Considering socio-ecological digital activism through a Fuchsean lens

Abstract

Digital technologies, platforms and applications, developed and disseminated by digital capitalist monopolies that at times collude with governments, pose a risk to democracy and socio-ecological justice. The potential for pro-democratic political activism can be eroded through people’s enmeshment in solipsistic digital practices or be undercut by algorithmic manipulation among other mechanisms. And when grassroots activists striving for socio-ecological justice utilise digital tools, they can be targeted through the workings of what Christian Fuchs calls the ‘surveillance-industrial complex’. For Fuchs, though, digital means remain key to anti-capitalist resistance, and he theorises that the digital commons and the digital public sphere are vitally important sites for such resistance. This paper presents a reading of Fuchs’s arguments, supplemented by insights from global South theorists, and uses the environmental conservation and human rights organisation Environmental Defenders as a case.