The Global Sustainability of Digital Infrastructures

How the development of digital infrastructures gives rise to global sustainability challenges—such as climate change—is the leitmotif of this research note. For such an inquiry, I elucidate the need to trace the temporally long and ecological sociotechnical processes in the development of digital infrastructures. The premise is that these processes account for global sustainability challenges, which cross both periods and regions of the world. In addition, I present the digital infrastructure for global money and payment as a relevant setting to trace these temporally long and ecological sociotechnical processes. This infrastructure also helps to illustrate empirical approaches based on two research strategies: longitudinal and prospective, as well as a multi-field inquiry. Revealing temporally long and ecological sociotechnical processes, lastly, grounds a need to reconceptualise the instrumentality of technology.