Today’s digital technologies consume a massive amount of resources – but there are alternatives. Can we rethink tech infrastructures around sustainability instead of exploitation?
Our current system extracts Earth’s materials to fuel industry and computation. Nature becomes data; life is reduced to quantifiable, exploitable parts within a global circuit.
Against extraction stands regeneration: a living web of unpredictable lifeforms collaborating to endure, revealing new possibilities for nurturing and healing our biosphere.
WHY THIS PROJECT
What is “digital infrastructure”?
If you are reading these lines, you are already interacting with a piece of it: smartphones and computers are terminals of a vast, planet-wide communication network that includes servers, data centers, submarine cables, power plants and much more. Here, we will analyze digital infrastructure through six “realms”, each representing a specific aspect of planetary digital networks: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User.
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THE EARTH REALM
“Earth” is where the resources and energy needed to build, sustain and expand the planetary digital communication infrastructure are found.
At this level, we are currently witnessing a competition between two paradigms: a dominant “hyperextractivist” mode, and a new yet ancient, sustainable alternative. The latter has been called “sympoiesis”: a process of “collective creation”, where living beings – human and more than human – incessantly co-produce systems, worlds, and meanings. Here you are invited to explore an atlas of allegorical symbols, each representing a specific aspect of this realm and its competing models.
Above - Hyperextractivism
Extraction
The Picaxe
The pickaxe breaks the earth’s crust and lays open its hidden treasures. Today, extractivism has become synonymous with conquest and domination.
Ever since hominids discovered the usefulness of clay and flint, the soil we walk on has been treated as a source of precious materials. Extractivism goes beyond minerals, shaping the global economy and reminding us that, even in the age of digital technologies, natural resources remain more precious and necessary than ever before.
Destruction
Mineral Substrate
As the availability of resources decreases, their extraction becomes increasingly destructive, with devastating environmental and social consequences.
Mineral resources are limited. Even those that could in theory regenerate, like fossil fuels, can’t do so in a human timescale. Yet capitalism’s hunger for energy and minerals is inexhaustible, and as their availability dwindles on earth, some already dream of conquering new reserves of precious metals in outer space.
Draining
The Oil Rig
Fossil fuels are the condensed remnants of ancient life, accumulated over millions of years beneath the Earth’s crust.
Their extraction is an act of temporal violence – draining the deep time of the planet to fuel the instantaneity of the present. Every barrel of oil embodies millennia of geological accumulation turned into seconds of combustion. The digital world, often imagined as immaterial, runs on this liquefied past – a hidden death cult.
Finance
The Semiconductor Chip
The microchip is the engine of financial abstraction. It translates matter into value, electrons into capital, speed into control.
The global semiconductor industry depends on complex supply chains of rare minerals and fossil-powered manufacturing, yet it sustains the illusion of dematerialized wealth. Finance today moves at the pace of computation: algorithms replacing brokers, speculation replacing production. The chip is the new mint of late capitalism.
Reduction
The Mapped Surface
To map is to simplify: to compress the vast complexity of the world into a legible surface. Reduction is a mode of domination.
Reduction is both a technical and ideological gesture: it transforms the unmeasurable into units, the continuous into discrete points, the living into data. Digital cartographies, from satellite imagery to AI models, flatten the world to make it actionable. This process promises control but also erases depth: the more we quantify, the less we perceive.
Exploitation
The Battery
Behind its sleek surface, the battery hides a chain of exploitation that stretches from Congolese cobalt mines to Chinese gigafactories.
The battery is the green icon of the digital age: a promise of autonomy, mobility, and sustainability. HoweverHower, energy is stored through extraction, not liberation. The portable device depends on invisible workers and damaged landscapes. Even “clean” energy technologies replicate the colonial logic of resource frontiers.
Below - Sympoiesis
Cooperate
The Coral
Corals are not single organisms but living assemblages – colonies of polyps entwined with algae, bacteria, and minerals.
They embody a model of existence alternative to extractivism: one based on cooperation, interdependence, and mutual care. Each reef is an infrastructure of shared survival, where the boundary between individual and collective dissolves. In an age obsessed with competition and extraction, coral reminds us that thriving means building together, not apart.
Propagate
The Dandelion
The dandelion’s seeds spread through air, carried by the slightest wind. Its strategy is not domination, but diffusion.
Every seed holds the potential to root in new, unexpected places. Propagation here is not replication but adaptation: a quiet, persistent insurgency of life. Like memes or open-source code, dandelions teach that survival in a hostile environment depends on the ability to spread everywhere lightly. To propagate is to become resilient.
Be Aware
Tree of Life
The Tree of Knowledge, Yggdrasil, Kalpavriksha, the World Tree – the Tree of Life has many names, all of them whispering: “Be aware.”
A tree as ancient as the universe itself, connecting heaven and earth and revealing forbidden secrets about good and evil: many religions and mythologies across in different cultures and epochs have shared this symbol. Today, it lives on through the shrewd appropriation of its fruit as an emblem of digital technology.
Heal
The Herbarium
The herbarium is a memory of care, a quiet technology of preservation, each pressed leaf both record and remedy: a gesture of attention.
Digital infrastructures could be designed as herbariums of the planet: sensitive archives that store not only data, but relations of care between humans, materials, and ecosystems. To heal means to slow down extraction and cultivate reciprocity – to imagine networks that give back what they take, that regenerate instead of deplete.
Decolonize
Achillea Millefolium
Achillea millefolium – yarrow – grows everywhere: in cracks, wastelands, and forgotten fields.
Yarrow doesn’t conquer territory; it reclaims it.
Its roots spread horizontally, weaving networks underground. Its leaves heal wounds. Its flowers attract pollinators. Yarrow is a system of care disguised as a weed. To decolonize means to unlearn the hierarchies that separate knowledge from intuition and science from ritual. To decolonize is to grow like Achillea: resilient, relational, and ungovernable.
Survive
The Jellyfish
The jellyfish drifts through shifting currents with effortless resilience: a living algorithm of adaptability.
It thrives without excess, embodying a logic of minimal energy use and continuous transformation. In an age when our digital systems consume oceans of electricity to simulate intelligence, the jellyfish offers another model: computation that flows with, not against, its environment. To survive is to design infrastructures that can flex, scale down, and coexist.
THE (W)HOLE REPOSITORY
Congratulations on making it this far!
In the section below, you will find a carefully curated list of online resources that aim to study, critique, and improve the vast world of digital infrastructures, with a special focus on the topics presented in this realm. If you like this section, please make sure to visit the main page of our repository, where you will find many more links from all the other realms of the (W)HOLE project.
Art
Post Growth – Art-research toolkit for degrowth futures
Sustainability
Circular Economies
Environmental Justice
Summary
Interactive tools, videos, and workshop materials to rethink growth. Explore energy, labor, and planetary limits; use cards and exercises to spark classroom and community discussions.
Phantom Islands is a sound atlas of imagined islands plotted on maps. Mixing field recordings, archives, and synthesis, it explores how fiction and data blur the line between place and imagination.
Antimundo is an artistic platform that explores the intersections of ecology, technology, and resistance. It investigates alternative worldviews and infrastructures that challenge extractivist and colonial paradigms.
ARECACEAE is a poetic web experiment intertwining botany, computation, and digital aesthetics. Through algorithmic imagery of palm trees, it reflects on the artificial reproduction of nature and the ecological implications of digital simulation.
Earth by Warp – A Portal for Creative and Planetary Futures
Sustainability
Community
Subversion
Summary
Earth by Warp is an experimental digital space merging art, music, and ecology. Created by Warp Records, it showcases projects that explore the entanglement between creativity, environmental awareness, and collective futures through multimedia storytelling.
A living publication connecting mycology, art, and technology. Fungal Page embraces the metaphor of networks and decay as an alternative to extractive growth models, inviting ecological and collective modes of being.
An evolving artistic and research platform exploring interspecies communication and shared ecologies, proposing care and empathy as foundations for multispecies coexistence.
An art and design collective exploring nonhuman rights, posthuman ethics, and speculative futures. Their works use humor and storytelling to question anthropocentrism and technological domination.
PLANT is an experimental web project that visualizes the internet as a living ecosystem. Through interactive design and generative visuals, it reveals the organic and unstable nature of digital networks while proposing a more ecological, symbiotic view of computation.
Artist research exploring geology as computation: soil, minerals, and ground signals as circuits and memory. Essays, workshops, and experiments on “earth-as-medium” electronics.
Queer Futurism: Denizens of Liminality – Queer Nature
Intersectionality
Decolonialism
Sustainability
Summary
A poetic exploration of queer futurism and ecological kinship, this project reimagines survival and belonging beyond binaries, blending decolonial ecology with speculative storytelling.
The Toaster Project – Making a toaster from scratch
Resources
Exploitation
Alternatives
Summary
Designer Thomas Thwaites mines, smelts, and molds parts to build a £4.99 toaster from raw materials-exposing hidden supply chains, industrial complexity, and the limits of DIY.
An artistic web project exploring extraction, land, and digital colonialism, connecting ecological degradation with the invisible infrastructures powering global computation.
An online magazine exploring how technology intersects with climate justice, publishing accessible articles, research, and community-led reflections on sustainable, equitable digital futures.
An independent online magazine highlighting creators, communities, and projects that imagine a healthier, more humane internet culture beyond platform capitalism and extractive digital norms.
Essays and links on the politics of technological stacks-cables, data centers, logistics, standards-showing how power flows through infrastructure and how people can study and contest it.
Subtopia’s 2009 essay on seaborne “labor camps”: offshore worker housing/prisons as mobile zones of control, tying logistics, migration, and speculative urbanism.
MOLD explores the relationship between food systems, design, and ecology. It investigates how technology and culture shape what we eat, proposing regenerative and socially just futures for nourishment and the planet.
An essay advocating for an internet grounded in Indigenous values of reciprocity, care, and community, challenging extractive and colonial models of digital infrastructure.
An online magazine powered by solar energy that explores sustainable technologies, resource-conscious design, and practical strategies for a resilient digital future.
A platform for multispecies collaboration, Interspecies.io connects artists, scientists, and activists to rethink coexistence, communication, and shared habitats between human and nonhuman life.
Tierra Común is a network of scholars, activists, and technologists working toward data justice from a Global South perspective. It challenges data colonialism and promotes community-led governance of data as a shared resource grounded in local autonomy and solidarity.
A community exploring sustainable computing practices inspired by permaculture, focusing on energy efficiency, repair, reuse, and ecological awareness in digital design.
Step-by-step actions to relocalize: strengthen local food, start co-ops, change policy, and run campaigns. Toolkits, examples, and resources to organize in your community.
Created by Data for Black Lives, this educational resource unpacks the structural links between capitalism, racism, and data extraction. It exposes how algorithmic systems reproduce inequality while offering frameworks for data justice and collective liberation.
A playful combinatorial sandbox where users merge elements to create unexpected worlds, encouraging exploration, creativity, and shared discovery through simple, open-ended interaction.
The Sustainable Institution – Symposium, Residency & Toolkit
Sustainability
Resources
Justice
Summary
International project for greener cultural institutions: a symposium series, artist residency, and open toolkit. In partnership with E-WERK Luckenwalde, LUMA Arles, and Rupert.
An educational platform offering resources on ecological design, regenerative economies, and community-based approaches to sustainability and social transformation.
A practical climate-action guide offering accessible steps individuals can take across daily life, highlighting how personal choices connect to broader ecological justice and collective environmental impact.
Age of Union – Environmental Alliance for Planetary Change
Justice
Community
Sustainability
Summary
Age of Union is a global environmental alliance supporting restoration projects and creative activism. Through films, education, and partnerships, it promotes collective ecological responsibility and regenerative relationships between humans and the planet.
Framework designs modular, repairable laptops that challenge planned obsolescence and electronic waste. By empowering users to fix, upgrade, and customize their devices, it promotes a circular economy and a more sustainable approach to personal technology.
Grow by Ginkgo supports bio-designers working with living materials. It promotes regenerative production and research at the intersection of biotechnology, ecology, and creativity.
The Slow Grind: How Productivity Culture Harms Bodies and the Earth – Atmos
Justice
Intersectionality
Care
Summary
An article connecting ecofeminism, disability justice, and anti-capitalist critique, showing how productivity culture exploits both human and planetary bodies.
An open-access publication exploring methods and tools for circular design, integrating sustainability, systems thinking, and collaborative learning in design practice.
Archaeologies and Organologies: Toward an Understanding of Media Materialism - Leonardo Journal (MIT Press)
Resources
Knowledge
Decolonialism
Summary
An academic essay tracing the material, historical, and philosophical dimensions of media technologies, linking computation to planetary and cultural infrastructures.
An exploration of “counter-mapping” as a decolonial practice that reclaims geography from extractive and colonial frameworks, emphasizing storytelling, memory, and local knowledge.
Jiang Gaoming – Chinese Botanist, Ecologist & Conservation Advocate
Sustainability
Environmental Justice
Summary
Born 1964 in Shandong, Jiang Gaoming is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He champions ecological restoration, critiques blind tree-planting, and promotes letting nature recover naturally.
The Extractive Growth of Artificially Intelligent Real Estate – Failed Architecture
Exploitation
Alternatives
Transparency
Summary
Failed Architecture examines how AI-driven real estate amplifies extraction and inequality, revealing the material and political dimensions of digital urbanism.
A six-issue independent magazine exploring the circulation of people, goods, information, and ideas across territories. It examines migration as a planetary condition shaped by technology, politics, and ecology.
Examines how photography and human perception are transformed by AI-driven image flows and machine vision, asking what it means to live amidst ‘machine eyes’.
Inspired by Donna Haraway’s philosophy, this Next Nature article explores how humanity can coexist with ecological and technological complexities rather than seeking control. It advocates for symbiosis, responsibility, and care in shaping future ecosystems.
Explores how “field-guide” practices help us navigate and make sense of the complex, layered infrastructures of the cloud-turning invisible systems visible through mapping and speculation.
