From the Bog to the Cloud, livre ebook

Links digital and energy infrastructures with colonial histories to challenge mainstream "green" narratives;

Focuses on Ireland’s land-based resistance movements as a lens to explore global anti-extractive struggles;

Offers a critical alternative to techno-solutionist and eco-modern climate policies.

The green digital transition is underway. But what does this transition look like when dictated by the energy and resource demands of monopoly tech? How has this situation come to be? And where is it being resisted?

This provocative book uncovers the hidden intersections of land, resource extraction and climate policy in the transition to “greener” and “smarter” economies. Challenging eco-modern and techno-solutionist approaches, the book links narratives of sustainability with colonial histories and uneven development, arguing that tech-driven transitions replicate exploitative patterns of imperial capitalism. Using Ireland as a focal point, the authors show how the history and depth of the country’s postcolonial dependency on multinational investment, especially US technology companies, comes into friction with disparate land-based struggles.

Thinking with these movements, the book offers a critique of dependent models of development and proposes an anti-imperialist approach to environmental politics.

Introduction

Chapter 1: Energetic Mediation and Imperial Geographies

Chapter 2: Bog Modernity and Energy Decolonisation

Chapter 3: Data Centre Land

Chapter 4: Atmosphere Meets Cloud

Chapter 5: The Value of a Bog

Chapter 6: Land, Extractivism, and Anti-Imperialist Environmentalism

Conclusion