In November 2022, any residual feeling that Silicon Valley represented a clear-cut boon for humanity vanished like a fart in the wind. In an act of breathtaking arrogance, OpenAI released GPT-3.5, a free preview of its chatbot ChatGPT. Confronted with a technology that could synthesise humanlike text in response to prompts from actual humans, journalists and commentators rushed into print to weigh its likely implications, often using the chatbot itself to generate the first few paragraphs of their articles (which is a bit like a caveman ostentatiously sporting a bronze medallion towards the end of the Stone Age). Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman began to petition the US government to regulate the emerging tech, upon pain of some unspecified catastrophe, quite possibly the prospect of competition from start-ups with too few hoops to jump through. By the time Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer came out in July 2023, the affinities between the theoretical physicist and the tech bros’ favourite tech bro were all too apparent to anyone who’d been paying attention, though no one (save for the fawning members of an AI Senate committee in Washington) was buying Altman’s global-citizen shtick.
Little wonder then that Silicon Valley is now searching for a good-news story—a narrative that can restore the tech bros to their status as the avatars of progress, on a par with the great social-media revolutions of the late 2000s and early 2010s, when YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al. facilitated a great wave of revolutionary disruption across North Africa and the Middle East, and the ‘horizontal’ politics of the Occupy movement. And while it would be premature to say that it has found such a narrative, I think it’s becoming clearer by the day that the kind of environmentalism that makes a fetish of ‘smart’ technologies has given it an opening chapter—one in which the hero is the remarkable capacity of digital systems to compile, store and interpret data. To the extent that the battle against climate change will rely on large amounts of information, the tech developers will no doubt come to the centre of the conversation.
‘Fetish’ is unfair, perhaps. To have copious, reliable data —not only about what is happening now but also about what may happen in the future —is obviously enormously important, and there is plenty of ingenious technology aimed at that end. From technologies aimed at gathering data on weather patterns and climatic changes, or at mapping and monitoring at-risk ecologies, to the efficiencies digital systems can bring to agriculture and building practices, there are many ways in which infotech is pertinent to the environmental crisis, and to deny this would be ridiculous. Yes, there is plenty of greenwashing out there; and yes, there is far too little attention paid to the environmental footprint of information tech itself (the subject of an important book by the French journalist Guillaume Pitron). But there are also sincere and serious people working in the eco-data space, and plenty of environmentalists who appear to appreciate their efforts. To object to information tools on the basis that they are most identified with the milieu currently cluttering up the San Francisco Bay Area would be a silly position to take.
The problem, however, is that we are now in danger of mistaking the planet we are trying to save for the abstractions we employ to describe it, in a way that underwrites the narrative favoured in ecomodernist circles. The instruments we use to look at the world are not incidental to how we think about it, and the instrument we call ‘data’ is no exception to that rule. That Bill Gates—the man who has done more than anyone to popularise the neo-environmentalist perspective—has a website called OWID is significant. For here, we have the planet as dashboard. For those who would remake the world, it is first of all necessary to represent it as a thing that can be remade (or recoded).
So what does such a perspective entail? And what does it portend for the future?
This essay is adapted from Richard King’s 2025 book Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? (New South Books).
NATURE AS NETWORK
Like nanotech, information technology is not itself a sector or an industry: it is a platform on which a whole range of sectors and industries can innovate and develop their tools. Accordingly, there are a number of ways in which smart technologies are making themselves indispensable in the fight against human-caused climate change and the environmental crisis more generally. In particular, they allow scientists and developers to both monitor and model the environment and to build efficiencies into human systems. These areas are not mutually exclusive; to model climate change, one also needs to monitor the environment, just as one needs to monitor data flows in order to make systems more efficient. To the extent that these terms describe distinct processes, often related to different goals, the division is useful. There is an important difference between using information technologies to understand the environment and using them to intervene in it.
The use of information technology to monitor the environment is increasingly popular among environmentalists. When it comes to deforestation, for example, acoustic sensors, cameras, and satellites provide critical information on species loss and vegetation trends, enabling conservationists to greatly accelerate the pace of analysis. Similarly, the Australian Nature Conservancy has recently partnered with Microsoft to monitor coral reefs, using satellite technology and machine learning algorithms to quickly identify changes to these indispensable ecosystems. One extraordinary recent development has been the creation of an ‘internet of animals’—a network of sensors aimed at tracking the behaviour of thousands of non-human species with a view to protecting those species and helping our own gain a deeper understanding of the planet’s interrelated systems. Built to operate in communication with the Russian module of the International Space Station, the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) has been set back by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but is nonetheless a fascinating example of ‘informational ecology’ and the kind of technologies to which it might lead. Its presiding genius, Martin Wikelski, conceives of it as a sort of early warning system tailored to mostly human ends—one that, in alerting authorities to an El Niño event or a build-up of toxins, could transform humanity’s relationship with nature. As he puts it in his book on the subject: ‘You could describe this as the search for the sixth sense of animals. It is a grand endeavour akin to the search for gravitational waves, or the last “God particle” (the Higgs boson), or the beginning of time.’
It’s the predictive power of projects such as ICARUS that makes them so potentially transformative. In order to build the kind of resilience that will be needed in the face of climate change, we will need to know as accurately as possible how it is likely to affect Earth’s systems, and the use of AI to analyse data from satellites, weather stations, and the like is a critical aspect of that endeavour. Obviously, we will never know for certain how the climate emergency will unfold; there are too many variables and too many tipping points. But there have been a number of important developments in the power and speed of predictive systems, many of them tied to developments in machine learning. As a form of AI that extracts patterns from data, machine learning has benefited exponentially from increased computational capacity and the accumulation of data, and environmentalists have benefited too. In the case of Earth system models, for example (sophisticated computer simulations that describe Earth’s processes and how they interact), advances in algorithmic technologies mean that the complicated process of building ‘equilibrium’ models on which to run the simulation—models, that’s to say, of how the planet’s systems might have looked before the Industrial Revolution—can now be achieved in a fraction of the time it took to build these systems in the past (up to two years in the case of the IPCC’s simulations, which utilised the world’s most powerful computers). As the ‘resolution’ of such models increases and scientists gain a more granular sense of how ocean, land and atmospheric systems are interacting as the planet heats up, such predictive models will play a central role in the new environmental thinking.
As well as using algorithmic technologies to monitor and model the environment, many contemporary environmentalists are also keen to explore the efficiencies that infotech can bring to systems and products. Here, a whole range of applications are routinely invoked in the environmental literature, from smart grids, smart housing and smart materials for more sustainable energy consumption, to the use of Big Data analytics to reduce the negative environmental impact of the manufacturing and transportation of products, to the use of computer-modelling tools to develop more efficient products. ‘Smart city’-style initiatives, in which urban data flows are analysed in real time and translated into citizen and commercial services, are a popular focus among tech developers of a broadly environmentalist bent. So too is the ‘precision agriculture’ that utilises data analytics to reduce not only water waste but also the use of fertilisers and pesticides. Based on the expanding Internet of Things—the network of technological artefacts that exchange information over the internet—such systems are far from hypothetical. In Singapore, for example, predictive modelling is used to manage traffic signals, resulting in a 22 per cent decrease in travel time and a reduction in CO₂ emissions, while in agriculture worldwide, the use of sensors, drones, robotics and algorithmic modelling is already a reality for many farmers.
Not that we should get too carried away with the idea that information technology is good for the environment. As well as the environmental destruction caused by the mining of the rare-earth elements needed for e-devices and batteries, and the massive amounts of toxic waste created by technology companies whose profits depend on the regular replacement of their products, information technology is also a net source of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly on a par with aviation. Arena editor Timothy Erik Ström has noted the
colossal waste generated by cybernetic capitalism … the amount of electricity that networked computing-machines consume. The International Energy Agency notes that between 2022 and 2026 data centres will likely double their electricity consumption, up to around 1,000 terawatt hours. This increase is approximately equivalent to adding the entire electricity usage of another Germany. Taken collectively, data centres’ demand for power is higher than that of any country except China, the US and India. And data centres are only one part of the global infrastructure of networked computing-machines …
Even in radical circles, writes Ström, it is common for commentators to succumb to the illusion that computing machinery is clean. But the reality is very different: the tech industry is as polluting as any other. This is the reason so many tech companies are now calling for widespread nuclear power: anticipating a future in which renewable energy provides some but not all of the energy needed for powerful new forms of AI, the tech bros have thrown a great deal of money at innovations in the nuclear space, and at so-called small modular reactors in particular. For all that the spruikers of blockchain technology hype the many efficiencies that would flow from its coordinating capacities, bitcoin mining still gobbles up huge amounts of energy—over 120 terawatt hours a year. In this respect, and in many others, the environmental impact of IT is far from being the straightforward story of unimpeded progress told by the more excitable ecomodernists.
Nevertheless, one has to admit that the potential for the kind of efficiencies dreamed of in that caffeinated milieu is consistent with developments in computing, and that tech of the kind surveyed above will play a crucial role in any response to the climate emergency. The bigger problem is the kind of approach to the planet and its management that such technology engenders. It is a paradox that with the means to destroy life comes the means to understand how it is being destroyed, and it may be that in trying to view nature as a networked system, we are building into our climate solutions the very hubris and shortsightedness that brought us to this crisis point. Obviously, we won’t get far without plentiful and reliable information: good data is not to be despised. But when the world becomes nothing more than data—when our models come to stand in for the real thing—there is a danger that we deepen the problem.
This is true in both a mundane sense and in a deeper philosophical one. Regarding the former, consider the role of a particular ‘data point’: net-zero. Invoked in environmental circles, this figure describes a scenario in which the amount of emitted greenhouse gases is equal to or less than the greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere. To that extent, it’s uncontroversial, at least outside the slackening tent of denialist clowns and shonky operators who slept in on the morning the circus left town. But there is also a sense in which the net-zero figure gives another kind of licence to those who would kick the climate can down the road. As Professors James Dyke and Robert Watson argue, the climate models that began to appear towards the end of the 1990s, in the wake of the Kyoto Summit, allowed modellers to link economic activity in the form of (highly speculative) investments and technological innovations to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a way that effectively removed the need for deep critical thinking on environmental matters. The problem became especially acute when the US was permitted to count its forests as carbon sinks in its carbon budget: resources that, if managed well, would absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere and offset US fossil-fuel use. This has been the story of net-zero ever since: projections made, innovations imagined, and a dirty great vapour trail of disappointment. As the authors put it: ‘Instead of confronting our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe.’
This, then, is the mundane sense in which numerical data can lead us astray. But to get to the deeper ways in which this is true, we need to reflect that information technology, no less than the powerful telescopes through which we are able to view other planets, or the powerful microscopes through which we are able to view aspects of our own planet that would be otherwise invisible to us, affects not only our subjectivities but also our notions of the kind of thing the world is. In particular, we need to reflect on the way that data performs an abstracting function—how, in describing something about the world, it also disguises something about it. Earth, after all, is analogue, not digital, and not so easy to manipulate as someone habituated to algorithmic models might be inclined to suppose.
As Arena writers have often argued, the process of abstraction is key to the transformation of the human condition. ‘Abstraction’ describes a retreat from materiality—from the palpable, physical stuff of the world—and allows us to ‘hold’ information in our minds and convey it to others through language. But this capacity is not an unchangeable phenomenon, and over the course of human history what Ström (within the Arena approach) calls the ‘means and forces of abstraction’ undergo a process of intensification and acceleration, catalysed first, and crucially, by the invention of writing around 5500 years ago and, later, by the rise of print, the scientific method, double-entry bookkeeping and rationalised cartography in Europe’s ‘long sixteenth century’ (c.1450–1640). The innovation of new kinds of instrumentation (in particular, those telescopes and microscopes) accelerates this process further, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as ‘natural philosophy’ shades into science, the effort to understand the world is relocated from the field to the lab. Thus, as our knowledge of the natural world increases across the Enlightenment, so too does our separation from it: nature becomes a thing out there to be understood and taken hold of. More holistic understandings of nature—understandings that survive in some Indigenous cultures—retreat before this new understanding.
The point is not to lament this change, still less to argue for a return to the past. It is rather to be aware of it, and aware of the fact that with this new understanding comes a radical new sense of what is possible and permissible—that data is not politically neutral but expressive of a certain kind of concern, very different from the concerns of the past. Silicon Valley’s favourite historian Yuval Noah Harari has coined the concept of ‘dataism’ to describe the fact that data flow has become the highest human value, and one can see this ideology (or religion) at work in the ecomodernist mindset. For the tendency in that approach is to look at what is happening to nature rather than why it is happening, in a way that reproduces and extends the kind of techno-solutionism that has brought us to the point of crisis.
When the world in data becomes the world as data, data becomes the world’s salvation.
GAMING NATURE
The technoscientific outlook evinced in ecomodernism is the projection of a kind of thinking that has come to the centre of Western culture in the decades since heavy industry was relocated to parts of the globe where labour is cheaper and easier to push around. In that half-century or so, the personal computer has utterly transformed the economy; it is no longer upper-body strength but one’s ability to manipulate data that determines the social capital of a growing number of employees, whose domestic lives are no less steeped in algorithmic technologies. Such technological mediation, and the increasingly abstract networks of connection that necessarily arise from it, have led to the dataism Harari identifies, which, in turn, has led to the idea that one can simply ‘hack’ Earth’s systems, rewriting nature’s basic ‘code’ in the cause of planetary health. Habituation to digital systems has resulted in a dashboard model of nature.
Just run a Google Image search on the phrase ‘environmental dashboard’ and cast a casual eye over the results. A hundred colourful digital consoles will immediately appear on screen: dashboards gauging water quality or sustainable development KPIs, or even the environmental impact of products such as Nike shoes, all replete with pie charts, bar charts, panels, ratings, trackers, and percentages—with data points of every description. Those digital iterations of the environment are evidence of a particular outlook—a dataist approach to the problems we face. Again, and as per Ström’s analysis, such abstraction has deep historical roots—roots that descend into the soil of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution and reach all the way down to the invention of writing. But the information revolution has pushed this process further than ever. If Dyke and Watson are right to claim that the preoccupation with net-zero emissions had unintended consequences (not the least of which was the utter failure to achieve anything close to net-zero emissions), what might be the consequences of a more thoroughgoing dataism—one joined to a more interventionist stance? How might human beings in thrall to algorithmic technologies reshape the planet going forward?
One clue might be the new generation of computer games aimed at educating and entertaining a younger cohort of environmentalists. Certainly, such games are increasingly common. In the 2022 game Floodland, for example, players control a colony of people attempting to survive in a post-climate-change world by constructing buildings, managing resources and building alliances with rival ‘clans’, while the aim of the 2018 game Eco is to research and develop technology to destroy an asteroid before it strikes Earth, while also avoiding too much damage from pollution and resource exploitation. Other initiatives are even more direct in their approach to game development. The UN’s Green Game Jam, for example, is an annual program that invites developers to ‘implement environmentally themed content into their live games with existing audiences with the goal to empower players to take action for the environment while playing their favourite games’.
Of particular interest in this connection is a game called Half-Earth Socialism. Based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass (the title of which is an allusion to E. O. Wilson’s proposal to sequester 50 per cent of the planet’s surface for non-human biodiversity), this game represents a number of trends in left-ecological politics, including a dramatic degrowth agenda, and is aimed at constructing a hyper-rational, eco-friendly socialist utopia. The critic Scott Robinson describes its parameters:
The world waits on your command, which you dispense with the click and slide of cards and buttons, as in your average table-top game. The structure of the game is to make a five-year plan that earns you ‘political capital’, which you spend on research, infrastructure and policy decisions to advance your vision of a future … The game rewards emissions reductions above all else. Measures to cut emissions result in disproportionate gains in political capital, regardless of their flow-on effects of fuel shortages, electricity blackouts or caloric deficiencies. This reflects the abstract level at which the game is played; the player is encouraged to ignore how people live except for the way in which it affects resources or earns political capital (points).
That last point is an important one. The game is so expansive in its focus that questions of social and psychological being are either ignored or travestied—rendered as mere political ‘approval’. Such lacunae are due in no small part to the fact that this is only a game, and, obviously, one shouldn’t take too seriously what amounts to a political publishing gimmick. Nevertheless, I think it is significant that even young activists like Vettese and Pendergrass are beginning to think in such big-picture terms, and that they choose to express their political vision in the form of a climate-modelling program that essentially ‘gamifies’ climate change and its political (if not its social) consequences.
SPACESHIP FUTURE!
Where might this sort of approach take us? Predictions are invidious, but perhaps we’ll gain some kind of answer to this urgent (and largely unasked) question if we bend an ear to the ideas and commentary bubbling up from the ecomodernist cohort. Take, for example, the lead researcher at OWID, Hannah Ritchie. Her 2024 book Not the End of the World affords an important and interesting glimpse of the emerging neo-environmentalist outlook. Framed as a rejection of the ‘doomer’ mindset, much of it is aimed at encouraging readers to ‘stress less’ about such lifestyle factors as using energy-efficient lightbulbs, packaging and plastic bags, recycling and eating local foods. Though not as techno-utopian as ‘Whole Earth catalogue’ maestro Stewart Brand (who has nevertheless endorsed the book), Ritchie is no less strident in her support of nuclear power and transgenic crops. In keeping with the Anthropocene narrative, the book is vertiginous in its scope and sweep, covering pollution, climate change, deforestation, species depletion, ocean plastics, agriculture and global fish stocks. Readers who’ve spent any amount of time with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals will recognise the register: here’s the problem; here’s the solution; here’s a technology or a policy that makes the solution possible. Neither political thought nor social analysis is especially important for Ritchie; in fact, she appears to regard such concerns as incidental to the kind of analysis needed to rise to the challenge of climate change: ‘Researchers tend to zoom into a problem … We [at OWID] zoom out.’
As with the Sustainable Development Goals, Ritchie is committed to the idea that green growth can be combined with the development of the Global South. Thus, the book’s most striking assertion: that contemporary humans may be the first ‘generation’ to leave the environment in better shape than they found it—a feat that would rest on using technology to ‘decouple’ economic growth from environmental impact. Implicitly rejecting the conservationist tradition in ecology and environmentalism, Ritchie paints sustainability as something in humanity’s future rather than something it needs to return to. Here she is drawing on a key element in the Anthropocene narrative: that humanity has always changed the environment and that it therefore makes no sense to accuse it of having overstepped the mark. On the contrary, what is necessary is for Homo sapiens to marshal its technological powers in pursuit of a world of fairness and abundance. Ecomodernism’s teleology in a nutshell.
As revealed in a painful interview with US conservation website Mongabay, Ritchie’s claims about the progress made so far towards decoupling are poorly evidenced, and there are a number of other instances of faulty reasoning sprinkled throughout the book. But it’s the overall framing of Not the End of the World that should concern us as much as its questionable logic. Ritchie wants to say that the doomers are wrong to emphasise Earth’s biophysical limits and that their assertions are both paralysing and a gift to denialists. And yet there are plenty of pessimistic scientists who remain objectively optimistic in their interventions and plenty of activists who take to the streets despite believing that the world is fucked. Why then does OWID’s lead researcher want to argue in this vein at all? The answer is that Not the End of the World is precisely the thing she claims it isn’t: a political prescription through and through.
As Ritchie implies in her comments about OWID, that prescription will be characterised by a commitment to ‘zooming out’ from the problem—by trying to get the climate crisis, and the crises that follow it, into frame, in a way that so abstracts the problem that it ceases to bear very much resemblance to the situation ‘on the ground’. That’s risky in itself, of course, in that scientists and policymakers may overestimate—may even be forced to overestimate—the explanatory power of their models. But it will also have a profound effect on the policies framed in response to the droughts, fires, floods and hurricanes that will characterise the climate crisis. And those policies could get very strange indeed.
Thus, OWID becomes OWAD—the world as data—a perspective that runs through all of the developments I’ve been calling ecomodernist. This is not a conscious perspective; it is a way of seeing, or a way of thinking. It is yet more evidence of the constitutive role abstraction plays in the neo-environmental movement, and a sign that an increasingly instrumentalised outlook is taking hold within that world. For if the planet and its systems are merely information, then surely it is possible and permissible to intervene at every level.
‘Don’t panic!’ say the ecomodernists. ‘Spaceship Earth is heading for trouble, but the New Controllers are on the bridge, and the dashboard is working perfectly.’
This essay is adapted from Richard King’s latest book Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet?(New South Books), out now.