A museum patron awkwardly calls for “security!” as JustStopOil activists cover a famous painting in soup; an eco-influencer explains all the U.S. 2022 Inflation Reduction Act climate policies in 60 seconds in a funny voice; a very sweaty man gives a tour of his makeshift apartment cooling devices amid the record-breaking 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave. TikTok has become a repository for first-person video recordings of moments in climate history, often posted in real-time and tinged with a distinct style of audiovisual memetic humor—a “platform vernacular” (Gibbs, 2015) that TikTok videos should abide by if they want to go viral. The platform’s vernacular, which emphasizes authenticity and lightheartedness, poses challenges to the dissemination of serious information about climate change, and legacy news organizations have struggled to adapt. A slate of young eco-influencers has risen to fill this gap, but the quality of their climate communications remains unexamined. This research project examines the fundamental mismatch between TikTok’s designed affordances, resultant vernacular, and generally agreed-upon principles of effective climate communication by performing a multimodal analysis of videos posted within three different climate discourses: protest, policy, and disaster. Preliminary results suggest an overwhelming favoring of climate-friendly individual lifestyle changes over systemic change arguments, an increased presence of lighthearted ‘newsy’ content, and a shift toward the promotion of educational content rather than the bite-sized imitative memes that continue to dominate other ecologies within the platform.

In recent years, different voices have denounced the significant environmental costs of digital technologies. However, less emphasis has been put on exploring the impacts of such technologies from an environmental justice perspective. As the extraction of lithium in Chile or the dump of e-waste in Kenya illustrate, there are relevant asymmetries to attend in this regard. Against this backdrop, in this paper we develop the concept of eco-imperialism to unpack the planetary asymmetries underpinning the environmental impacts of digital technologies. Applying the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, we show that the expansion of digital technologies relies on a violent and opaque outsourcing of environmental damage to regions that are not at the core of technological design and development. As of today, both liberal market and state-led market societies (mainly the US and China) are involved in digital eco-imperialism. In particular, we explore three facets underpinning the lifecycle of digital eco-imperialism: land exploitation, infrastructural growth and electronic waste dumping. Our empirical insights stem from interviews and participant observation conducted with industry actors in Europe (panels and conferences held in the UK and Spain) and communities in resistance in Chile (groups opposing a Google data centre and lithium extraction).

In 2023, the world faced a humanitarian tragedy in Brazil involving the Yanomami people. In addition to the result of criminal conduct of public policies aimed at indigenous peoples in the last four years, the case highlights a culture of erasure of Brazilian native peoples that permeates society, institutions, and the mainstream press. In this work, we discuss how mining in indigenous lands has been approached discursively in Brazil. For this, we analyze the conversations on Twitter related to #AtoPelaTerra, a protest in defense of the environment and against the bill that authorizes mining in indigenous lands, held in Brasília in March 2022. To understand the conversation dynamics of the publications collected, we performed a network analysis (WASSERMAN & FAUST, 1994) and to analyze the speeches produced by the subjects who participated in the debate, we adopted the Analysis of Connected Concepts (LINDGREEN 2016). Our results demonstrate that the conversation about the indigenous agenda has been polarized and with a strong misinformation content, especially in the field of the extreme right. In addition, the defense of native peoples and environmental preservation has a limited scope to its most active militancy. In the mainstream media, both the environmental agenda and the indigenous agenda are softened by replacing the term “mining” with “mineral exploration”, which ends up normalizing (FOUCAULT, 2003) practices that are harmful to the environment and indigenous peoples, as an effect of a crossing of the economic and supposedly developmentalist debate that prevails in these spaces.

In colonial and postcolonial Ireland, boglands were seen as "wastelands" to be "improved" by large-scale enterprise. Today, they are strategic landscapes for carbon sequestration and climate solutions, both for the state and multinationals located in Ireland. Various contemporary projects, co-funded by industry and state partners, have facilitated the expansion and proliferation of sensing, monitoring, and mapping technologies across Ireland's bogs to measure and maximize their value in these economies. However, by doing so, they are laying the foundations for a "green grab" of Ireland's land resources by tech companies.

This paper situates the historical resource and conservation landscape of Ireland’s peat boglands within their emerging role in datafied “green” revolutions. Emphasizing the stakes of land, resources, technologies, and research institutions within green transitions, the paper theorizes peat bogs an emerging site of digital climate solutionism. In doing so, I offer a framework for understanding resource landscapes in so-called “post-extractive” contexts where networked forms of extraction are innovated through public/private technoscientific research at the intersections of digital technology and ecosystemic interactions between geologies, atmospheres, and cultures. Bringing together literature from environmental media studies, STS, and geography, and performing participant observation and discourse analysis on emerging projects of peatland science in academic and industry settings, I theorize how “environmental mediation” offers an aperture for understanding how digital technologies network landscapes towards “ecosystem services” and other capital-driven climate projects.