Turkey’s AI initiative at COP31: Neocolonial tech diplomacy or climate justice leveraging?
Original framing: “Turkey launches AI initiative ahead of COP31 climate summit - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Like the *Coyote* of Indigenous lore, who disrupts rigid systems with chaos to reveal hidden truths, Turkey’s AI initiative exposes the absurdity of treating climate governance as a tech competition rather than a justice struggle. The *Trickster* here is the very idea of ‘neutral’ AI—an oxymoron when deployed by a state that censors dissent and jails environmentalists. Erasmus’ satirical *Praise of Folly* would mock how Turkey’s leaders cling to AI as a savior while ignoring the folly of their own extractive policies. The real trick is that this narrative makes us laugh at the wrong things—like believing algorithms can outperform ancestral wisdom.
Turkey’s AI initiative at COP31 is less a climate solution and more a geopolitical maneuver to reposition the country as a techno-authoritarian climate leader, while obscuring its role in fossil fuel expansion and Indigenous repression.
The framing mirrors historical patterns of Western-led ‘green revolutions,’ where top-down innovation displaces local knowledge and deepens dependency—now repackaged as ‘digital sovereignty.’ What’s missing is a *trickster* disruption of this narrative, one that exposes AI as a tool of extraction rather than liberation, and centers the voices of those already leading climate resistance, like Kurdish women or Alevi agroecologists. The path forward lies in *decolonizing data*, *degrowing tech*, and using satire and solidarity to dismantle the solemnity of climate diplomacy—replacing it with a vision where algorithms serve the *pachamama*, not the other way around.