Digital X Climates is an interdisciplinary network dedicated to advancing research, dialogue, and public engagement on the entanglements of digital technologies with environmental, social, and political ecologies. We foster critical inquiry into the material infrastructures, labor relations, cultural imaginaries, and policy arrangements that sustain digital systems, from data centers and extractive supply chains to platforms, algorithms, and networked devices. Challenging persistent narratives of digital immateriality and limitless innovation, Digital X Climates foregrounds the environmental costs and uneven human consequences of contemporary digital technologies, situating them within broader planetary and ecological limits.

The “X” in Digital X Climates marks both a critical conjunction and tension, insisting that “digital” and “climate” be thought together as entangled domains while acknowledging their possible incompatibilities and the demand for non-toxic, even non-digital futures. It also names the open variable of scholarly inquiry into how digital systems and climatic conditions co-produce one another (e.g., crisis, embodiment, inequity, infrastructure).

Bringing together digital humanities scholars from a range of methods and backgrounds, the group asks how digital systems contribute to the climate crisis and global inequality, and how they might be reimagined otherwise. It examines the legal, regulatory, cultural, and design challenges involved in asserting limits on digital capitalism, while exploring how critical and digital humanities approaches can support practices of resistance, accountability, and intervention. Through collaborative research and exchange, Digital X Climates seeks to cultivate alternative techno-ecological futures grounded in sustainability, justice, and collective care.

Image: Large-scale projection artwork by Studio Above&Below, “Explorations of digital material ecology” (virtual sculpture responsive to water surface data collected by nearby river), 2021.