Daoist elemental actions in the Silicon Archipelago

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of Daoist elemental actions. It explores how they work as artist/activist interventions into data’s damaging socio-ecological effects in smart cities along China’s Digital Silk Road, or what I call the Silicon Archipelago. The Digital Silk Road is seen as a front in a US–China data technology trade war. Daoist elemental actions involve an analysis-prediction-intervention system for describing, predicting and resisting data damage. Using some new concepts of Daoist elemental actions and the Chinese Five Element system, I explore how I can analyse data damage and predict ways to resist this in the Digital Silk Road. To explain this system, I use Daoist and Western philosophy and theory to explore in-depth novel concepts such as Elemental Analysis, Elemental Prediction, Effortless Actions and Cosmopolitical Stories. Re-interpreting Daoist concepts allows the human and the non-human to be considered together, as the Chinese element wood, when examining their relationship to data damage via elemental balance in the Digital Silk Road. Data flow can be analysed through Daoism and its relationship to Qi flow, bringing a novel decolonial ecofeminist perspective to the issues. Taking on the role of an Elemental Healer in this article, I combine academic and more performative styles of writing, exemplifying a new practice-based methodological approach.