Environmentalism and Digital Culture

Soenke Zehle has an excellent article at Mute magazine about two recent books, mentioned here before, concerning the ecological cost of high-tech: Elizabeth Grossman's High-Tech Trash and the collection Challenging The Chip.

Describing the books, he writes:

These two titles are not simply about the electronics industries, but about the widening scope of economic and environmental justice and creative grassroots responses to the global spread of the Silicon Valley experience. Supported by visions of technological transcendence, the electronics industry has effectively distracted public attention from the environmental and health implications of its products. Yet driven by grassroots organisations like SCCOSH the SVTC, it was Silicon Valley where the mythology of electronics manufacturing as a clean industry was first unmade. Sharing these histories, and they way they have resonated in centers of electronics manufacturing across the globe, can contribute to the a transformation of the way the electronics industry operates.

Link: Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net.

Zehle goes further to make an appeal to activists who champion the new "digital commons" to consider the other, real commons:

Almost a decade ago, James Boyle called for a 'politics of the public domain' and suggested reinventing 'the commons' as a shared point of reference to bring about a convergence of info-political initiatives comparable to the way the novel notion of 'the environment' had succeeded in consolidating ecopolitical efforts in the 1960s.[4] Since then, the politics around the digital commons have arguably become the most vibrant and visible dynamic of net.cultural mobilisation. Perhaps the time has come to revisit the metaphor of an 'environmentalism for the net' to talk not only about multiple forms of resistance to an ever expanding intellectual property regime, but quite literally of the ecopolitical implications of the very infrastructures that facilitate and sustain the net.cultural dynamic of collaborative creation.

See also David Bollier's comments on this topic at OnTheCommons.org (which is where I spotted this): Can we have an "Environmentalism for the Net" without an "Environmentalism for the environment"?