Computers in Our Cosmos: Intersections in Geographies of Care, Abolition Geographies and Worker Movements

ABSTRACT AI assistants on spacecrafts. Netflix streamed through inter‐planetary communication networks. Colonies on Mars by 2050. While the glamorous public–private ventures into outer space curate discussions on the technical specificities of these proposed projects, this paper reorients discussions on such developments through critical frameworks of care and governance. This intervention is part of the Themed Intervention, ‘Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI’, which prompts pressing questions around how we can foreground issues of responsibility, care and repair within engagement with data‐driven technologies. This paper responds by thinking through stories of technological expansionism in outer space, attending to the complications around governance, incoherent projects of commodified safety, and circulations of uncare in the wake of endeavours seeking to embed computers in our cosmos. In particular, this intervention explores how the scholarship and movements seeking to approach care more critically can help deepen ongoing discourse. It makes this argument through examining the intersections between feminist and Indigenous geographies of care, abolition geographies and worker movements within the data science and space science community. These bodies of work offer analytics to critique modes of (un)care in technological expansionist projects but also generate new possibilities. For instance, feminist ethics of care and Indigenous geographies open up different relationalities of care—including care that is circulated through wider, interconnected cosmologies, as well as protection beyond property rights. Through reflecting on what has been ‘illegible to us as “safety”’ (Kaba and Hayes 2018), abolitionist geographies provide alternative prospects for collective security, contrasting the safety that is sold by military technology firms. Worker and student movements highlight the material solidarities that can be extended to geographically dispersed communities. As such, these diverse bodies of work offer important contributions towards rethinking relationships of care and violence, on Earth and beyond.