The Green and the Digital: Environmental Political Thought Encounters "the Fourth Industrial Revolution"

Abstract

Digitalisation is a dynamic force, altering the world in myriad ways. As reality shifts, we should reconsider ideas founded on bygone realities. Environmental political thought, built so much on particular readings of particular technologies, especially their impact on the natural world, may have much to reconsider. Classic work in political thought took technology as fixed at the level of the Second Industrial Revolution. Yet we have now arguably passed through a Third Industrial Revolution, which embedded digitalisation in all aspects of life and work, and into a Fourth, where digital technologies like cloud networking, artificial intelligence, and eventually quantum computing, herald changes comparable in significance to history’s most transformative technologies. For environmental political thought, the most salient claims are those about enhancing sustainability through digitalisation. Big Data Analytics may vastly increase the efficiency of energy production, agriculture, urban infrastructure, and more; online networks could help eliminate commuting and office-building emissions; consumer goods and products can be increasingly detached from material manufacture, existing instead in digital space. In short, digitalisation can claim to decarbonise and dematerialise production. More intriguing is digitalisation’s potential impact on communities. Digital technologies are often described as highly malleable. The key green aim of localising, democratising, and downscaling production may thus be possible with their assistance. They could make decentralized, autonomous communities economically viable by facilitating the decentralisation of work. They could even facilitate green mass societies by enabling digitally the level and manner of participation that greens have previously held to be achievable only locally. Outside of light green thought, the environmentalist reaction to the boldest of these claims may well be reflexive scepticism. Indeed, this may be an astute reaction. Digitalisation has thus far contributed little to the goal of sustainability (Beier et al. 2022). It may ultimately do no more than enhance the efficiency of unsustainable enterprises, much as it has done in the fashion industry till now. Still, to counter the hype around digitalisation’s green credentials, it would still be worth detailing its pernicious impacts. The papers presented as part of this panel examine three key aspects of the relationship between green political thought and digitalisation. First, the emancipatory potential of digital innovations in the agri-food system. Second, the relationship between social media, sustainability, and autonomy. And third, the implications of a range of digital technologies for debates around the appropriate scale for green political communities. Uniting all three papers is the question of what digitalisation means for democracy in the context of normative environmental thought.

Title	Details
Sustainability and Democracy in the Digital Transformation of the Agri-food System. On the Contributions of a Feminist Care Perspective	View Paper Details
Greening Autonomy through Digitalisation? Forms of Critique in the Social Web between Dispositive Structures and Emancipatory Transgression	View Paper Details
Transformational Technology and the Green Political Community: Rethinking Green Political Theory for the Digital Transition	View Paper Details