Pluralistic: The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism (11 Oct 2025)


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A field of utility scale solar. Behind the mountains on the horizon line loom two logos: the original EFF 'clenched fist and lightning bolt' logo and the first Earth Day logo. They are reflected in the solar panels. Behind them roils hellish red-shot smoke.

The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism (permalink)

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a climate activist. I used to be – I even used to ring strangers' doorbells on behalf of Greenpeace. But a quarter of a century ago, I fell in with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and became a lifelong digital rights activist, and switched to cheering on environmental activists from the sidelines of their fight:

https://eff.org

Over the decades, there've been many moments where I've been struck by the parallels between climate activism and tech activism. In both cases, the foundational challenge is getting people to care about the looming catastrophic effects of bad policies. In both cases, those policies and their effects are highly abstract and technical, and are downstream of a huge, weird, cross-cutting set of contingencies and circumstances, which makes it hard for anyone to truly take their measure. You don't just have to master the technical issues – you have to get your arms around the economic, social and political issues, too. Bad tech policy and bad climate policy are both wicked problems, hard to define and even harder to solve.

Whether we're talking about tech or the climate, there is a surefire way to get people to care about these issues: simply do nothing, allow these problems to get worse, and worse still, until millions of peoples' lives have been ruined. Then, of course, people will care. If we do nothing about fire debt and rising temperatures, then everyone who lives in the urban-wildlife interface will lose their homes and possibly their lives to a wildfire. And if we do nothing about surveillance, manipulation and monopoly, then eventually everyone will find their pay slashed, their freedoms curtailed, their identities stolen, and their pockets picked by a tech monopolist or an opportunistic predator living off of the monopolist's weakened, vulnerable victims.

In some important sense, the job of an activist is to raise the salience and convey the urgency of these issues before those consequences are upon us. Both climate and tech activists use storytelling to do this, and I've written novels that are cautionary tales about what happens if we get climate wrong and if we get tech wrong, as well as novels that are meant to inspire hope for the kind of world we could have if we get them right.

Both climate and tech activists have to contend with bullshit neoliberal "solutions" that propose to solve the problem by deploying technologically outlandish policies. Tech activists have to fight with people who say we can solve the commercial surveillance problem by "getting consent" to spy on people. Environmental activists have to fight with people who say we can control emissions with garbage "carbon credits" that make Elon Musk into a centibillionaire by selling indulgences to SUV manufacturers that fill our roads and our skies with ever-mounting clouds of CO2 and carcinogenic exhaust:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Both climate and tech activists have to show people that this crisis stems from systemic dysfunctions, not individual consumption choices. We have to get our supporters to stop focusing on agonizing about whether they should use a plastic straw or agonizing about whether they should quit Facebook, and focus instead on using politics to shatter the power of the giant, wildly profitable corporations that got us into this crisis. We need to smash oil companies like Chevron and Exxon, and we have to smash oily rag companies like Facebook and Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach

Beyond these parallels, both climate and tech activism have some actual commonalities. The biggest barrier to getting good tech or climate policy is the power of the cartel that dominates each sector. Cartels aren't just contrivances for raising prices – they're even better at capturing their regulators. A hundred small and medium-sized companies are a hopeless rabble, unable to agree on anything – especially what they want from regulators. But five giant companies find it very easy to come to agreement, and they are aslosh in monopoly cash, which they can mobilize to get their way in policy forums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

But there's another, more hopeful parallel between tech and climate: after decades of vapor lock, both have seen rapid global improvement. Solar is racing ahead of all expectations. Globally, we're getting more power from solar than we are from coal. Solar is cheaper than any form of fossil fuel. Solar gets better every day, and we're figuring out how to overcome some of the serious challenges to solar, like finding all the materials we'll need for a solar transition. It turns out that a lot of the challenges on that front boil down to the fact that recycling old cleantech uses up a lot of energy. But as solar gets cheaper and more efficient, we have a lot of energy, and we can take apart an old solar panel that ran at 20% efficiency and use its recovered materials to make two solar panels that each run at 40% efficiency:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

Then there's tech. The past half-decade has seen more global action on tech regulation than the previous 40 years. Not all of it is good – plenty of it is as stupid as pinning your hopes on carbon capture or fusion reactors – but governments all over the world have got the bit in their teeth and they're champing at it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

For both climate and tech, Trump is turning out to be a (mixed) blessing in disguise. Sure, he's killing decarbonization in the US, but he's also alienating America's (former) allies so quickly and thoroughly that many countries are moving closer to China's orbit. Again, that's a mixed blessing, but one very positive impact of Trump's beliigerence is that it has lit a fire under the leaders of other (formerly) friendly countries, spurring big, ambitious programs to escape US-based tech companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Back in the first Trump administration, tariffs on Chinese solar panels led Chinese manufacturers to flood countries in the global south with solar panels that were so cheap that whole regions solarized, virtually overnight. Pakistan – one of the countries suffering the most from a changing climate, and most at risk from future changes – is now a solar nation, so much so that its national power company is in danger of going bust because everyone's making their own electricity rather than buying it from the grid.

Meanwhile, Putin's invasion of Ukraine pushed Europe – all of it, but especially Germany – into a galloping solar transition of its own. Virtually every high rise in Germany is now dotted (or even covered) with cheap, easy to hang balcony solar panels. Europe is way ahead of its energy transition goals:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/

Putin's not the only dictator pushing Europe to enact rapid changes in order to escape US Big Tech silos, building a "Eurostack" of open, transparent, made-in-the-EU applications and services that are meant to replace American tech platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Another, unhappier commonality between tech and climate: it's not just that both are getting better faster than we'd thought possible, it's also that they're both getting worse faster than we'd feared.

On climate, virtually every bad thing that showed up in our models is breaking faster than we thought it would. The permafrost is melting faster and it's releasing more methane than we'd anticipated. The gulf stream and jet stream are bother getting more screwy, more quickly than predicted. Sure, we're decarbonizing and solarizing faster than we thought we could – but the world is falling apart faster than we thought it would, too:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/something-extraordinary-just-happened

And I don't have to tell you what's happening with tech. Technofascism is ascendant. ICE is using our devices to round up our neighbors and send them to torture prisons. Trump is using our social media posts to hunt down "the radical left" as a prelude to mass purges. Seven AI companies are now a third of the S&P 500, and they're losing money even faster than they are emitting carbon, and the crash on the horizon is gonna make 2008 look like a walk in the park:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/

What's more, tech and cleantech are merging. The enshittification that has turned every platform to shit can now turn every part of the cleantech stack into a pile of shit, too. If Apple can pull the ICEBlock app out of your phone, then a solar inverter company can also remotely shut down your solar array and leave you in the dark:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/america-with-chinese-characteristics/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

For all of this century, I've been a tech activist, but it's turning out that being a tech activist has an awful lot in common with being a climate activist, and sometimes – as when we're fighting to keep EVs from being bricked by their manufacturers or to prevent rent-seeking with inverters – they're literally the same thing.

The great James Boyle has described the transformational power of the word "ecology." Without that word, there's no obvious connection between, say, the campaign to save the ozone layer and the campaign to save endangered owls. The fate of charismatic nocturnal avians is not readily understood as being of a piece with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere. The word "ecology" makes the connection, and so transforms a thousand issues into a movement

I think something like that is happening again. There's a inchoate movement groping its way to understanding that it is a movement – that the problems of labor exploitation, fascism, climate degradation, surveillance, authoritarianism and genocide are all connected to each other by the fact that they are caused by extreme concentrations of wealth and power. Highly concentrated wealth and power is dangerous in and of itself, because even the most benign billionaire isn't infallible, and the stupid decisions of very rich people are far more consequential than the stupid decisions you or I make. Our mistakes make the people around us unhappy. Billionaires' mistakes – like their dilettanteish obsession with "education reform" – can ruin a whole generation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#ed-bezzle

And of course, the kind of person who amasses billions is pretty much never a benign person. The story you have to tell yourself in order to become a billionaire makes you into a literal psychopath:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

We don't have a word for this new anti-enshittification, anti-oligarch, anti-carbon baron movement yet, but perhaps that word might be "solidarity." Solidarity is the opposite of fascism. The solidarinet is the opposite of the enshitternet. Solidarity is what stops disasters from becoming catastrophes:

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2017/07/cory-doctorow-be-the-first-one-to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-not-thought-of-doing-before/

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Music labels: DRM makes you into iTunes’ love-slave https://web.archive.org/web/20051013082542/http://www.affbrainwash.com/archives/020414.php

#20yrsago 20 suicidal Congressional Reps demand a Broadcast Flag https://web.archive.org/web/20051011041517/http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004047.php

#20yrsago Cross-stitched tracert output https://web.archive.org/web/20051013061129/http://infosthetics.com/archives/2005/10/stitched_tracert_dos_commands.html

#15yrsago UK government ready to abolish consumer protection agencies as “waste” https://web.archive.org/web/20101013075803/http://www.noshockdoctrine.iparl.com/lobby/50

#1yrago Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/#based

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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