ABSTRACT

We are not islands, and in a process-relational social organisation much must be held in common. We are individuals, but we cannot survive alone. Four different perspectives on individualism show it to be little more than greed. An ecological economics reintegrating the household, the social, the supportive state, and – crucially – the life-giving earth into our polities is introduced and promoted. I introduce the concept of ‘infomateriality’ – a nonbifurcated digital world where the physical bodies of people – fingers touching keyboards and eyes scanning screens – are as much ‘hardware’ as cabling, circuitboards, and haptic interfaces, and the social practices, power relations, and embedded politics within IT artefacts define all such techné as fundamentally social. Abstract divisions are false, and whole, socially embedded systems should be the focus of IS and from a philosophically and sociologically much deeper perspective. ‘Tech for Good’ is held up as a movement in the right direction. My hope is that this book will help promote action in the field of Information Systems toward a better world, where Green Tech for Good is deployed for Nature, rather than against it.