Create the Code You Want to See

As climate change accelerates and becomes a more significant existential threat, the tech sector’s carbon footprint keep increasing and they are difficult to quantify. The tech sector also continues to produce harmful technologies and engage in harmful practices, ranging from work surveillance to AI children’s toys. This essay argues that climate change and these unjust practices are entangled and cannot be individually solved in silos, as they are symptoms of a centralized system driven by competition and artificial scarcity. The essay critiques the tech sector’s reliance on top-down central planning by utilizing frameworks of Elizabeth Sawin’s multisolving, Donella Meadows leverage points, and Elizabeth Ostrom’s work that empirically proves the viability of polycentric governance. It proposes prefiguration as the necessary strategy for STEM workers to enact deep systemic change that works towards polycentricity. Concrete, actionable prefigurative practices already occurring within STEM are surveyed, including open source hardware, mesh networks, and repair cafes. While these prefigurative acts exist in the micro-scale, they are necessary practices for the adoption of circular economies, renewables, and worker-owned cooperatives. This paper reframes technical labour as a political act and provides a strategic blueprint for STEM workers to mitigate immediate environmental and social harm while constructing the democratic and decentralized infrastructure required for a just climate transition.