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Abstract

Today, two great signs of change are occurring. On the one hand, the capitalist world economy is putting tremendous pressure on the earth's biosphere and bringing an onslaught of destruction to immediate environments and vulnerable people worldwide. On the other hand, the rise of new and progressive social-economic foundations is the result of an unprecedented increase of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Therefore it is arguably more crucial than ever to understand how social, economic and ecological foundations of the internet and ICT infrastructures are interwoven. What are we-as scholars, activists and citizens-to make of ICTs that seem to emerge from an economic and social system based upon ecological destruction and social oppression, while at the same time engaging millions of people in the proliferation of information, knowledge and active democratic collaboration? This special issue investigates how we can begin to understand this problem, and how we can hope to balance the perils and promises of ICTs in order to make way for a just and sustainable paradigm.Keywords: Commons based peer production, peer-to-peer, political ecology, ICTs, materiality, immateriality, transition, sustainability, digital commons.Recent studies by Christian Fuchs have examined the complex web of production relations and the new division of digital labour that makes possible the vast and cheap ICT infrastructure as we know it (Fuchs 2013;. The analysis partly reveals that ICT products and infrastructure embody slave-like conditions that perpetually force mine and assembly workers into positions of dependency. Expanding this argument, the WWF has reported (Reed and Miranda 2007) that mining in the Congo basin poses considerable threats to the local environment in the form of pollution, loss of biodiversity, and an increased presence of businessas-usual made possible by roads and railways. This research highlights that ICTs are inherently material, as opposed to purely cognitive or code based, because the ICT infrastructure under the given economic structure embodies slave-like working conditions, various class relations and undesirable ecological consequences (see also Humphrey 2001). Thus, the position that views the emerging digital economy as purely immaterial is challenged.At the same time, the emerging digital commons provide a new and promising platform for social developments, arguably enabled by the progressive dynamics of ICT development. These are predominantly manifested within commons-based peer production, i.e., a new mode of collaborative, social production ; and grassroots desktop manufacturing or community-driven makerspaces, i.e. forms of bottom-up, distributed manufacturing. The most well-known examples of commons-based peer production are the free/open source software projects and the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia. While these novel forms of social organisation are immanent in capitalism, they also present the potential to challenge the dominant capitalist system of production and ev...