ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines an approach to digital media ecologies that foregrounds the materialism of ecological science and eco-philosophies while drawing insight from the field of political ecology. The latter begins from the premise that politics and ecology are fundamentally entangled; politics are necessarily ecological and ecology is intrinsically political. This perspective productively critiques technological appropriations of ecological language that neglect to engage with urgent issues of ecological justice in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. While metaphorical digital ecologies typically discuss flows of information in a disembodied and decontextualized manner, a political ecology of digital media examines how today’s media systems form vast planetary assemblages that extract, purify, and transport millions of tons of matter around the globe each year and burn vast quantities of fossil fuels to produce, maintain, and extend the domain of media. The chapter outlines the entanglement of matter, code, and knowledge that congeals in digital assemblages, focusing on the geological and planetary spatio-temporal contexts and socio-ecological justice issues present in the life-cycle of devices and the infrastructural context of ubiquitous cloud computing.
