The Fantasy of Digital Ecology

In our situation of ecological emergency, greenwashing diverts our attention from the real culprits. While we conscientiously sort our waste, the digital industry devours the planet with complete impunity.

The mirage of individual responsibility

What we call greenwashing constitutes a perfectly honed manipulation technique that aims to transfer the responsibility for the ongoing ecological disaster onto the shoulders of citizens. This strategy, which Günther Anders might have called an “inverted Promethean gap,” makes us believe that our daily actions would have a decisive impact on the planet’s future. Each person thus finds themselves invested with a salvific mission: sorting their waste, limiting air travel, favoring carpooling, etc.

This carefully orchestrated guilt-shaming produces a double perverse effect. On one hand, it generates permanent ecological anxiety among citizens, what American psychologist Susan Clayton calls “eco-anxiety.” On the other hand, it provides the comforting illusion of acting concretely on the world. As Herbert Marcuse already wrote in One-Dimensional Man (1964), the capitalist system excels in the art of transforming potential contestation into docile participation.

Greenwashing thus functions as a social control device of considerable efficiency. It channels our militant energies toward symbolic gestures while preserving the production structures that methodically destroy ecosystems. This ecological “voluntary servitude,” to borrow La Boétie’s expression, maintains us in the illusion of individual influence even as the structural decisions completely escape us behind the smoke screen of our attention to our individual “responsibilities.”

The disproportion of impacts: citizens versus industry

I don’t claim that our daily gestures are totally useless; every drop of water effectively contributes to the river. But we must have the lucidity to recognize the crushing disproportion between our small individual efforts and the ongoing industrial devastation. According to the highly publicized report by the Carbon Disclosure Project organization from 2017, 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015 come from only 100 companies. Faced with such figures, how can we not see in the injunction to selective sorting a form of mystification?

The real drivers of ecological catastrophe operate on an entirely different scale: frenzied extraction of hydrocarbons, exploitation of rare metals for the electronics industry, proliferation of data centers that already consume nearly 1 to 1.5% of global electricity according to the International Energy Agency. These industries, driven by the sole logic of profit, pursue their expansion without concern for the planetary boundaries theorized by Johan Rockström and his team.

André Gorz, in Ecology and Politics (1975), had already identified this mystification:

“Ecology is like universal suffrage and Sunday rest: at first, all the bourgeois and all the supporters of order tell you that you want their ruin, the triumph of anarchy and obscurantism. Then, in a second phase, when the force of circumstances and popular pressure become irresistible, they grant you what they refused yesterday and, fundamentally, nothing changes.”

Greenwashing represents precisely this recuperation of ecological demands by the system that denies them.

The fantasy of digital ecology in our professional practices

This individual guilt-shaming now contaminates our professional practices, particularly in the digital domain. When we must make choices concerning the use of digital tools or storage capacities, we impose on ourselves a form of guilt-inducing frugality. We fear that by “spending too much” digital resources, we become accomplices to ecological destruction.

This self-censorship rests on what I call the “fantasy of digital ecology” - an imaginary construction that gives us the illusion of authentic ecological engagement. As Fabrice Flipo analyzes in The Imperative of Digital Sobriety (2020), this focus on individual uses obscures the systemic dimension of the problem: “Individual digital sobriety is necessary but largely insufficient in the face of the structural explosion of global digital consumption.”

Decisions made under the influence of this fantasy, whether personal or collective, rest on a profound ignorance of the real issues. We act in good conscience but in complete unconsciousness of the real impact of our choices. This situation perfectly illustrates what philosopher Bernard Stiegler called “generalized proletarianization”: we lose our practical and theoretical knowledge in favor of pseudo-knowledge conveyed by the industries themselves.

The urgency of radical political action

Faced with this generalized mystification, I maintain that genuine ecological engagement would require far more radical actions. To paraphrase philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, we need not to “change our habits” but to “change habit.” It is the industrial infrastructure itself that must be attacked: those aging nuclear power plants, those sprawling server farms, those open-pit mines that destroy entire regions.

The effectiveness of greenwashing lies precisely in its capacity to make us believe we are acting when we are only perpetuating the system. This illusion of action, which Guy Debord could have integrated into his theory of the spectacle, neutralizes any inclination toward radical transformation. While we calculate our individual “carbon footprint,” a concept invented and popularized by BP in a 2004 advertising campaign to divert attention from its own responsibilities, the real decisions are made in the boardrooms of multinationals.

The difficulty in accessing reliable information on these issues is not fortuitous. The same financial groups that invest in the most polluting industries also control a large part of the media landscape. This capitalistic concentration, analyzed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent (1988), guarantees that ecological questions will always be treated from the angle of individual responsibility rather than from that of industrial predation. Thus closes the trap of a system that transforms our legitimate desire to preserve the planet into an instrument of our own enslavement.