9 Communicative Capitalism, Technological Solutionism, and The Ocean Cleanup

Digitally mediated communication has rapidly become integral to societies, cultures, identities, and economies. As of 2017, there were about 4.3 billion internet users (ITU 2017). Although enormous discrepancies remain in terms of geographies of digital access, with inhabitants of the most developed countries being four times more likely to have access than those from the least developed countries, this should be understood within the context that twenty years ago there were only 120 million internet users, primarily located in the United States and Europe.¹ The overall trend indicates a huge increase in the number of people using digital communication tools over a fairly short period of time. The newfound hegemony of digital communication technologies can be grasped by examining the market valuations of the world’s most valuable corporations (see figure 9.1). In 2006, the six most valuable corporations according to market capitalization were primarily oil/energy companies with some diversity with valuations ranging from US$204 billion to US$363 billion; by 2021 this list featured five digital technology corporations: Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Tencent, individually valued at between US$2170 billion and US$780 billion.

Consequently, it has become common to hear claims that society has left the age of industrial capitalism and entered what has been referred to as the information age, network society, postindustrial age, age of tech, platform capitalism, or communicative capitalism. Although there are nuanced differences among these overlapping terms, not least the latter pair’s focus on the contemporary moment as a period of capitalist development, a common thread advocates that digital information and communication technologies have become central to the present moment. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that media and communications are frequently proclaimed to be central to mobilizing social and political change. As the Spanish sociologist Manual Castells (2010, 369) argues, electronic media “have become the privileged space of politics.” This does not mean that politics is entirely captured by media or can be reduced to images, sounds, and signs; rather, communicative action occurring exclusively outside digital media is marginal and therefore unlikely to impact significantly socio-ecological crises.

The centrality of digital media to contemporary society has led, perhaps unsurprisingly, numerous academic commentators on the global plastics crisis to call for communicative action designed to address the current situation. In many cases, this is based on a strategy of raising awareness of the issues among the public (e.g., Jacobs et al. 2015; Vegter et al. 2014; Veiga et al. 2016). In such cases, the problem is approached through a prism whereby informing individual consumers of issues of toxicity and accumulation will necessarily alter their behaviours. This approach is problematic insofar as it both reduces the scope of activity to the domain of individual consumption (see the introduction to this volume) and incorrectly assumes a linear causal relationship between information and action.

Networked digital technologies have transformed the economic value of information. Whereas until the late twentieth century information was a relatively scarce and therefore valuable commodity, today information is abundant, and the volume of information being produced is still expanding at a breakneck speed (Andrejevic 2013). As a result, what has become scarce and therefore valuable is human attention (Crogan and Kinsley 2012). Within this context, described as an attention economy (Beller 2006; Goldhaber 1997), there is not a deficit of information on ecological or social crises. That is, there is no shortage of rigorously researched details pertaining to the global plastics crisis; climate change; deforestation; reductions in biodiversity; oceanic acidification; conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, Myanmar, Somalia, and South Sudan; starvation; epidemics of eminently treatable diseases; and countless other problems. The endurance of these crises attests not to a lack of information or awareness but to the distinction between awareness and effective action. Reading an article, watching video reportage, sharing a story on Twitter, and liking a post on Facebook are not actions that necessarily have any discernible impacts on these crises.

Indeed, enormous volumes of digital telecommunications are a central feature of the contemporary socio-economic system, leading political theorist Jodi Dean to describe these conditions as “communicative capitalism.” Within this framework, corporate digital communication platforms are critiqued as systems that effectively capture and commodify attempts at political organizing. Through this process of commodification, they reinforce rather than meaningfully challenge hegemonic neoliberal social relations. For Dean, within the cacophony of online communication, “messages get lost. They become mere contributions to the circulation of images, pinion, and information, to the billions of nuggets of information and affect trying to catch and hold attention, to push or sway opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another. What in one context enhances the potential of political change, in another submerges politics in a deluge of circulating, disintegrated spectacles and opinions” (2009, 24). Within this torrent of content, disinformation, hyperbole, clickbait, and cunningly disguised advertising frequently become disproportionately visible as they effectively game social media trending algorithms. Meanwhile, respectful, reasonable, and detailed analyses are often rendered invisible. The point is not that all mediated communications about plastics are already commodified and captured by neoliberalism, and therefore ultimately doomed to reinscribe existing social relations, but that activist telecommunications must be oriented toward mobilizing actions and enacting tangible changes rather than merely participating in the commodified circulation of digital content. This marks a departure, therefore, from the strategy of raising consumer awareness prominently advocated in the case of plastics.

Digital platforms are designed to promote convenience; remotely storing information in the cloud (i.e., a corporate data centre) rather than requiring local backups, recommendation algorithms that suggest new areas of consumption, and allowing people to contribute to political campaigns by signing digital petitions, liking, sharing, or retweeting social media content are all designed to be user-friendly and convenient. They are designed to save time at a historical moment when the deluge of digital content means that attention is being pulled in many directions at once. In 2013, Jonathan Crary described this situation as 24/7 capitalism, whereby commercial pressures are exerted during every wakeful moment, with sleep being the only frontier not yet colonized by quantification and commodification. Since then, the rise of sleep-tracking wearable computing devices means that even sleep provides valuable data for digital platforms. As Crary and other theorists of technology and time have argued, there is a significant discrepancy between the rhythms of embodied human action that evolved under slower technocultural assemblages and those under the near-lightspeed flows of big data (Berardi 2009; Stiegler 2017). This temporal disjuncture subsequently results in a further drive for and dependence on automated digital systems that provide convenience in order to conserve human attention and cognitive load.

A homologous logic of convenience is equally central to the enduring arguments for single-use plastics. They are emblematic of an ecologically unsustainable throwaway culture in which petrochemical-derived synthetic polymers—the fossilized remnants of prehistoric life—are cracked and moulded into objects such as single-use bags, straws, and coffee cup lids whose usage times are commonly measured in minutes yet whose ecological effects persist for millennia. Far from being necessary or ecologically desirable entities, single-use plastics allow people to engage unconsciously in a multitude of minor acts of environmental destruction for the sake of convenience. The time required to preserve, clean, maintain, and reuse materials could be employed otherwise, so it’s easier and often more economically efficient to just throw them away and forget about their ecological impacts.

Not all plastics are the problem from this perspective. There are many (relatively) long-lasting uses of plastics in which the specific properties of lightweight, malleable materials that act as thermal and electrical insulators are beneficial and whose chemical properties allow relatively straightforward reuse or recycling. However, particular plastics that are toxic because of their material composition (often related to the use of flame retardants, phthalates, and other plasticizers) or those that are designed to be almost instantly discarded are problematic materials whose ecological harms significantly outweigh their social benefits. Convenience, then, underlies the social case for using both single-use plastics and digital corporate platforms. Convenience is a tactic for dealing with a poverty of time and attention but frequently has disastrous longer-term impacts that exist at temporal scales obscured by the information overload and short-term economic focus of communicative capitalism.

The operational logics of the networked computational technologies that play a central part in contemporary life do not simply reside in machines; rather, they pervade how humans perceive the world and structure their engagements with it. Following the French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler, technologies are not external, neutral agents employed by autonomous human beings; indeed, the dynamic process of being human is and always has been fundamentally entangled with technology (1998, 2016). Technologies alter our collective capacities for storing memories and communicating cultures within and across generations. The digital, networked technologies that underpin communicative capitalism remotely store elements of our memories and selves. These electronic prostheses are owned and monetized by corporations that collate vast quantities of data in order to predict and shape behaviours. This economic model, predominantly involving forms of highly targeted advertising, is inextricably bound up with ecologically unsustainable overconsumption. Advertising might try to sell you an organic, more ethically designed product, but it does not try to curb consumptive behaviours; in fact, its raison d’être is to manufacture desire in order to fuel consumption.

The logics of convenience and calculability associated with digital technologies are reflected in how various complex social and ecological problems today are increasingly approached through an ideology of “technological solutionism” (Morozov 2014; Taffel 2018). The answer to just about every conceivable problem is allegedly located in the application of “innovative,” “smart,” and “disruptive” digital technologies underpinned by big data and machine learning. This is to suggest not that digital technologies cannot or do not have important roles to play in tackling contemporary social, political, and ecological crises but that the particular model of Silicon Valley–styled solutionism—which combines the fetishism of technological innovation, quantifiable data, and markets² with a distrust of centralized government, regulation, and formal politics—is itself an ideological construct that presents a particular form of technocratic cyberutopian libertarianism as common sense. If we follow Marx’s (1968, 32) famous statement that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”—that is, the ruling material force of society is its ruling ideological force—then technological solutionism is arguably one of the dominant ideological models of the early twenty-first century.

Technological solutionism is exemplified by The Ocean Cleanup, a project that seeks to employ “advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic” (The Ocean Cleanup 2018). TOC was founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur who, at age nineteen, dropped out of an undergraduate engineering program to work full time on the project. TOC originally sought to construct and deploy the world’s largest floating structure, a 100-kilometre-wide, high-density polyethylene (a fossil fuel–derived thermoplastic), u-shaped floating array that moves with the currents in oceanic gyres to catch and concentrate plastics at a central point from which they would be collected by ship and transported to shore for recycling. Following a TEDx talk entitled “How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves” that went viral,³ Slat launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $2 million US. Since then, the project has seen major investors come on board, including right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Dutch pharmaceutical corporation Royal DSM, supplying funding for the project of more than $31.7 million US.

TOC published a feasibility report in 2014 that was heavily criticized for containing a range of design issues and paying insufficient attention to the environmental issues that the array would cause (Martini 2014). In 2016, TOC tested a 100-metre prototype in the North Sea; however, after just two months, the shackles that connect the array to the mooring failed (Stokstad 2017). This led to a redesign, and in 2017 TOC announced that, rather than a 100-kilometre-wide array, it would deploy numerous one-kilometre-wide booms that would not be anchored to the seabed but have suspended sea anchors. After five years of testing, in September 2018, TOC deployed “Wilson,” its first array in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, colloquially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. However, by December, it was widely reported that the array was unable to retain the plastics initially collected, so further changes had to be implemented (Summers 2018).

TOC’s website home page (www.theoceancleanup.com) features a headline describing the venture as “the largest cleanup in history.” Beneath it is a statement that “over five trillion pieces of plastic currently litter the oceans,” a figure drawn from Eriksen and colleagues (2014). The subsequent section of the home page, which has the subheading “Technology,” declares that “The Ocean Cleanup develops advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. A full-scale deployment of our systems is estimated to clean up 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.” This section is misleading in two ways.

First, the claim that the project’s technological solution will “rid the world’s oceans of plastic” wildly exaggerates the potential efficacy of the project. TOC’s floating barriers are designed to catch macroplastics, so they are unable to collect plastics smaller than two centimetres in diameter (Slat et al. 2014, 177). About 92 percent of the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the oceans is microplastic (under five millimetres in diameter) (Eriksen et al. 2014). Consequently, TOC’s proposed solution will do nothing to remove the vast majority of plastic pieces from the oceans. However, we should note that, though the majority of oceanic plastics by count are microplastics, the majority by weight are macroplastics; plastics over 200 millimetres in diameter comprise about 0.2 percent of the total count but contain 75 percent of the mass of oceanic plastics (Eriksen et al. 2014). Put simply, a single lost fishing net might weigh hundreds of kilograms, whereas microplastics typically weigh fractions of a gram. TOC has the potential to reduce the volume of macroplastics in the oceans, and these macroplastics degrade over time into microplastics. The website is misleading insofar as it suggests that TOC will entirely remove (rid) rather than reduce oceanic plastics and cites count rather than weight immediately before discussing a 50 percent reduction within five years, logically leading readers to assume erroneously that this applies to the previous statistic.

Second, TOC’s array removes plastics only from the uppermost 1.5 metres of the ocean. Plastics and the persistent organic pollutants that they attract in marine environments have been found in deep-sea organisms, including crustaceans that dwell between 7,000 and 10,000 metres below sea level in the Kermadec and Mariana Trenches (Jamieson et al. 2017). Capturing macroplastics at the surface has no impact on the plastics already present in deep-sea environments. Although TOC conducted research concluding that oceanic microplastic concentrations decrease exponentially with depth, and approach zero at a depth of five metres (Kooi et al. 2016), other research indicates that plastics are present at significantly greater depths and mixed throughout a deep surface layer in a way affected by numerous factors, including wind speed (Kukulka et al. 2012). Indeed, TOC’s study was criticized by oceanographers as advancing invalid conclusions because no samples were taken below five metres (Martini 2014).

The key point here is not the suggestion that passive floating arrays cannot assist with reducing the volume of macroplastics in oceanic gyres. If this limited and nuanced claim was advanced by TOC, then it would have presented one potentially useful strategy to be employed in tackling the problem of oceanic plastics. On the contrary, TOC exemplifies technological solutionism because it presents itself as a single, straightforward fix for the entire problem, as denoted by the erroneous claim that the project will rid the oceans of plastics. Presenting a partial and limited technical project as a magic bullet to eliminate entirely the complex problems of oceanic plastics is not just a fantasy that posits a convenient technical remedy for an issue caused by convenience-based overconsumption but also suggests that there is no need for regulation, legislation, or democratic debate since advanced technology will simply resolve the problem.

TOC’s website home page further elaborates the project’s technological orientation with three headings that align with key ideological markers of technological solutionism, arguing that the project is autonomous, energy neutral, and scalable (see figure 9.2).

The first of these tropes, that TOC is autonomous, speaks to the fact that the arrays are designed as passive floating structures able to move after deployment with the oceanic currents that transport plastic debris into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG). The website claims that “algorithms help specify the optimal deployment locations, after which the systems roam the gyres autonomously. Real-time telemetry will allow us to monitor the condition, performance and trajectory of each system.” Here we see TOC deploy terms commonly associated with digital systems—“algorithms,” “automation,” and “real-time feedback”—in order to establish the technological sophistication of the project. The ability of digital systems to automate processes so that they do not require human oversight is frequently cited as a key departure from previous technologies (Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Manovich 2000). Networked digital computers exhibit novel forms of non-human agency, they can make decisions based on the execution of algorithms in response to streams of “real-time” data (Mackenzie 2006), and they operate at speeds that exceed human reactions and can do so continuously, without the need for breaks imposed by human bodies. Autonomy therefore signifies both how digital assemblages exceed the speeds of previous technocultural ensembles and how they can operate with minimal human intervention once in place.

In practice, however, such rhetoric is somewhat dubious. TOC’s arrays—the extraction of their raw materials and the manufacturing processes—are not autonomous, and their deployment requires ships to tow them to the desired locations. Once in place, these systems do not have the capability to repair themselves, with any such work again requiring boats to be sent with the requisite engineers and materials to undertake work that would be economically costly and technically complex because of the remoteness and size of the arrays. Also, the process of extracting and removing the plastic debris caught by the arrays is not automatic; rather, it requires a vessel to travel to the array and gather up the plastic items before returning to shore, where the material can be unloaded and recycled. Furthermore, the claim that “algorithms help specify the optimal deployment location” for the TOC arrays has been questioned, for the project has sought only to explore deployment within the NPSG. TOC claims that its proposed deployment of twenty-nine arrays in the NPSG can remove 42 percent of the mass of plastic currently located there (Slat et al. 2014), which amounts to 17 percentof global marine plastics pollution. Sherman and Van Sebille (2016) argue that deploying the same number of arrays at different locations could capture 31 percent of marine plastics by mass, with a key finding that placing arrays nearer to the coastlines of East Asia would capture a larger volume of plastic before it enters the gyre. Van Sebille, England, and Froyland (2012) found that it takes up to fifty years for some plastic debris to travel from shores to centres of oceanic gyres, so—in addition to the benefit of capturing a greater mass of debris—locating arrays closer to sources of pollution has the benefit of capturing materials earlier, before macroplastic debris further degrades into microplastics and nanoplastics, which the arrays cannot capture.

The second claim, that TOC will be energy neutral, resonates with the popular notion that digital technologies and the solutions that they offer are technologically complex but have minimal environmental impacts, that information technologies are smart, green, and act primarily at an immaterial level. The reality, however, is that digital technologies are complex assemblages of matter dependent on a diverse range of materials, many of which are relatively scarce in terms of their geological and geographical distribution, associated with significant issues in terms of the ecological impacts of their extraction, manufacture, and end-of-life disposal (Cubitt 2016; Gabrys 2013; Rossiter 2016), and often contain materials toxic to human and non-human life forms, notably including plastics, plasticizers (e.g., phthalates), and other additives (e.g., brominated flame retardants) (Taffel 2016).

It is common for the vast majority of the life-cycle energy requirements of digital devices to amass during the extraction and manufacturing stages, with in-use energy consumption being a small fraction (between 10 percent and 20 percent) of lifetime emissions. Although TOC’s promotional materials focus on the fact that its arrays will not require an external energy source to manoeuvre through the gyre once in situ, this definition of being energy neutral excludes the requisite energy for extracting raw materials, manufacturing the arrays, towing them to the gyre, sending ships to the arrays for maintenance, or ferrying plastic debris back to shore for recycling (itself a process that requires significant amounts of energy to melt thermoplastics). Although the in-use stage of TOC’s array is predicated on harnessing the power of the oceans, this claim neglects the huge energy costs associated with production, deployment, collection, and maintenance.

The final claim of this promotional material declares TOC to be a scalable project. This relates to one of the key shifts in the evolution of the array design, the move away from a singular gargantuan (100-kilometre) device to numerous one-kilometre arrays. This change enables TOC to deploy arrays gradually, scaling up over time, with the opportunity to innovate iteratively on the design in order to rectify problems. Iterative design and the accompanying notion of permanent innovation—whereby a platform or product is never finished but can be improved and refined constantly—originate from software development, in which the malleability of code entails that updates can occur as and when changes are made. This approach contrasts with mid-twentieth-century manufacturing processes that relied on standardization, which made alterations costly and consequently relatively infrequent. Scalability also speaks to the ability of digital platforms to traverse scales in an apparently seamless manner, allowing start-up enterprises to gain millions of users rapidly without altering the underlying characteristics of the project.⁴ Anna Tsing (2015) argues that the logic of scalability is inherently bound to the colonial fantasy of conquering the natural world and invokes a reductionism that tends to obscure externalities. Whereas living entities comprise dynamic assemblages constantly modulated and contaminated by collaboration with others, scalability assumes a mode of immutability fundamentally at odds with ecological complexity. This assumption allows a reductionist model predicated on mathematics⁵ to supplant historical and qualitative approaches that pay attention to the diverse specificities that arise from the evolution of assemblages in particular places and ecologies.

TOC has been criticized for espousing precisely this lack of specificity with regard to the ecological impacts of its array and the ability of biotic systems to affect the array itself. Its feasibility report has been criticized for discussing the potential impacts on species of zooplankton that dwell in the boreal and temperate North Pacific but are not found in the NPSG while failing to discuss the probable consequences for species that are found there (Martini 2014). Additionally, the feasibility report fails to discuss the by-catch that will likely occur from passive floating organisms such as the hydrozoan Velella velella, rafting barnacles of the Lepas genus, and the violet sea snail Janthina janthina. Tens of millions of these and other organisms are unlikely to be able to escape the array (Eriksen 2017, 125; 5 Gyres Institute 2015). Furthermore, the arrays are likely to act as biotic aggregating devices, not only accumulating plastics and floating organisms but also attracting fish and other marine life that feed on these organisms, in turn enticing the aquatic species that feed on them (Thaler 2015). Since the arrays are designed to spend a decade at sea, the structures are likely to form semi-permanent oceanic ecosystems, which—because of the high concentration of plastics caught by the arrays—can have severely deleterious impacts on the lives of these organisms. Both the 5 Gyres Institute and Thaler argue that these ecological impacts should be addressed in a formal environmental impact assessment conducted by an external organization, but thus far this has not been undertaken for TOC.

In addition to these issues, TOC’s feasibility report fails to address the issue of biofouling, the process whereby communities of micro-organisms attach themselves to floating structures. The NPSG has a significant community of such rafting species, which tend to be found on larger floating entities as opposed to microplastics (Goldstein, Carson, and Eriksen 2014). TOC accepts that the accumulation of such organisms presents a potential issue in terms of additional weight and drag (Slat et al. 2014), but no feasible solution has been presented, leading Martini (2014) to conclude that “The Ocean Cleanup cannot be said to be feasible unless it develops a realistic plan to address this fundamental ocean deployment issue.” The lack of attention paid by TOC to both how the arrays will affect the specific taxa of the NPSG and how biofouling will affect the arrays themselves exemplifies Tsing’s (2015) critique of how the supposed scalability of digital projects fails to address the complexity and specificity of ecological communities. Effectively, local concerns about by-catch, biofouling, and ecological alteration are rendered invisible by the global-scale solutionist rhetoric of TOC.

Rejecting the idea that digital technologies produce simple solutions to complex ecological crises, and foregrounding how the global rhetoric of scalability often masks a range of local harms, do not mean that employing technology cannot help to alleviate issues such as the global plastics crisis. Indeed, finding thoughtful ways of employing technologies for particular tasks in particular places must be part of the strategy for addressing contemporary ecological issues. However, the real risk present in the technological solutionism illustrated by TOC is that people believe nonsensical claims that it is an autonomous, scalable, and energy-neutral way of eliminating plastics from the Earth’s oceans. Succumbing to this seductive but fallacious narrative entails that there is no need for any form of collective political action since advanced technology—with the aid of a few visionary entrepreneurs and engineers—has provided an unequivocal solution. There would be no need, accordingly, for any further expenditure of precious attention on such non-problems. Put simply, the discourse of technological solutionism suggests that technology will fix the global plastics crisis for us. Herein lies the peril of technological solutionism: it inhibits the forms of messy, difficult, and contested political activity desperately needed to enact substantive changes to deeply destructive consumer cultures based on the fetishization of competitive individualism, choice, and convenience.

In place of the fantasy that technology will single-handedly ameliorate the ecological impacts of consumerism through downstream solutions such as TOC, which only retrieves plastics that have been discarded and entered oceanic gyres, there must be concerted political action to “turn off the tap” that sees an estimated 4.8–12.7 million tonnes of plastics enter the Earth’s oceans each year (Jambeck et al. 2015). Indeed, even TOC’s feasibility report finds that, without reducing plastic inputs into the oceans, the organization’s arrays will not be able to reduce the overall volume (by mass or count) of oceanic plastics, let alone fulfill its claim of ridding the oceans of plastics entirely (Slat et al. 2014). The complete removal of oceanic microplastics is an unattainable dream that derives from the fantasy of total anthropocentric control over ecological systems.

Significantly reducing marine plastics pollution is possible, but achieving this reduction requires legislative action to regulate the use of single-use plastics and prohibit the use of toxic monomers and plasticizers. Here we can find prominent examples in which enacting legislation has led to significant reductions in plastic-related harm. Where legislation has banned particular goods, such as plastic bags in France, California, and South Australia, or the use of particularly toxic materials in products, such as the European Union’s Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, which removed the use of lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, polybrominated biphenyls, polybrominated diphenyl ether, and four phthalates⁶ from microelectronics, the end-of-life harms from these substances are avoided entirely. Alternatively, the more than 80 percent reductions in the use of single-use plastic bags following the introduction of legislation mandating small levies in England, Scotland, and Ireland (BBC 2015; McNeily 2013; Smithers 2016) denote that action short of a ban can still significantly reduce consumption predicated on convenience. Tackling the global plastics crisis requires far more than simply banning single-use plastic bags, though. We need a reappraisal of how much of the 300 million tonnes of plastic used each year is really necessary or beneficial. Ultimately, legislative activity must be designed to reduce significantly the overall volume of plastics produced, with an initial focus on dramatically reducing single-use and particularly toxic plastics.

Legislative efforts are the results of years of campaigning from NGOs and activists and require the complex, contested, and often painstakingly slow process of formal politics. Far from the elegant, simple fix offered by technological solutionism, legislative efforts involve conflict and collaboration and require collectives to mobilize against economically powerful industry groups and lobbyists. At a time when formal politics is often decried as corrupt and incompetent, it is perhaps unsurprising that the reductionist narrative of technological solutionism presents a seductive alternative, but as in the case of TOC unilateral, voluntarist fixes are fantasies that cannot replace large-scale collective action. Legislative action frequently requires citizens to employ digital telecommunications to mobilize support; however, the key departure from raising awareness here is that such activity is not limited to informing individual consumers within the context of communicative capitalism but explicitly attempts to enact forms of collective change supported by mandatory legal frameworks. Dealing with Anthropocenic ecological disasters such as the global plastics crisis requires the use of digital technologies, but they do not provide magic bullets, as is typically proclaimed by technological solutionism. Technologies can assist with the difficult, conflict-based processes of political and cultural change, but they cannot entirely replace them.

1. 1. There are also notable discrepancies in terms of gender, with more male internet users, and age, with younger citizens more likely to have internet access.
2. 2. Typically, this involves venture capital–funded technology startups expected to lose significant sums of money for several years before becoming profitable. Indeed, most startups fail, but investors require only a fraction of those companies to become the next Facebook, Dropbox, or Snapchat for the overall model to be profitable.
3. 3. As of 2018, the video had almost 3 million views.
4. 4. Typically, this involves using platforms such as Amazon Web Services that grant projects access to vast technological infrastructures, with access scaling based on usage and demand. If demand surges, then the project can scale up because it is allocated more computational power, bandwidth, and storage by the Amazon Web Services system.
5. 5. The move from media technologies predicated on chemistry and physics to mathematics is one of the key changes associated with the shift to digital technologies that employ numerical representation (binary code) as a universal format that can be manipulated algorithmically.
6. 6. The four phthalates banned under RoHS are bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP), dibutyl phthalate (DBP), and diisobutyl phthalate (DIPB).

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