1Thanks to mobilisation by diverse stakeholders acting within a wide range of bodies (collectives of committed tech workers, activist organisations, regulatory agencies, etc.), the issue of the environmental impacts of digital technology emerged as a public, scientific and professional concern. Think-tanks such as Shift Project developed indicators and metrics to track the environmental footprint of digital technologies, others produced accounts of the ravages of extractivism in mining, sociologists and urban planners released studies on data centres and data workers, etc. Such work contributed to re-materialising and decolonising the imaginary of digital technology as intangible, dematerialised and clean. Calculation infrastructure, the chains of raw material extraction, the global logistics, the energy flows rendered necessary by digital technology, the tons of electronic waste generated by a double obsolescence—technical and social—all became visible thanks to such action. The rising visibility of socio-ecological implications of digital technology was coupled with a questioning of the limits and contours of such technology. In the way of hyperobjects as described by Timothy Morton (2018), digital technology permeates entities at scales of time and space that go beyond it. The digital hyperobject, this “extractivist material-infrastructural-discursive continuum” that digital technology represents (Allard, 2024), embeds itself in practically all sectors as digitalisation of a whole range of activities advances.
2This materiality and its socio-ecological consequences are the topic of work discussing the place that digital technology has occupied in physical and social spaces, or rather that which it is afforded by groups of actors with convergent, divergent and parallel motives. The infrastructures that underpin digital tools and the practices associated with them enable one to trace out new mappings which are being drawn locally at the intersection of social, economic and ecological challenges (Cellard & Marquet, 2023). By following these lines, one uncovers the fragilities (Rubio, 2025) of digital technology and the operations of care and maintenance (Denis & Pontille, 2022) on which they rely, such as infrastructure repairs and digital tools maintenance (Nova & Bloch, 2020). Awareness of this incites questioning both on the ways of engaging with and transforming digital technology by asking how it can be made more just, as well as on the ways of renouncing these technologies (Monnin, 2023).
3Describing the socio-ecological challenges of digital technology implies documenting a field of uncertainty, of tensions and competing narratives, where belief in technological innovation, injunctions to sobriety, organisational practices, activist action, critical imaginaries and paths for collective experimentation collide.
4It is on this terrain that this issue of Hybrid, dedicated to the socio-ecological dimensions of digital technology, intends to intervene. The issue does not ambition to perpetuate the opposition between “polluting digital technology” and “solution digital technology” but rather to shift the gaze elsewhere. We wish to move beyond strictly technocentric framings, to refuse to reduce ecology to carbon footprints or impact metrics, and instead envisage digital technology as an intrinsically social, cultural, political and artistically creative phenomenon, using a variety of disciplinary approaches. The articles in this issue seek to highlight the diversity of actors who shape, inhabit, endure and transform digital technology. In effect, it is necessary to contemplate materialities, imaginaries and conditions of production of digital technology starting from the situations, tensions and experiences which make them a fully socio-ecological object, situated in plural worlds.
5This ambition implies adopting a crosscutting perspective. Digital technology is never a sector that can be isolated. It is a diffuse and complex object, that transpierces organisations, interactions, professions, public policies, and ordinary and artistic practices. It is also a space of experimentation, where ways of acting and considering relations between humans, technics and milieus invent themselves. The contributions here go against the homogenising discourses which treat digital technology as a coherent whole; instead, they showcase the plurality of the digital world, of relations to the digital, and show how environmental issues become indissociable from issues about redistribution, knowledge, power, inequalities and vulnerabilities.
6In this respect, this issue takes note of an epistemological shift: digital technologies are not only objects to be assessed in terms of their impact, but spaces to explore, critique and cultivate. While they are constituted of technical artefacts, they are also constituted of standards, policies, narratives, professional acts, practices of care or indifference, and unstable, sometimes contradictory, values. The purview of this edition is situated at the heart of these entangled dimensions. We seek to make visible the interplays, imaginaries, sensitive experiences and situated professional, artistic and educational practices which partake in the socio-ecological construction of digital technology.
7The collection of articles can be read as a movement towards the rediscovery of the materiality of the digital world and its socio-ecological consequences. What this issue shows, is above all that forms of digital life are heterogenous. They cannot be reduced to energy-hungry infrastructure nor to enchanted narratives about the so-called “green” transition. Rather, they are deployed across sometimes unexpected terrains, such as in wildlife management, in indigenous cosmologies, in university routines, in activist practices and in documentary and futurist imaginaries.
8The issue is organised in three sections. The first, titled “Decentring digital worlds” brings together articles which propose plural forms of apprehending the socio-ecological issues linked to digital technologies by putting in dialogue alternative approaches with more institutional ones. The work by Margaux Crinon opens the issue with a particularly fertile proposal for considering this heterogeneity. By observing wildlife monitoring mechanisms, Crinon shows how digital interfaces become zones of contact, or “ecotones”—in the ecological sense of zones of transition—between human, animal, technical and institutional worlds. These spaces are permeated by forms of techno-animism which invite a rethink of the categories of knowledge, of relations and of responsibility which are enlisted in the production of ecological data. Far from naturalising technology as a neutral tool of observation, Crinon reveals the tensions, adjustments and operations of interpretation that link biologists, infrastructure and non-human living beings.
9This attention to the plural worlds of digital technology continues in the article by Matheus da Rocha Montanari, where we are offered a profoundly decentred reflection on technical creativity, in collaboration with Guarani and Kaiowá communities. His concept of the “cosmotechnics of contamination” directly unravels Western frameworks for analysing digital technology, and introduces knowledges that separate neither culture, nor nature, nor technology, nor ritual, nor information, nor care. Through virtual reality experiences, chanting practices and gestures to restore the land, he shows that digital technologies can become actors in a regime of multispecies relations, indissociable from land battles and experiences of political violence. Here, the ecologisation of digital technologies is not a question of sobriety or efficiency. It is a question of cosmology, of a poetics of care, of resistance to the Capitalocene and its destruction.
10These situated proposals resonate with approaches more anchored in institutions and organisations, where structural tensions of contemporary digital technology are being played out. Chrysta Pélissier, Audrey De Ceglie and Jean Moutouh show how young middle school and secondary school pupils and university students construct their representations of artificial intelligence, integrating them into their orientation trajectories, their professional imaginaries, their concerns and their hopes. The analysis reveals a significant paradox between the professional impact of AI, which is perceived as being substantial, and the environmental impact which for the most part remains opaque. This discrepancy enables one to apprehend how a form of digital culture is being shaped in which the imaginary of the technological future overshadows understanding of its material conditions.
11The articles in the second section, which we have given the titled “Acting with, against and without irresponsible digital technology” continues the critical stance, delving into the discourses, constrained uses and ordinary practices, linked in particular to the formulas “responsible digital technology” (or, in English, also “digital responsibility”) and “digital sobriety.” The article by Jeanne Ferrari-Giovanangeli and Céline Morin deconstructs contemporary forms of greenwashing associated with “digital responsibility,” showing how the latter has itself been greenwashed in media discourse. Their work questions the way in which categories that appear stabilised (sobriety, responsibility, frugality) are in actual fact mobilised to render visible certain actions, invisibilise certain contradictions and produce a politics of affects through which organisations bestow upon themselves a moral identity. Digital responsibility in this light appears an unstable category, transpierced by battles of definition and strategies of legitimation.
12The analyses of Bouchra Daoudi, Léa Di Cioccio and Lara Mariton extend this criticism to the terrain of everyday practices, by studying the use of digital technologies in times of crisis. Their conception of sober homo numericus unveils the extent to which digital frugality is not only an institutional injunction, but can also become a situated resource, shaped by economic constraints, vulnerabilities, emotional arbitration and experiences of material or energy restriction. Here once more, responsible digital technology has plural declinations. It is not an ethical ideal, but a daily negotiation with infrastructure which are neither easy to choose nor easy to abandon.
13The article by Inés Laitano and Jean-Marc Meunier proposes another essential shift by addressing the digital accessibility as organisational culture. Accessibility, far from being simply a nice touch becomes here a revealer of workplace relations, available training, professional routines, representations of diversity and institutional solidarities. The results of their survey show that obstacles to accessibility do not arise solely from a lack of technical skills, but are also linked to the way in which collectives construct (or don’t) sensitivity to disability, perceptions of shared responsibility and situated understanding of practices of digital care.
14In a similar vein, Marta Severo, Mathilde Vassor et Romain Vindevoghel take the internal tensions that emerge on the ground in responsible digital technology seriously, by analysing the professional reconfigurations it produces. The interviews that they analyse show that organisations develop strong rhetoric about responsibility and transformation, but this rhetoric is impeded by structural constraints, contradictory injunctions and sometimes fragile redefinitions of professional roles. Responsible digital technology thus appears not as a state, but as a field of tensions, a space of negotiation and a professional arena.
15The last section “What can research-creation do?” is composed of three notes proposing ways of feeling, of figuring and of imagining socio-ecological dimensions of digital technologies other than through conceptual analysis. These notes recall that ways of knowing also pass through narrative, through aesthetic gestures and through forms of sensitivity. Far from being illustrations, these articles open up a space where counter-narratives and forms of critical attention are forged.
16Ariane Papillon thus explores how documentary creation can make our intimate dependence on digital technologies perceptible, by interrogating everyday gestures as praxial responses and awareness responses rendered possible through image.
17Matthieu Raffard and Mathilde Roussel, for their part, address the cast-off materiality of digital objects, such as a simple HP Deskjet 3755 printer, to reinsert this materiality in a reflection on the infrastructure, maintenance, waste and temporality of technical objects.
18Lastly, Fabrice Sabatier enlists cartomancy as a mechanism of conversation and disenchantment of artificial intelligence which more than ever embodies the technico-magical illusion. His Prompt to Play transforms AI into narrative objects, objects of sensitive connections and shared experience, in order to undo magical framings which obfuscate the chains of extraction, the invisible workers and political imaginaries which shape our relations to technical systems. Thus, to use the concluding words of Sabatier, “the device does not aim to model AI systems; rather, it repositions us as technological beings, dependent in multiple ways on social and ecological environments or microcosms.”
19Taken together, these pieces show that the socio-ecological dimensions of digital technology are not only situated in the measurement of the latter’s environmental footprint, or in the mapping of its material infrastructure. They reside in the ways that human beings and sometimes non-human beings live, interpret, experiment, circumvent, discuss, contest or transform technologies. They reside in the capacity to identify constitutive tensions of the contemporary digital world between technological enthusiasm and environmental concern, between demand for innovation and practices of renunciation, and between the magic or industrial narratives and the work of sensitive demystification. In this regard, this issue of Hybrid invites us to reconsider digital technology through the prism of socio-ecological dimensions and to redefine it as a milieu of reflexive inquiry with regard to relations, dependencies and possibilities. The issue proposes to consider digital technology not only as an object of analysis, but as a terrain of intervention on which vast political questions are being played out anew. How do you render visible the material conditions of existence of technologies? How do you recognise and support professional cultures which weave forms of digital care? How do you invent imaginaries which do not naturalise the current trajectory of technological development, but open up alternatives, bifurcations, and possible worlds?
20To think of the socio-ecological dimensions of digital technology, is to accept this multiplicity, this instability and this conflictuality. It is to take seriously the different levels, from documentary gesture to indigenous cosmology, from the classroom to the data centre, which intersect in the construction of the digital world. It is, lastly, to recognise that responses to today’s crises will not come from a technical or institutional imperative, or even from a single moral, but from ensuring the coexistence of knowledges, practices and narratives capable of giving life to relations between technologies, milieux and societies that are not death-inducing.