Calculating Empires
A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
(2023)

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The concept “artificial intelligence” is a loaded terminology, situated in a
very specific territory and sparking a very particular imaginary of possible futures.
Silicon Valley and Hollywood’s fast and metallic futures, which are incompatible
with values, desires, and dreams of decolonial, antiracist, and transfeminist visions
of being on this planet. We seek to explore and expose the limitations of applying the
term AI to feminist technological practices and propose alternative epistemologies
and approaches to develop decolonial feminist tech. This paper is an epistemologi-
cal, historical, political, and creative exercise to expose the harmful Western-cente-
red logics and imaginaries that are guiding tech development towards technologies
of war, extractivism and domination and seek alternative terminologies that serve
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us as tools to help envision systems guided by social-environmental justice and
feminist principles, technologies of life and del buen vivir. To achieve such goal, we
travel in the history of western science fiction to untangle colonial and patriarchal
imaginaries that are guiding mainstream tech development; start to decolonize our
imaginaries by departing from a map of everything that is left behind when we use
the terminology “artificial intelligence”, and from a brief immersion in biology and
ecology studies, focused on mycology, soil studies, and a symbiotic approach to
evolution, using radical imagination and speculative narratives, we propose con-
cepts to inspire tech development that can be regenerative and in symbiosis with
the Earth, all its beings, temporalities and rhythms.