Environmental activists and digital technology – Uses, criticisms, concerns (and communalist perspectives)
Introduction
Digital technology now plays a central role in our lives, our social relationships, and our activist practices.
It is both a tool for organization and dissemination, a space for counter-discourse and mobilization, but also a source of alienation, dependence, and surveillance.
Its omnipresence cannot be considered independently of the material conditions of its existence.
As Fabien Lebrun points out in Barbarie numérique. Une autre histoire du monde connecté (Digital Barbarism: Another History of the Connected World) (2024), the supposedly “dematerialized” world of digital technology is based on a material foundation of violence: destructive mining, wars for control of resources, labor exploitation, and ecological destruction.
Thus, any reflection on digital technology must begin by asking the question: are we talking about a neutral tool, or a totalizing technological system, inseparable from the industrial, colonial, and military capitalism that gave birth to it?
For communalist social ecology, this question is not merely theoretical: it requires reflection on how to collectively regain control over technology, an essential condition for any political and ecological autonomy.
It is from this critical perspective—but one that is open to the reconstruction of the commons—that the Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop proposes to address the issue of digital technology through four axes: uses, critiques, concerns, and proposals.
I. Uses: between constraint, tactics, and experimentation
For most environmental activists, digital technology is now an essential infrastructure: a means of communication, organization, and dissemination.
It makes it possible to reach a wide audience, coordinate scattered struggles, and experiment with forms of translocal solidarity.
But these uses are often constrained: they stem from the breakdown of the social fabric and the decline of face-to-face interaction in a world dominated by distance, speed, and fragmentation.
Even when used in an activist context, digital technology is never neutral.
Commercial platforms shape exchanges according to their market logic: data collection, commodification of attention, standardization of discourse. Their logic of instantaneity and disembodied communication weakens forms of direct organization and the emotional connection to the territory—both of which are foundations of social ecology and communalism.
This is why many environmental collectives are experimenting with forms of critical use: the use of free software, self-managed servers, decentralized tools, or even coordination between online coordination and in-person assemblies.
For the most radical activists, the uses of digital technology thus oscillate between necessity and vigilance, between the urgency to act and the awareness of the trap.
II. Criticisms: digital technology as a system of domination
Digital technology is not just a set of tools: it constitutes an architecture of domination embedded in the logic of globalized capitalism.
Its development relies on energy-intensive physical infrastructure (data centers, satellites, undersea cables, etc.), on extractivism and human exploitation in the Global South, and on societies’ growing dependence on centralized networks.
As Jacques Ellul, Bernard Charbonneau, Ivan Illich, André Gorz, Cornelius Castoriadis, Silvia Federici, and Floréal M. Romero have shown, technology is never neutral: it always embodies a political and social choice.
Under capitalism, it reproduces the logic of domination: separation between designers and users, dispossession of knowledge, loss of autonomy, and subordination of life to the imperatives of growth.
Digital technology accentuates this dynamic.
By dissolving the direct relationship with the world and substituting connection for relationship, it contributes to an anthropological rupture: the loss of rhythm, silence, sensitivity, and community.
This process, analyzed by both Karl Marx and David Le Breton, is part of the ongoing rationalization of the economy and its excesses: the transformation of technology into an instrument of acceleration, exploitation, and control.
In short, digital technology is the capitalist tool par excellence: digital technology and AI are in fact only the logical continuation of the evolution of a relentlessly improved technology aimed at adapting human beings to the endless acceleration of the coercive and intrinsic dynamics of capitalist value . The aim is to strip humans of their social nature and break all resistance in order to make them increasingly efficient, effective, profitable, and productive. The rhetoric of all the pseudo-political elites, proclaiming their opposition to totalitarianism, is nothing but hot air, pure ideological discourse hiding a neoliberal governmentality that deploys this logic of value into the deepest aspects of existence. A policy that is written into the genes of capital and can only promote this reformatting of human beings in the image of the insane programs of 20th-century totalitarianism to produce a “new man.” An even more dangerous program, in that, like Orwell’s, it remains invisible and taken for granted.
III. Concerns: acting within and against the system
The question is therefore not simply “should we or should we not use digital technology?”, but rather: how can we act within and against it?
We are living with a structural contradiction: we must use the tools of the system to challenge it, to communicate, or simply to exist in the public sphere.
This tension is not a moral inconsistency but a political tragedy: that of having to resort to what we reject.
This is the paradoxical condition of all struggles in technocapitalist society.
But this condition is not a weakness of the movement—it is its starting point: learning to struggle while dependent, without ceasing to work to overcome that dependence.
This requires distinguishing between:
• the forced uses of digital technology (out of necessity, for lack of an immediate alternative);
• and critical or transitional uses, which seek to divert, minimize, or collectivize technology in the service of the common good.
Initiatives have existed for several decades: free software (GNU/Linux), community infrastructure (Guifi.net, Freifunk), free hardware (Arduino), low-tech workshops, and French collectives such as Framasoft, La Quadrature du Net, and CHATONS.
They show that it is possible to practice technical autonomy, even if only very partially, within the framework of a still capitalist society.
But these practices remain fragile in the long term: they cannot be sustained without a political base, without popular institutions capable of setting collective limits and creating new tools.
Criticism of digital technology cannot therefore be dissociated from the self-institution of local political power: that of municipalities, popular assemblies—and the federation and confederation of the latter, from the grassroots up.
Politics conceived as a unifying body for common social activities, with a view to meeting basic needs at the local level and rebuilding society through mutual aid, solidarity, and the commons.
IV. Proposal: communotechny as an ethical, political, and convivial horizon
In light of these observations, the Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop proposes the notion of communotechny as a dialectical horizon.
Communotechny (noun)
From the Latin communis (common, shared) and the Greek technè (art, know-how).
-> A set of technical practices developed, mastered, and transformed collectively within democratic and ecological communities.
Communotechny does not refer to an ideal technology, nor to a pure and simple rejection of technology, but to the first of all techniques: political praxis, which conditions all others.
It consists of subjecting human techniques to the principles of direct democracy, sobriety, conviviality, and symbiosis with nature.
It is in line with the thinking of Lewis Mumford on democratic techniques, Ivan Illich on convivial tools, and Murray Bookchin on technological autonomy within libertarian municipalism.
Conviviality as a condition of commune-technique
For Illich, a tool is said to be convivial when it reinforces autonomy and cooperation rather than undermining them.
It allows everyone to act without depending on a body of specialists, and the community to govern itself without delegating its power to technical devices or experts.
This is also what Gorz rightly pointed out: “self-management requires tools that can be self-managed.”
In other words, user-friendliness refers to an ecology of technical action, where the tool serves the person integrated into the community, and not the other way around.
It is therefore not an addition to the soul, but a political measure of freedom: an instrument is user-friendly if it allows a community to limit itself, learn together, and decide how to use it.
Towards convivial and communalist techniques
Communotechny recognizes that, in the current phase, the use of digital technology may be temporarily necessary—but only if it is relocalized, collectivized, de-hierarchized, and reappropriated.
It is not a question of “adapting” current digital technology, but of politically domesticating it, collectively reinventing it, placing it under the control of communes and popular assemblies, in a logic of giving, knowledge sharing, and technical conviviality.
As Steka reminds us, “we do not yet know what a communalist society will be able to use or invent” in terms of techniques.
But the challenge remains that of being able to grasp techniques—even technologies—capable of relieving us of overly arduous or repetitive work, without alienating other populations such as those in the “global South,” nor depriving us of the “doing together” that underpins all human creation and all genuine social bonds—the only ones that foster true communication and constitute its ontological essence.
This recognition of our ignorance is not a weakness, but a condition of lucidity: it forces us to think of the communotechno-political transition not as a plan, but as a collective learning process.
Thus, communotechny can be understood as an instituted conviviality—a conscious pooling of technical means, guided by the values of freedom, self-management, self-limitation, and cooperation.
It constitutes both an ethical compass and a project of emancipation:
• breaking free from dependence without giving up the capacity to act;
• reinventing our actions, our rhythms, and our tools on the scale of living communities;
• making technology no longer a power over life, but an art of connection, moderation, and community.
Conclusion
Environmental activists face a contradiction that no one can avoid: acting within a technological world that they wish to transcend.
We must carry out our actions under the influence of a technological infrastructure that we want to abolish.
This contradiction must become the site of a lucid praxis, based on radical criticism, concrete experimentation, and the reconstruction of the common good.
Communotechnics, within the communalist emancipatory project, does not offer a magic solution: it charts a direction, a horizon, a way of inhabiting the world by reconciling know-how, autonomy, conviviality, and ecological and social responsibility.
Rebound :