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Call for papers n°14: Environmental Materialities of the Digital

Special Issue edited by Loup Cellard (University of Melbourne, AMD+S Center, and Sciences-Po Medialab) and Clément Marquet (CSI, Mines Paris – PSL, i3 (UMR 9217)). Abstracts are due by May 02nd, 2023.
  • 1 In addition to articles, reports in newspapers, web and television programs regarding digital pollu (...)
  • 2 Bill No. 2021-1485 of 15 November 2021 aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of digital tec (...)

Over the past few years, there has been unprecedented media and political attention directed at the negative ecological consequences of digital technologies1. In France, there has been an increase in the number of institutional reports, and public statements made by experts, elected representatives and the wider public on these issues. The controversy surrounding 5G in 2020 is a striking example. Environmental warnings about the digital — a global technical system that has previously been largely considered 'immaterial' — have contributed to a regulatory agenda leading to the enactment of the law on reducing the environmental footprint of digital technology, on 15 November 20212. This politicization echoes a broader, international movement of criticism about digital technologies and GAFAMs in particular. Since 2018, the term 'techlash' — an outlash against tech — has referred to the growing public animosity towards tech companies: scandals around misinformation, awful working conditions of platform workers, privacy issues, sexism, racial discrimination, and now negative environmental impacts. With the recent ecological dimension added to the existing critiques (Alexandre, Beuscart, and Broca 2022), thousands of tech workers have joined strikes, calling on big business to take on climate commitments.

Ecological critiques of the digital bring the return at the forefront of public debate questions regarding the materiality underlying data exchange. After years of discourse on 'dematerialisation' (Broca 2018), the 'cloud' (Taffel 2019), and the advent of a so-called 'virtual' society (Vitali-Rosati 2012), materials and infrastructure are back in the spotlight. For example, new enquiries are being conducted on the metals in smartphones, obsolescence and consumption practices, waste management, repairability issues, the energy consumed by data centres as well as certain software infrastructures like Bitcoin or machine learning algorithms. Through this process, what is understood by 'digital' for industrial and institutional actors, as well as researchers, is becoming more complex. In addition to data, privacy, surveillance, work and interface issues lies large networks of human and non-human entities that must be analysed: materials, minerals and miners, chemical components, residents surrounding data centres, heat and CO2 emissions, workers in semiconductor factories, flora and fauna cohabiting with the terrestrial and submarine infrastructures responsible for transporting, storing and processing data, ecologically aware users working to reduce their digital footprint — and many other missing entities that we would like to see emerging from the articles in this issue.

This special issue of RESET aims to explore how environmental approaches can enhance our understanding of the digital, hoping to shed light on what reformist critiques and projects (mixing technical, legal, economic or social dimensions) do to the actors who confront the issue of building sustainable digital technologies. The special issue aims to consider: the fields of political forces that are constituted around the mattering of environmental issues within tech industries; the actors and entities that were invisible until now; the new entrants legitimised by environmental problematisations; and finally, design, consumption and use practice transformations. The issue thus calls for empirical contributions that document, analyse and theorise the environmental degradation produced by the rise of the digital, the techno-ecological reordering that are being elaborated locally and the dynamics at work in the ecologisation (Mormont 2013) of technologies — that is, the integration of environmental concerns and knowledge into public policies, organisations and professional practices related to the digital.

Double transition and metabolic perspective

In the French academic sphere, the dominant framing of the digital-environment relationship has centred on the tensions and potential alliances between the 'two transitions' (Monnoyer-Smith 2017). On one hand, there have been warnings about the unsustainable socio-ecological trajectory of the digital (Flipo et al. 2012; Flipo 2020; Dubey and Gras 2021), yet on the other, promises about the environmental benefits of digitisation, and in between, works clarifying the regulatory state of play (Bohas and Berthoud 2019) or the methodologies of environmental analysis (Berthoud and Parry 2010; K. Marquet, Combaz, and Berthoud 2019). These important works are part of a normative horizon that aims at answering the questions: "should we digitise?" or "how can we reconcile the two transitions?" (Carré and Desbois 2022). With this special issue we want to move beyond such a prescriptive horizon by developing a more descriptive approach whose project aims to account for the environmental transformations induced by digitisation, and the effects of the integration of ecological concerns in the development of digital hardware, software and services.

To address this question, we propose that contributors take the material dimensions of technical systems as their points of entry; asking how they become the object of collective concern at the ecological level; which actors take charge of the alerts and problems; to what controversies and conflicts these criticisms give rise; and with what effects on the design, production, consumption and use of technologies. We hypothesise that taking into account the environmental materialities of the digital produces ontological troubles that require actors to redefine what the digital is, a task that contributes to making the project of a double transition either possible or impossible.

In order to take a step aside from normative approaches, we propose first of all to pluralise the materialities of the digital, in line with the achievements of media studies and science and technology studies (STS). These strands of research have insisted on the importance of the physicality of technical systems by looking at the history of information management (Gitelman 2014; Robertson 2021), the work of programming (Alcaras and Larribeau 2022) or of database creation (Denis 2018; Plantin 2021), as well as contemporary infrastructures such as data centres (Furlong 2020), relay antennas (Parks 2010) or submarine cables (Starosielski 2015). But these approaches have also emphasised the effects of intangibles — such as file formats or programming languages — on our representations of the world and capacities for action (Dourish 2017). They have also drawn attention to the 'continuous materiality' of the digital, (Knoespel and Zhu 2008) understood as the set of interactions between software and hardware layers, and the importance of understanding the characteristics of technological systems (power, memory, connectivity) to grasp its political and economic stakes (Blanchette 2011). Moreover, a materialist approach can also take into account the conditions of production of equipment and infrastructure, i.e. by looking at the geopolitical stakes of minerals (Boudia 2019), the working conditions in mines (Sovacool 2021) or the fate of electronic waste (Lepawsky 2015).

It is important to study the materialities of the digital from a metabolic perspective, i.e. by paying attention to the flows of matter (metals, plastics, chemicals, water, fuel, greenhouse gases) and energy (renewable, carbon-based, nuclear) set in motion by digital technologies, and to the ways in which these are investigated, domesticated and denounced, or how they could even overwhelm the actors concerned and possibly destroy ecosystems. Examples of this can be found in the work of historians, who defend the project of an environmental history of computing (Ensmenger 2018), and are documenting the deforestation caused by the massive use of gutta percha by the telegraph and submarine cable industry in the nineteenth century (Tully 2009) and the environmental mobilisations against the pollution of water tables by semiconductor factories in Silicon Valley (Lécuyer 2017). Such attention to the environmental pressures exerted by the needs of the digital industry is also found in the work carried out on data centres by geographers, or researchers in media studies and STS. These researchers describe empirically the energy pressure exerted by these infrastructures on the areas in which they are located and the fragility of local mobilisations when big corporations place territories in competition with one another (Ortar et al. 2022).

The multiple scales of digital materiality render its apprehension in ecological terms challenging for actors confronted with it: local criticisms of negative consequences are systematically put in parallel with the global benefits of digitalisation. Nevertheless, one of the effects of the greening of digital technology is to reintroduce environmental issues at each level of materiality: is the code efficient and 'sober'? Are the servers ‘eco-designed’? Do the minerals come from responsible and ‘fair’ mines? Has data centre energy consumption been optimised, clean energy supply contracts signed and closed-loop water cooling networks created? Can e-waste be re-used or should it be directed to recycling programs?

We therefore welcome works that question these dynamics, that ask how and who ensures that metals are 'ethical', that data is 'green', that water is recycled, that chemicals are treated and waste repaired. What effects do these processes of ecological modernisation have on the industrial sectors, on the consumption of equipment and on its use? What new economic models are being invented to take into account the environmental weight of data and smartphones? How do we define what is a ‘sober’ code, an ‘eco-designed’ server, ‘ethical’ minerals and a ‘green’ data centre? Who does this, on what normative basis, as a result of what conflicts and negotiations?

To address the environmental materialities of the digital, we invite contributors to submit original and empirical works and to include their proposal in at least one of the following three axes, dealing with the techno-ecological entanglements, the work of making visible and ordering the environmental consequences of the digital, and the nascent greening of technological practices.

Research areas

Axis 1. Techno-ecological entanglements: symbioses, cohabitations and destructions

This special issue first encourages contributions that pay attention to the diversity and complexity of the techno-ecological entanglements of the digital. Here, environmental problems are seen as 'problematic encounters' between disparate forms of materials (Barry, 2019), such as the different material layers of digital objects (software, physical, infrastructural, energy) on one hand, and the so-called 'natural' spaces on the other (like the shoreline of an ocean where undersea cables land, a river where e-waste lies). Although the environmental damages are numerous and often identified, the relationships that infrastructures and equipment have with the environment are more varied and complex than they may appear at first glance. Indeed, the presence of infrastructures produce new ecologies: telecommunication poles have encouraged the proliferation of woodpeckers (Schwoch 2021) while placing the network under the threat of squirrels and other rodents; and the maintenance of fiber-optic networks also raises questions about responsibilities in terms of tree pruning or the management of underwater fauna and flora (Starosielski 2015). In many cases then, ambivalent relationships are created between the infrastructure deployed and the environments it crosses. Moreover, the consequences of environmental and climatic disturbances can also affect the proper functioning of technical systems, good examples include the shortage of semiconductors caused by a major drought in Taiwan in 2021 (Roussilhe 2021), the overheating of US and UK data centres in the summer of 2022, or the warnings about the risk of submerging the arrival points of submarine cables in the event of a rise in sea levels (Durairajan, Barford, and Barford 2018). At the intersection of the sociology of public problems (Cefaï and Terzi 2012) and infrastructure studies (Barry 2020), we aim to analyse how frictions between digital materialities, biological and energy ecosystems are taken into account, conceptualised, discussed and made public by actors. How are the destructions weighed against the formation of new digital ecologies? Who takes part in these discussions and assessments?

Axis 2. Making visible and ordering: sabotage, mobilisation, quantification and administration

The special issue also invites proposals that address the processes of making the materiality of the digital visible and ordered. From the contestation of infrastructural projects to the quantification of impacts through the elaboration of laws and roadmaps, the consideration of the digital materiality and its environmental consequences requires numerous investigations: the nature of objects (C. Marquet 2018; Carnino and Marquet 2022) as well as that of numbers and statistics cannot be taken for granted (TheShiftProject 2020; Flipo 2020; Roussilhe 2022). By crossing the sociology of quantification (Didier 2021) and the sociology of mobilisation and public action (Gilbert and Henry 2012), we aim  to provide information on the work carried out by NGOs, experts, residents, politicians and economic actors working to publicise the environmental consequences of technologies through various repertoires of action (sabotage, mobilisation, training, lobbying), and who strive to promote specific methodologies to measure impacts (such as life cycle assessments) or discuss the categories and sectors of activities concerned by labels, certifications and other market conciliation instruments (Laurent and Mallard 2020). Do the different repertoires of political action produce knowledge, practices or techniques for making the environmental implications of the digital visible in a way that renews our understanding of techno-ecological entanglements? From which domains of knowledge and practice are techno-ecological entanglements described and evaluated? Does the use of these domains of knowledge and practice lead to consensus or do they lead to divergent visions of the ontology of the digital?

Axis 3. Greening practices: from industrial optimisation to digital sobriety

Finally, we welcome contributions that focus on the greening of digital practices. This axis aims to study how different actors integrate environmental concerns into the design and use of technologies, along a continuum ranging from energy optimisation and carbon offsetting practices generally promoted by industrial actors to initiatives aimed at reinventing the Internet in a more sustainable way (Laser et al. 2022), including reuse and repair practices (Callén and Criado 2016; Bloch and Nova 2020) or efforts to produce 'low tech' technologies. The greening of the digital world is as much about managing the air-conditioning of a data centre as it is about developing low-tech websites in industrial, academic or non-profit environments that shape both individual and collective relationships to the digital. Whether these commitments are analysed as the bearers of radical digital degrowth, industrial optimisation, or even a form of greenwashing, we ask ourselves how the problematisation of material and energy issues concretely transforms the way in which actors relate to technologies? How do actors balance and arbitrate their design choices (regarding the form, usability or security of a digital object or service) with a concern for the environmental impact of the digital in a society that thinks of itself as 'sustainable', 'sober' or 'in transition'? Such perspectives can be analysed in the light of the sociology of innovation (Goulet and Vinck 2022) or, if the focus is more on the users, by paying attention to the transformations in consumption practices (Grossetête 2019; Ginsburger 2020).

Practical information

The abstracts (500 words maximum) are due by May 02, 2023. They should be sent to the following addresses:

Response to authors: late May 2023

Deadline for submission of papers (40,000 to 60,000 characters, including spaces and excluding bibliography): September 30

The proposal (abstract), written in English or French, will mention the research question, the methodology used, and the theoretical framework employed. It should emphasise the scientific interest of the proposed article in relation to the existing literature and the call for papers, and should be accompanied by a short bibliography.

Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by the members of the journal's editorial board. Authors selected at this stage will be required to send their article in electronic format before 15 September 2023.

The journal Reset is also open, in its “varia” section, to all works in the humanities and social sciences, dealing with the digital as an object or method of research.

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Notes

1 In addition to articles, reports in newspapers, web and television programs regarding digital pollution, we should also note the successful publication by Guillaume Pitron, L'enfer numérique, voyage au bout d'un like, Editions Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021.

2 Bill No. 2021-1485 of 15 November 2021 aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of digital technology in France, read online: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000044327272/

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