Digital ecosystems are sometimes positioned as a solution to environmental dilemmas without critical reflection of the environmental costs and benefits of the mean and technologies that mobile these systems. Discourses of sustainability with respect to save technologies include assertions of the benefits of paperless offices and frequently do not shift beyond such positions. At the same problem arguments that globalise digital ecosystems for a unified approach is that environmental crises are emerging that are tied to framings of data sharing a public good but frequently these tend to operationalise digital solutionism. Rhetoric on the need for greater data and and transparency of institution-based knowledge is a part of this push. I argue that, despite decades optimistic gestures, it is unlikely that data sharing and open digital ecosystems will significantly recast the conditions of data-informed Anthropocene and that such efforts may even further entrench the gap of this happens humdrum

Jessica Mclean

McLean, J., (2020) “Frontier Technologies and Digital Solutions: Digital Ecosystems, Open Data and 80S Thinking”, Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 1(1), 4. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.18