The Materialist Circuits and the Quest for Environmental Justice in ICT’s Global Expansion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article builds on and contributes to research on the material impacts of Information and Communication Technology and Consumer Electronics (ICT/CE) by proposing a holistic framework addressing labour exploitation and environmental destruction in the production, consumption, and disposal of digital devices. Although the emerging media scholarship on digital labour have critically analyzed the material impacts of ICT/CE in terms of labour issues emerged from the production and consumption stages, relatively little research attention has been paid to the end-of-life issues of digital devices and other environmental issues caused by the ICT industry’s global expansion. Based upon previous research on digital labour, environmental management and ecological justice, this article proposes a political economic understanding of the environmental dimension of the ICT industry and how it has contributed to the escalation of environmental crisis and social injustice in developing coun-tries, especially in terms of the urging situation of the global e-waste challenge. The article argues that the critical standpoints taken by political economy of communication and environmental justice re-search provide valuable and promising theoretical connections between labour activism and ecological struggles; and future inquiries on digital economy, in this regard, should combine both perspectives, pay more attention to the enormous social and ecological tensions in the Global South, and make explicit connections between the regressions in labour rights and global environmental justice and ICT’s aggressive and unsustainable expansion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".