centres provide the computing and storage power that is essential to realising the smart digital futures furthered by corporate strategists and government policymakers. Yet, the data centres that underpin these futures are themselves energy-intensive enterprises (Howe et al. 2015) placing burdens on national energy supplier Eskom and energy shortages for the neighbouring communities (Pollio and Cirolia 2022). Data are entangled with water, wind, oil and other elements. Resource prospecting and extraction of energy were driving forces of colonial expansions. The material effects this has had on contemporary human and more-than-human life as well as geopolitical formations continue: How might we think together beyond techno-solutionism and -determinism to imagine technological futures otherwise.

Waltorp, Karen and Asnath Paula Kambunga. 2023. "Land, Legacies and Energy Futures in Cape Town, South Africa." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

• The process of designing curriculum is quite useful as it details how different activities correspond to learning goals in science, mathematics, and technology. Fig. 3 describes the steps: selecting content through content specialists in the POAC team, making a curriculum outline, individual meetings with content specialists, and making the lesson plans. I really like the activities they designed, such as comparing different mask materials and how they protected against differently-sized viruses. They were also given time to research career pathways and present on epidemiology careers, a step that invites students to imagine career pathways. 

• I realize the scope and audience of this paper is different, but I am so curious about how the Imhotep Academy created a setting that encouraged underrepresented students to participate and speak up, given that they cite evidence of how difficult that can be. How did they choose participants? 

• Having read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed recently, I am thinking about his approach to curriculum design that is based on a feedback loop between would-be learners and would-be educators. The roles of learners and educators aren’t fixed. Content development is not done beforehand just by content specialists but in an iterative process with multiple feedback loops. Since very few research teams have the time or the resources to deploy Freire’s rigorous approach, I am not surprised that most curriculum development does not follow the route. And educators are working with former experiences anyway. So I am curious about how the authors’ previous experiences shaped their approach to curriculum design?

• A context for this paper is the controversy on the proposed revisions to the California math curriculum that conservative media outlets argue “waters down” calculus–a cherry topping on the college admissions cake–to privilege data science in middle-school grades. Education researchers contend that apart from physics and engineering majors, not many colleges actually require calculus for admissions (many private institutions do), and that the relevance of advanced calculus for college preparation is overrated. 

• National Commission on Excellence in Education ‘s 1983 report Nation At Risk: the need for a new STEM workforce specializing in computer science and technology 

• National Council on Mathematics 2000 guidelines for preparing American students for college in Common Core Mathematics 

• Stuck in the Shallow End: Virtual segregation; Inequality in learning computer science in American schools focusing on Black students 

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p.232: "In these pages, I have repeatedly emphasized the complicity between subject and object of investigation. My role in this essay, as subject of investigation, has been entirely parasitical, since my only object has been the Subaltern Studies themselves. Yet I am part of their object as well. Situated within the current academic theater of cultural imperialism, with a certain carte d'entree into the elite theoretical ateliers in France, I bring news of power lines within the palace. Nothing can function without us, yet the part is at least historically ironic. What of the poststructuralist suggestion that all work is parasitical, slightly to the side of that which one wishes adequately to cover, that critic (historian) and text (subaltern) are always "beside themselves"? The chain of complicity does not halt at the closure of an essay."

p217: "[Subaltern Studies] can never be continuous with the subaltern's situational and uneven entry into political (not merely disciplinary, as in the case of the collective) hegemony as the content of an afterthe- fact description. This is the always asymmetrical relationship between the interpretation and transformation of the world which Marx marks in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. There the contrast is between the words haben interpretiert (present participle—a completed action—of interpretieren— the Romance verb which emphasizes the establishment of a meaning that is commensurate with a phenomenon through the metaphor of the fair exchange of prices) and zu verandern (infinitive—always open to the future—of the German verb which "means" strictly speaking, "to make other"). The latter expression matches haben interpretiert neither in its Latinate philosophical weight nor in its signification of propriety and completion, as transformierien would have done. Although not an unusual word, it is not the most common word for "change" in German—verwandeln. In the open-ended "making-other"—Veranderung—of the properly self-identical—adequately interpretiert—lies an allegory of the theorist's relationship to his subject-matter."

p217: "If it were embraced as a strategy, then the emphasis upon the "sovereignty,... consistency and...logic" of "rebel consciousness" (EAP, 13) could be seen as "affirmative deconstruction": knowing that such an emphasis is theoretically nonviable, the historian then breaks his theory in a scrupulously delineated "political interest."19 If, on the other hand, the restoration of the subaltern's subject-position in history is seen by the historian as the establishment of an inalienable and final truth of things, then any emphasis on sovereignty, consistency, and logic will, as I have suggested above, inevitably objectify the subaltern and be caught in the game of knowledge as power. Even if the discursivity of history is seen as a fortgesetzte Zeichenkette, a restorative genealogy cannot be undertaken without the strategic blindness that will entangle the genealogist in the chain. Seeing this, Foucault in 1971 recommended the "historical sense," much like a newscaster's persistently revised daily bulletin, in the place of the arrogance of a successful genealogy. 20 It is in this spirit that I read Subaltern Studies against its grain and suggest that its own subalternity in claiming a positive subject-position for the subaltern might be reinscribed as a strategy for our times.

What good does such a reinscription do? It acknowledges that the arena of the subaltern's persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian. The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic. It is a hard lesson to learn, but not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice."

p. 214: "Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and "situate" the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest. This would put them in line with the Marx who locates fetishization, the ideological determination of the "concrete," and spins the narrative of the development of the moneyform; with the Nietzsche who offers us genealogy in place of historiography, the Foucault who plots the construction of a "counter-memory," the Barthes of semiotrophy, and the Derrida of "affirmative deconstruction." This would allow them to use the critical force of anti-humanism, in other words, even as they share its constitutive paradox: that the essentializing moment, the object of their criticism, is irreducible.

p.213:"I am progressively inclined, then, to read the retrieval of subaltern consciousness as the charting of what in poststructuralist language would be called the subaltern subject-effect.15 A subject-effect can be briefly plotted as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network ("text" in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. (Each of these strands, if they are isolated, can also be seen as woven of many strands.) Different knottings and configurations of these strands, determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject. Yet the continuist and homogenist deliberative consciousness symptomatically requires a continuous and homogeneous cause for this effect and thus posits a sovereign and determining subject. This latter is, then, the effect of an effect, and its positing a metalepsis, or the substitution of an effect for a cause."

p. 212-213: "Another note in the counterpoint deconstructing the metaphysics of consciousness in these texts is provided by the reiterated fact that it is only the texts of counterinsurgency or elite documentation that give us the news of the consciousness of the subaltern...Yet the language seems also to be straining to acknowledge that the subaltern's view, will, presence, can be no more than a theoretical fiction to entitle the project of reading. It cannot be recovered; "it will probably never be recovered."

Once again, in the work of this group, what had seemed the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern can be made to become the allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness, though the elite profess otherwise. This might seem preposterous at first glance. A double take is in order. I will propose it in closing this section of my paper."

p. 210-211:" It is the force of a crisis that operates functional displacements in discursive fields. In my reading of the volumes of Subaltern Studies, this critical force or bringing-to-crisis can be located in the energy of the questioning of humanism in the post-Nietzschean sector of Western European structuralism, for our group Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and a certain Levi-Strauss. These structuralists question humanism by exposing its hero—the sovereign subject as author, the subject of authority, legitimacy, and power. There is an affinity between the imperialist subject and the subject of humanism. Yet the crisis of anti-humanism—like all crises—does not move our collective "fully." The rupture shows itself to be also a repetition. The collective falls back upon notions of consciousness-as-agent, totality, and culturalism that are discontinuous with the critique of humanism. They seem unaware of the historico-political provenance of their various Western "collaborators." Vygotsky and Lotman, Victor Turner and Levi-Strauss, Evans-Prichard and Hindess and Hirst can, for them, fuel the same fire as Foucault and Barthes. Since one cannot accuse this group of the eclecticism of the supermarket consumer, one must see in their practice a repetition of as well as a rupture from the colonial predicament: the transactional quality of interconflicting metropolitan sources often eludes the (post)colonial intellectual."

p. 210: "The group, as we have seen, tracks failures in attempts to displace discursive fields. A deconstructive approach would bring into focus the fact that they are themselves engaged in an attempt at displacing discursive fields, that they themselves "fail" (in the general sense) for reasons as "historical" as those they adduce for the heterogeneous agents they study; and it would attempt to forge a practice that would take this into account. Otherwise, if they were to refuse to acknowledge the implications of their own line of work because that would be politically incorrect, they would, willy-nilly, "insidiously objectify" the subaltern (2, 262), control him through knowledge even as they restore versions of causality and self-determination to him (2, 30), become complicit, in their desire for totality (and therefore totalization) (3, 317), with a "law [that] assign[s] a[n] undifferentiated [proper] name" (EAP, 159) to "the subaltern as such."