ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by tracing the histories of enclosure and externalization that exclude environments from the human, thus changing the definition of what we mean by “human.” It looks at the two key media of the information environment, the radio spectrum and telecommunications, and at the data principles that have come to underpin their operation as environments in the early twenty-first century, and the contradiction inherent in the term “information economy.” The theory of environments as externalities is tied to the principle of integral waste at the core of neo-liberal consumerism. The inherent contradiction of enclosure and externalization is the Klein bottle of environmentalization. The integration of waste extends to the enclosed commons of the information environment. The chapter analyses the relations of labor and consumption to the information economy, before concluding with a proposal on how a reintegrated political economy might make possible a new form of environmental politics.
