Sprouting technology otherwise, hospicing negative commons -- Rethinking technology in the transition to sustainability-oriented futures

TL;DR

This paper proposes a conceptual framework using four categories—ruins, ghosts, seeds, and visions—to analyze how ICT can transition towards sustainability by managing continuity, adaptation, and rupture in socio-technical systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining transition studies and commons theory to guide the reorientation of ICT for sustainability, integrating empirical and speculative insights.

Findings

Framework helps identify obsolete, latent, and emerging technological elements.

Supports understanding of socio-technical continuity and change in sustainability transitions.

Provides practical guidance for researchers and practitioners in rethinking ICT futures.

Abstract

Due to its significant and growing environmental harms, both directly through its materiality and indirectly through its pervasive integration into unsustainable economic systems, ICT will need to be radically redirected to align with sustainability-oriented futures. While the role of ICT in such futures will likely diverge significantly from current dynamics, it will probably not be entirely disconnected from the present. Instead, such transition involves complex dynamics of continuity, adaptation and rupture. Drawing from recent work in transition studies, the commons (particularly "negative commons"), as well as some of the Limits literature, this article proposes a conceptual framework for navigating this redirection. The framework attempts to bring together the disentanglement from sociotechnical elements incompatible with long-term sustainability and the support of existing practices that may serve as foundations for alternative technological paths. It introduces four categories: ruins, ghosts, seeds and visions, to examine how material and cultural aspects of computing may become obsolete, persist in latent or reinterpreted forms, or contribute to sustainability-oriented futures. Through both empirical and speculative examples, I intend to show how this lens can help researchers and practitioners engage more concretely with the tensions, inheritances, and opportunities involved in redirecting computing towards more sustainable and equitable futures.