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mbedded in its artistic performative setting, the third HOTHOUSE event explores how digital and AI influence weaponize climate misinformation, polarization and resulting forms of inequality. Instead of purely criticising these developments, the participants offer tactics to what can be done against it concretely.
Lucas Chancel, Co-Director of the World Inequality and professor of economics of Science-Po, Paris will present (via Point Cloud Video Sharing from Paris) up-to-date data on global income and wealth inequalities as well as newest findings on global gender and climate change inequalities.
The main part of the evening will feature the European premiere of Tactical Tech’s new “Digital Influence and Climate Friction” project, which has been developed together with over 30 cross-disciplinary experts in the last two years and proposes counter actions and advance solutions to shift discourses and narratives.
This presentation is followed by a discussion between Marek Tyszinsky of Tactical Tech, Thomas Lohninger of epicenter.works and the climate scientist Camille Belmin of IIASA that challenges digital misinformation and the vicious cycle it bears on climate catastrophe, hidden labour, population-environment-gender issues and inequality.
Like all four main HOTHOUSE events, the evening ends with “Dishonouring Tyrant Idols,” a tribunalistic ritual performance against technocapitalist authoritarianism.
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ith this project, Tactical Tech investigates the interconnections between climate friction and digital polarisation in response to climate solutions and reflects on which tools and tactics are effective to counter these schemes.
Digital influence has become one of the key strategies used by different actors to control narratives around climate crises. While these tools can empower communities to act, they are equally used to create confusion, suppress participation, and sow doubt about climate science and solutions.
While tech giants claim to champion democracy, freedom, and small-scale climate initiatives, they remain among the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Worse, their platforms, increasingly leveraged with AI, fuel polarization and misinformation, making meaningful climate action even harder to achieve. Moreover, there are significant setbacks as climate change has already led to new forms of inequality, as studies by the Worlds Inequality Lab show.
We must rethink the notion that the climate crisis can be solved by the tech industry. The chaos we see today isn’t a glitch in the system – it’s a direct result of it. We must ask bold, foundational questions: “What would a well-functioning, democratic digital public sphere look like?” and “How do we redesign these systems to nurture informed and engaged societies?”
Tactical Tech’s project proposes and promotes counter actions and advance solutions to shift discourses and narratives. And it builds the capacity of a wider community working on solutions to climate, creating effective narratives and formats that cut through the current state of “information disorder”.
