Digitalization in the anthropocene: A digital environmental history since the mid 20th Century

Digital technologies are seen as climate-friendly, in some cases even as climate saviours. In contrast to smoking factory chimneys, data centres, for example, appear to be low-emission, quiet and clean. The metaphor of the cloud suggests a cloudy, non-physicality. However, if you look behind the shiny surfaces of servers and screens, the entire carbon footprint of digital technologies comes into view. Digital technologies now consume enormous amounts of resources, from the electricity to run them to the raw materials to produce them to our attention to interact with them. Digitalisation can contribute to environmental pollution and climate change - even if publicly it tends to be cited as an antidote. The problem is that digital technologies have become much more widespread over the decades, and so has their environmental impact. This is a classic case of the rebound effect of technological fixes.

In addition, the calculation of digital computers and the debates on digital platforms also determine what people actually understand by "environment" and how it is controlled. All of this only becomes clear if we analyse the development of digitalisation and its environmental impact over the course of history. In a digital history of the Anthropocene, the project highlights six aspects of the connection between digitalisation and the environment: in addition to energy consumption and resource depletion, the focus is on environmental damage, recycling and reuse, the history of climate calculation and environmental perception using the example of the forest and, finally, the influence of digital technology on nature using the example of animal husbandry and the sea.