Lithium Democracy and the Built Environment of the Digital Public Sphere

In the past two decades, many political theorists have reimagined the historical relationship between energy and democracy, exposing climate change as a product of empire, racial capitalism, and the conquest of nature. While our ‘carbon’ democracies were built with fossil capital on the backs of slaves, debt peonage, and coal miners in a steam-powered race to ‘open the veins’ of the colonial territories, they also contained in them the seed of representative democracy and a burgeoning public sphere. This interplay between energy and modern democracy has profoundly shaped our inherited material conditions, epistemologies of rule, and the way we interact in public debate. In the Anthropocene, human beings relate to each other through a globalized, synchronized, and digitalized system of mass communication technologies. Crucially, public political spaces are increasingly digitalized, creating both possibilities, e.g., for street-level protests, as well as dangers, e.g., surveillance capitalism. However, what underpins the newly emerging digital public sphere is an energy infrastructure and a democratic politics of the built environment, largely reproduced through the exploitation of finite, natural resources. One technology upon which the new digital public sphere is fundamentally dependent is the rechargeable battery, assembled largely from conflict minerals–– lithium, cobalt and nickel–– extracted in the Global South. The digital public sphere may be a ‘novel’ form of social technology, but it reproduces the same social problems found in traditional face-to-face public spheres albeit in the global, neoliberal economy of a ‘planetary mine’. This paper offers a critical history of one of the minerals crucial for this built infrastructure of the digital public sphere: lithium. Rather than viewing lithium solely from the perspective of inanimate, life-less batteries, we should engage with it as ‘vibrant matter’, an ‘eco-technology’, and a ‘sediment of time’ in the longer duration of the history of energy and democracy. If the digital public sphere is here to stay in the post-carbon world where polities transition away from ‘carbon’ democracy to a ‘lithium’ democracy, then we need a working of how this new form of social technology functions. Further, I reconstruct lithium’s material and discourse cultures which I argue have prefigured its current hegemonic position in world politics today. To do this, I synthesize three areas of debate in contemporary political thought: First, I place lithium in the radical oil scholarship and the historical relationship between energy, democracy and the public sphere (Mitchell, Malm, Daggett). Next, I draw on ‘new’ and ‘old’ materialisms to develop a history of lithium, discussing its agency and placing it in within a wider story about the built infrastructure of digital spaces (Bennett, Foster, Forestal). Finally, I draw on insights from the Cold War discourse on technology and the public sphere to propose a more equitable use of lithium in the built infrastructure of digital spaces (Arendt, Bookchin, Mumford).