Approaching digital anthropocene(s): A double vision

It is becoming increasingly difficult to address environmental questions without considering how they overlap and intersect with digital concerns. We observe and make our understandings of environments through, for example, digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. Conversely, we make the digital through the appropriation of environmental forms; crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld devices, while powering our data use through vast quantities of energy consumption. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, whose politics is pressing. While it is evident that the anthropocene is constituted through colonial histories, what this collection foregrounds is how deeply interwoven it is with the tools, devices, and computational logics that are part of such histories. In this special issue, we bring together four anthropology and Science and Technology (STS) scholars, each of whom offers a different empirical instance of approaching digital anthropocenes. Through various modes of sensing, governing, intervening, and speculating, each article reveals a particular colonial legacy that provokes an alternate form of politics (proto, limit, civic, and pre-figurative). What is revealed in each case, we claim, is the legacy of a colonial infrastructure that whilst saturated in forms of technological inequality and injustice also affords a counter political re-imagining through digital mediations.