Abstract:
The world is progressively and steadily moving towards a deeper ecological breakdown. The capitalist mode of production is responsible and, despite the popularity of the narrative, the evidence against the notion that private companies are leading the green transition is expansive. There is no time to wait for private companies to decarbonize and invest green, yet the narratives of the future that underpin the many promises of green transitions often distract us from the urgency of the present. Among these narratives, many sites of power, including the European Union, still hope for technological breakthroughs that will resolve the ecological crisis without requiring a deep, structural transformation of the global economy. In this case, the techno-solution has a name: a “Twin Transition”, both green and digital, in which digital technologies are expected to enable the green technological change that will solve the climate crisis.
This presentation will not only challenge such techno-solutionist narratives but also connect them to a crucial contemporary problem: even if we assume that technological change could solve the ecological breakdown or, more accurately, that knowledge and applied technologies should play a role in the necessary political and economic transformation, these intangibles may not be accessible at the scale and speed needed. The intellectual monopolisation of all forms of knowledge turned into the intangible assets, particularly digital technologies, not only deepens economic inequalities but also poses an existential threat. Precisely Big Tech companies -the most extreme forms of intellectual monopolies- are themselves responsible for an expanding extraction of nature, further worsening the crisis, while their control over key technologies blocks the potential mobilisation of those technologies for developing forms of socio-ecological planning that could address such a crisis.
