The internet has long been animated by revolutionary discourses from early imaginaries of the digital as sovereignless space, to recent discussions of revolutionizing knowledge through universal access to generative AI. The world-historical paradigm shifts that computers and the Internet have allegedly catalyzed are often collectively referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Proponents of the fourth industrial revolution, or 4IR, assert that we have now reached industrialization of cybernetic production characterized by the merging of virtual and physical systems through such technologies as ubiquitous and mobile internet, sensors, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and the metaverse. But, like a wheel on a road or a turn of a cog in the machine, history repeats in variations, each new “revolution,” marking a return to something that came before. What has often been left out of these transformative digital imaginaries is acute attention to the intersection of virtuality and its heavy industrial reality. Throughout the last decade, internet scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the material and the entangled colonial and imperialist histories of the digital, including at AoIR2018 (Montréal) and AoIR2022 (Dublin). Part of this work has involved a “revealing” of the physicality of the internet, drawing attention to its undersea cables, metal-clad satellites orbiting space, water and energy-consuming data centers, and the accelerating post-consumer e-waste crisis. Steeped in this infrastructural turn in Critical Internet Studies (Acker and Donovan, 2019; Starosielski and Parks, 2015), and drawing from the emergent field of Discard Studies (Burrell, 2012; Gabrys, 2011; Liboiron and Lepawksy, 2022), this plenary panel asks: What might we gain by seeing the internet not as a thing (or collection of things), but as a process defined and determined by transnational flows of resources, materialities, labor, and practices of wasting?

For the past half-century, much of the internet discourse has been dominated by narratives from the Global North. More recently, important contributions of Global South digitalities and materialities have strengthened the field of internet research. Yet we need to do more work to build intellectual collaborations and connections between the Global North and the Global South. This plenary brings together scholars and practitioners working across transnational contexts to discuss the methodological challenges of studying digital discards in their specific and situated geographies, while also attending to the global interconnections between sites of digital wasting. Critical internet scholars, Nanna Thylstrup and Seyram Avle, will be in conversation with Ingrid Burrington and Vusumuzi Maphosa, two members of a transnational team of researchers, funded by the Internet Society Foundation and generously supported by Penn’s Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication. Over the last two years, this team has investigated the processes of digital wasting throughout the tech supply chain—from extraction in Greenland, to waste produced during chip fabrication in Taiwan and Silicon Valley, to wastes associated with industrial computing in the US, through to post-consumer discard practices and risks in Zimbabwe. Chaired by Lauren Bridges and Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, Co-Principal Investigators of the Internet Society research team, this plenary will interrogate the scale and reach of the internet’s environmental impact, and draw out some pressing questions of material politics facing the field of internet research.