This book explores technology and the global tech industry in relation to social, health, economic, and environmental relations and politics. Peter Little argues that the power and influence of electronics and Big Tech-from the proliferation of digital platforms to the expansion of global electronic waste streams-is a political-ecological problem that impacts communities and lives in both the Global North and South. From intense resource extraction, industrial pollution, and surging health and economic inequalities, to data-driven surveillance, platform economy proliferation and intrusion, and Silicon Valley corporate-power, Little argues that the political ecology of tech matters now more than ever. Based on a mixture of engagements with tech criticism, ethnographic case studies, and critical analysis and development of guiding concepts-ranging from technocapital to technoprecarious political ecology-the book exposes and interrogates the underlying toxicity, precarity, and planetary politics of the global tech. Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology also tracks justice struggles that confront technopower, including "just tech" forms of social action that further reinforce the importance of a global political ecology of technocapitalism in the digital age.
Peter C. Little is professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College.
Introduction: Amidst Platforms, Pathologies, and Planetary Plunder Part One: Groundwork for a Technocapital Ecology Critique Chapter 1 Technocapitalism and Hegemonic Technocapital Chapter 2 Pandemic Portals and Pathologies of Technopower Chapter 3 Technocapital Ecologies and Toxic Sacrifice Zones Part Two: Toxic Frontlines of Technopower in the Global North and South Chapter 4 Big Tech Necropolitics and Toxic Sacrifice in the Global North Chapter 5 Toxic Supply Chains and E-Waste Ecologies in the Global South Part Three: On Global Political Economy and Just Tech Transitions Chapter 6 On Technopowered Late Liberal Democracies Chapter 7 Engaging Tech and the Limits of Transformation: A Conversation with Mark Blyth Chapter 8 On Just Tech and Emerging Ecologies of Care Conclusion: Towards a Technoprecarious Political Ecology
This book is a must-read to understand the ever-present and intensifying horrors of technocapitalism. -- Alexander A. Dunlap, University of Helsinki
