Hidden Abodes: Digital Lives and Distant Others

This chapter argues that humanity’s present relations to digital technologies rest on two profound contradictions. Firstly, the promise of ever-expanding opportunities to live life fully online is increasingly in tension with the control over use exercised by the dominant commercialized platforms. The greater the volume of digital traffic, the greater the contradiction. The second contradiction arises from the fact that the enhanced prospects for pleasure, expression and personal agency held out to affluent digital users are predicated on the cumulative dispossession and immiseration of the citizens and indigenous peoples of the global South, and the marginalized communities of the North. This poses a stark choice; to move into a future shaped by the increasingly destructive impacts of our exploitation of the natural world and the anticipated and unanticipated risks to life they generate, or to recognize the need for radical change and accept the responsibility to create a future that is socially just and environmentally sustainable.