TECHNOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT: REFLECTIONS ON THE GLOBAL RELEVANCE OF A HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL NEXUS

Abstract

This contribution engages with recent scholarship on technology, environment, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence that have highlighted their manyfold historical, political and conceptual entanglements on a global scale. These include the way technologies over time have contributed to shape the human and natural environment; how they are changing political and scientific representations of the environment and of its transformations; the ecological costs of contemporary capitalism that exploits data and largely relies on digital technologies. Through this survey of texts and theories – mainly advanced by scholars at the Divison of History, Science, Technology and Environment of the Kth Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden – this contribution aims at pointing at the major strands of critical understanding of contemporary digital technologies from a global and ecologist point of view, also in order to highlight some of their theoretical further possible developments.