It’s increasingly understood that climate change is in large part a story of class struggle. Traditionally, this is taken to mean conflicts between the wealthy and the working class, or between Global North and Global South. However, as climate action inches forward, it is becoming clearer that intra-class conflicts among the owners of capital are also an important part of this story. In the past five years, incredibly well-resourced ICT companies have begun to mobilize lobbying dollars and business strategies in support of policies that could result in significant (if not yet sufficient) shifts in global carbon management to the detriment of fossil fuel capital. There are, after all, monopoly profits to be won by the platforms and infrastructures required to monitor and verify this environmental work. However, at the same time, the ICT sector has never been more entangled with the energy sector, with oil and gas prospecting and efficiency measures serving as one of the few verified business cases for the massive speculative investment poured into machine learning tools, and with ICT companies themselves dealing with a wide variety of traditional and unconventional power companies in an attempt to meet data centres‘ endless appetite for more electricity. In order to parse these contradictions, and to have a clearer sense of how to organize with and against this ambiguous set of actors, it’s necessary to theorize the emerging characteristics of ‚green data capitalism,‘ describing how the business strategies, infrastructures, and innovation cycles of today’s large ICT powers understand the politics of energy transitions and how best to make a profit therein.
Dieses Ereignis ist vorbei.