Over the past few years, there has been unprecedented media and political attention directed at the negative ecological consequences of digital technologies. 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, thousands of tech workers have joined strikes, calling on big business to take on climate commitments. 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.
We are looking for papers that situate their work in one for more of the following research areas:
Techno-ecological entanglements: symbioses, cohabitations and destructions,
Making visible and ordering: sabotage, mobilisation, quantification and administration,
Greening practices: from industrial optimisation to digital sobriety.
