Carbon capitalism, communication, and Artificial Intelligence

Communication has become crucial to the climate crisis, be it in promoting or impeding action for change. As the public has come to depend on social media platforms and communication channels to shape their understanding of the crisis, the computational systems upon which new digital technologies rely are generating a plethora of environmental problems of their own, most notably energy consumption and emissions, material toxicity, and electronic waste. This chapter examines communication systems as assemblages of material devices and infrastructures, capable of depleting scarce resources in their manufacturing, usage, and disposal. Drawing on the tradition of the critical political economy of communication and in particular on the theoretical elaboration developed in the book Carbon Capitalism and Communication, it negotiates how the accelerating impact of human interventions on the Earth’s ecosystems identified by climate research coincides with the rapid expansion of communication and computational systems.