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[Interview with Clément Marquet] Breaking free from the illusion of immaterial digital technology

ForewordClément Marquet is a researcher specializing in science and technology studies. He is currently a research fellow at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at Mines Paris, he conducts research on the material, social, political, and environmental dimensions of digital technology.His research focuses particularly on the materiality of digital technical systems, i.e., the physical infrastructures that enable them to function—such as data centers and submarine cables—as well as the political, social, and ecological tensions they generate. Using theoretical and methodological frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), he traces how these infrastructures are designed, evaluated, and integrated into territories, as well as how their impacts are measured and politicized. Breaking free from the illusion of immaterial digital technologyFrançois Huguet: Your research focuses on closely observing the physical infrastructure of digital technology—data centers, submarine cables, networks—which is often overlooked in public discourse, as well as the work of operators. Why do you think this materiality remains so largely invisible in digital policies? How does this invisibility pose a major political problem when we want to think about and build a digital system that serves the public interest?Clément Marquet: It's true that, in a way, digital infrastructure has long been invisible. But that has changed over the past year, and I think we'll come back to that during this discussion...I think one of the reasons for this invisibility lies in the way marketing discourse around digital technology and the internet has been structured. A few years ago, we saw the emergence of a whole discourse around an ethereal, almost immaterial yet omnipresent technology. The discourse surrounding digital technology focused solely on the principles of dematerialization, cloud-based services, etc. The vast majority of us were not concerned, for example, with where the data we exchanged was stored, the machines that ran the apps and web services we used, etc.Looking back, we realize that the people who created the software we use and depend on today shaped the discourse so that we would ask as few questions as possible about it and, above all, so that we would adopt their tools en masse. Initially, these companies only offered services, applications, and software. They were not infrastructure operators and did not want us to be interested in anything other than the services they offered. All our attention had to be focused on their startups, their services, and their innovations. For them, the value was in the service offered, not in the infrastructure that made it possible. And these types of economic players—startups and software service companies—were heavily promoted by the political and economic worlds, among others. They occupied almost all of the media space.In France, if we look at the history of the country's industrial sector, we also see that the public authorities have invested little in digital infrastructure issues [Editor's note: see box below on the France Très Haut Débit plan]. In recent history, however, they have invested heavily in major projects in the areas of electricity, roads, railways, water, and even telephony. When it came to digital infrastructure, the decision was quickly made to entrust these issues to the private sector and competition. The "infrastructure" side of digital technology has therefore developed significantly in the private sector, but little in the public sector. We could take the recent example of public service delegations to bring fiber optics to our territory. These were very important, and it was not public operators who led these projects. And even when the public authorities began to reflect on the challenges of digital sovereignty, they decoupled infrastructure and service, focusing more on the type of tools than on the infrastructure that made it possible for these tools to function. In other words, there was a need for sovereign public software that worked well, but no one asked questions about public data centers or where they were located.The shift began in the second half of the 2010s. Perhaps because it was then that we realized that digital technology has a counterpart: electrical infrastructure. The latter has a very significant, well-known, and highly visible "material thickness": power plants, power lines, etc. And the two are closely linked, as Fanny Lopez shows in her book À bout de flux (éditions divergences, 2022): while digital technology is driving massive electrification of uses, the electrical system itself is increasingly dependent on digital technology to function... I believe it is this issue of interdependence that has started to change things. Since 2015, economic competition to host data centers in Europe has become very intense. In 2019, France entered the fray by offering private operators of these infrastructures competitive electricity rates that would enable them to set up in France. But we can see today that, at that time, we were not yet able to envisage the social, political, economic, and environmental impacts that these technologies would have. The focus was on economic competition and much less on the effects that this type of equipment would have, particularly at the local level. Admittedly, there were initial tensions and protests in some areas over the installation of this equipment, but discussions remained very limited at that level. Local authorities and electricity managers had to figure out how and where to install this private equipment, how to transport the enormous amounts of electricity it consumes, and how to balance this electricity consumption with the rest of the electricity consumption in their regions. These were difficult questions that arose very quickly, and for which the regions received very little guidance from the government.In 2025, everything changed at the summit on artificial intelligence. For nearly a week, the talk was of LLM, unicorns, and software, but above all, it was about infrastructure, concrete, electricity consumption, jobs, and more. Since AI requires enormous amounts of electricity to function, it was understood and agreed that massive investments were necessary, in the name of technological sovereignty, for data centers located in France capable of supporting this technology. It was also realized that these investments must also be considered from the perspective of land use, regional planning, major geopolitical risks, international economic competition, etc. The question of the acceptability of this type of equipment was raised, as was the more geographical question of where to locate it. This is because the State has still not reinforced the prerogatives of local authorities on these issues. An example of this: if the very recent bill on simplifying economic life is adopted, local authorities will not be able to modify their Local Urban Development Plans (PLU) in the face of data center projects classified as being of "major interest"... Digital infrastructure and socio-environmental conflictsFrançois Huguet : The rollout of digital infrastructure is generating significant local tensions: conflicts over water and energy use, land development, etc. In your opinion, what do these conflicts reveal about how digital technology is currently governed?Clément Marquet: These tensions are all different because the issues at stake are unique in each case. For example, the ultra-high-speed fiber optic network in mainland France that we were just talking about raises quite different issues from those involved in setting up data centers in the same areas. The socio-political, economic, and environmental issues are very different. The geography of data centers raises issues of regional imbalance in that these facilities cannot be spread across the entire country in a decentralized manner. They are mainly developed in metropolitan areas, primarily in the Île-de-France and Marseille regions, because they need to be close to the major Internet "backbones," the long-distance high-speed Internet networks that in Europe are located between London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam. Marseille is also attractive because the region is located at the landing point of major submarine cables connecting Europe to Africa. Of course, there are data centers that do not necessarily need to be located near these backbones and can be located elsewhere, such as cloud services and AI learning, which require less speed, for example, but these are not in the majority.Returning to the issue of conflicts, when we look back at the history of these infrastructures, we see that their deployment has indeed been surrounded by tensions. One example is the installation of the first data centers in Plaine Commune in northern Paris (between 2000 and 2015), which sparked the first protests in the area (between 2011 and 2015). I believe that ADEME understood the issues raised by this equipment at that time. Today, it is in Marseille that we can analyze the conflicts playing out between companies, public authorities, and citizen groups. Since late 2023, the Marseille-based collective Le Nuage était sous nos pieds (The Cloud Was Under Our Feet) has been analyzing the socio-ecological impacts of local digital infrastructure, and what they are investigating is revealing from a political standpoint. The question is quite simple: faced with the electricity demand of the region's data centers, industrial choices must be made. Do we continue to develop shipyards, or do we focus solely on hosting data centers? These infrastructures are disrupting the mechanisms for allocating electrical resources and pushing our politicians to make choices that are often constrained. RTE, Réseau de Transport d'Électricité, a subsidiary of EDF, now has to operate in a completely different way due to the extremely high demands of data centers, which reserve large amounts of electricity to secure their future without actually consuming it, thereby potentially preventing other projects from going ahead. The network operator has therefore been forced to develop plans to pool the network, without always consulting local authorities, to guide the installation of large data centers, and to review electricity allocation mechanisms by providing for procedures to recover capacity if it is not used quickly enough by operators. In the United States, numerous local conflicts over the establishment of data centers are generating public concern about the ecological challenges they pose to our society and the fact that at no point has there been any democratic discussion about the development of this infrastructure. This criticism has cost the tech sector $98 billion. The "techno push" has been too strong, it is akin to aggression, and it is normal for these infrastructures to be criticized. In this context, with private control over AI technology and the enormous amortization costs of these infrastructures, it seems difficult to me to put the public interest first and therefore to think about digital technology in the general interest... Who measures the environmental footprint of digital technology—and how?François Huguet: You are also interested in methodologies for measuring the environmental footprint of digital technology and the political and commercial issues involved. What do these methodological controversies say about the balance of power between public actors, industry, and experts? Can we talk today about a "neutral" or "objective" measurement of the environmental impact of digital technology?Clément Marquet: This subject is very broad and very complex.The first thing to consider is the scope of what we are measuring. For digital technology, we need to consider the resources extracted to build the machines, the energy required to operate them, and the cost of recycling them once they are no longer in use. When thinking in terms of "carbon equivalents," it is difficult to grasp all the dimensions, particularly the extractive aspects of digital technology. We then need to determine where "digital" ends: isn't a connected refrigerator a computer? The same goes for a so-called smart car. We therefore need to establish categories to avoid double or even triple allocation of impacts (for example, avoiding allocating the impact of a car's on-board computer to both the automotive and digital sectors). Obtaining figures and a macroscopic perspective on these points is extremely complicated. Databases on these impacts are very difficult to build because data from the industrial world cannot be used. However, it is on the basis of this data that truly relevant measurement tools could be developed. But this data is protected by industrial secrecy. And there is something paradoxical about this: manufacturers say that the indicators are not good, but at the same time, they do not share their data to improve these indicators... We are therefore building indicators using fairly obsolete databases, which are very complex to update. Things are starting to change slightly with environmental reporting requirements for data centers, even though they have already been built and little assessment has been done of the environmental cost of their implementation in a given area.For strong measures to be implemented, we need to move towards truly binding European policies that go beyond mere reporting.Measuring is not enough to govern; thresholds and obligations must be put in place. Only then will we be able to "control" digital technology and move towards a digital world that is desired rather than endured.

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Published on 19/02/26



[Feature] Why and how to make artificial intelligence frugal?

ForewordArtificial Intelligence (AI) systems consume a lot of energy. To operate, they need large computing capacities to train on billions of data sets, which requires powerful servers.The rise of artificial intelligence has led to such an increase in energy consumption that data centers now use more energy than 92% of the world's countries. Beyond the burden this increase places on power grids, the development of AI also threatens climate objectives.The quest for a more frugal, more sustainable or more durable AI is guiding a great deal of research and initiatives.Unlike traditional artificial intelligence models, which are often data- and compute-intensive, and therefore require a lot of electricity and servers, and contribute to warming the environment and the climate, frugal artificial intelligence favors lighter, more efficient approaches.Frugal AI is now among the four areas to be explored in the second phase of the national artificial intelligence strategy (SNIA), which covers the period 2022-2025, particularly in its research component. The French Ministry of Ecological Transition, for its part, is working to structure a Community of AI Actors in Territories, through a "Call for projects - Frugal AI demonstrators serving the ecological transition in territories". This ministry has also initiated a reference framework to measure and reduce the environmental impact of AI.Several voices have been raised in recent months to make frugal AI a priority, in France, of the national artificial intelligence strategy:In its assessment of the first phase of the SNIA, the Cour des Comptes (French National Audit Office ) sees frugal AI as a "founding principle that should permeate all the research funded by the second phase". However, the challenges of energy and data frugality are " little taken into account in research work", "beyond a few promising initiatives".According to the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) in an opinion issued in September 2024, " there is a concern that funding is lacking for AIs designed directly to protect the environment (...) Research efforts have only marginally focused on frugal AI". The CESE recommends focusing public funding on AI with a direct environmental purpose and on frugal AI.The Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques (OPECST), for its part, makes the goal of frugal AI an "imperative".This theme of frugality is on the agenda of the Artificial Intelligence Summit to be held in Paris on February 11 and 12. A coalition for the environmental sustainability of AI could be formed at the end of the Summit. AI drives energy consumption through the roof"The conclusion of the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices (OPECST), in a comprehensive report (339 pages), is that the situation is clear."AI requires considerable energy inputs throughout its lifecycle. AI tools, especially generative AI tools that use large language models (LLMs), require a lot of computing power to train their algorithms, and therefore electricity. The AI giants' supercomputers call on tens of thousands of Nvidia chips, even before they are used, just to train the models. While it is estimated that datacenters alone consume less than 2% of the world's electrical energy today, this figure could rise to 4% by the end of the decade under the impact of AI, whose installations require 3 to 5 times more electricity than traditional datacenters."Most models have to be trained on hundreds or even thousands of graphics processing units( GPUs). These GPUs enable fast matrix calculations, but with proportionately high energy consumption and CO2 production. For example, training GPT-3 on GPUs required 190,000 kWh, or 85,000 kg of CO2 equivalents, equivalent to driving a car 700,000 kilometers, or a round trip from the Earth to the Moon.According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global electricity consumption in the AI and datacenter sectors could more than double by 2026 compared to 2022, reaching 1,050 terawatt-hours (TWh), equivalent to Japan's electricity consumption.This insatiable demand for energy could, according to Gartner, put energy suppliers under pressure and lead to shortages, limiting the growth of new data centers from 2026 onwards. Frugal AI finds its way into the national artificial intelligence strategyMathematician, and MP, Cédric Villani in his report on artificial intelligence (AI) questioned the ecological sustainability of AI back in 2018. "It's a question of thinking about a natively ecological AI and using it to better think about the impact of humans on their environment. This is a matter of urgency: by 2040, global storage space requirements, fundamentally correlated with the development of digital technology and AI, are likely to exceed global available silicon production (...) The greening of the AI value chain will necessarily involve open hardware and open software architectures which, in addition to being a confidence-building factor, can enable significant energy savings."The first phase (2018-2022) of the national artificial intelligence strategy (SNIA) aimed to equip France with competitive research capabilities. The first phase of the SNIA was funded to the tune of 1.5 billion euros. It notably enabled the creation and development of the network of interdisciplinary artificial intelligence institutes (3IA), the establishment of chairs of excellence and doctoral programs, as well as the Jean Zay supercomputer.In November 2021, a new "acceleration" phase of the SNIA was announced. Frugal AI is among the four priorities of this second phase, along with Embedded AI, Trusted AI, and Generative AI. This second phase, which covers the period 2022-2025 and is endowed with 2.2 billion euros, plans, in particular, to " support 10 frugal AI demonstrator or technological development projects".Frugal AI is also one of the priorities of the Artificial Intelligence Priority Research Program and Equipment (PEPR), co-piloted by CEA, CNRS and INRIA, with "the ambition of identifying software architectures, frugal learning methodologies for training on controlled databases, and advanced application optimization to rationalize energy consumption of machine learning-based AI systems as far as possible". " Frugal AI must permeate all research in a concrete way".In its first phase, the national AI strategy prioritized research. However, according to the Cour des Comptes, the challenges of energy and data frugality are " little taken into account in research work", "beyond a few promising initiatives". The use of algorithms seems to be the dimension most integrated into research work (see graph below). However, the Cour des Comptes sees frugal AI as a " founding principle a founding principle that should permeate all research funded by the second phase ". "Many efforts remain to be made in terms of frugal AI and trusted AI, both in terms of mobilizing researchers, allocating resources and the indispensable construction of a European normative framework," concludes the Cour des Comptes. "In order to ensure that frugal AI development objectives are met in the second phase, whatever the sector, it would be advisable to improve the measurement and monitoring of the ecological footprint of AI, and to build a framework of actions compatible with the control of the environmental footprint." "Concentrate funding on AI with a direct environmental purpose and on frugal AI".The French Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE), for its part, in an opinion issued in September 2024, observes that " AI is currently used mainly in areas such as finance, targeted marketing and now industry, and not to train and operate optimization algorithms that benefit the environment (...) Under these conditions, it is to be feared that funding will be lacking for AI designed directly to protect the environment".Six years after the Villani report, we have to admit that research efforts have only marginally focused on "frugal AI". While the Artificial Intelligence and Ecological Transition Roadmappublished in 2021 (by the French Ministry of Ecological Transition) includes a "frugality" section, there are still too few projects underway".According to the CESE, frugal AI could be a priority focus of the fourth Future Investment Program 2021-2026 and the France 2030 investment plan.The EESC recommends focusing public funding on AI with a direct environmental purpose and on frugal AI.A systematic assessment of the environmental footprint of AIs will have to be carried out, requiring the companies concerned to be transparent about resource consumption, and building an evaluation benchmark. Such an AI "Ecoscore" will enable users, citizens and companies alike, to choose the most sober AIs (recommendation no. 5).At the same time, engineers will have to become more involved in the eco-design of equipment, particularly terminals, the renewal of which is accelerated by AI (recommendation no. 6), and users can be made more aware of their responsibilities through information campaigns on the environmental footprint of AI and the possibility, currently non-existent, of disconnecting AI uses and data collection on their applications (recommendation no. 7).Last but not least, measures are immediately applicable to data centers. For data center projects, the public authorities must ensure compliance with the objective of zero net artificialisation, in particular by using sites that have already been artificialised (recommendation no. 8), the European sustainability rating system for these centers must be taken into account, and the principle of recovering waste heat must be integrated (recommendation no. 9). 12 frugal AI demonstrators in the regionsAs part of its "AI and ecological transition" roadmap, the French Ministry of Ecological Transition has been supporting frugal AI-based solutions for territories since 2022.The " Démonstrateurs d'AI frugale des territoires" (DIAT) call for projects targeted AI projects capable of making predictions and recommendations to aid decision-making. " AI solutions must be frugal in terms of data and energy, and their own environmental impact must be measured, which must be thought out upstream of project construction ".12 projects were selected for this call for projects. The Banque ds territoires, operator of the call for projects, has identified three approaches to frugality among the selected projects:Minimize data collection, aiming for quality rather than quantity, and ensuring that only the data needed for the purpose is updated". This was notably the case for the IA.rbre project, which uses AI to help the Lyon metropolitan area detect "plantable" areas and use vegetation to create cooling zones or combat runoff phenomena.Limiting the number of sensors: frugality can also be achieved by exploiting data that are not originally environmental data. Through the Predict AI'r project run by the Paris-Ouest La Défense public establishment, the consortium will exploit cell phone boundary data to deduce, using AI, users' travel patterns and their impact on air quality. A strategy that could make it possible to avoid multiplying the number of air sensors, while at the same time being applicable to any territory, in France and worldwide.Frugality can also be measured by the positive externalities that AI generates in organizations. In Saclay, for example, the Urba (IA) project supported by the agglomeration community promises to help local authorities in the Paris region revise their local urban planning schemes (PLU) by integrating all normative constraints in terms of environmental protection, whether regional or national.These calls for projects are enabling the Ministry of Ecological Transition to bring together a Community of AI Actors in Territories (CAIAT) made up of representatives of territories, competitiveness clusters, research institutions, VSEs/startups/SMEs and companies. A benchmark for measuring and reducing the environmental impact of AIThe Ecolab of the Commissariat Général au Développement Durable (CGDD) and the Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) have published a methodology for assessing the effect of an AI service on the environment. In addition to providing an initial operational reference framework for quantifying its impact, the document contains a set of best practices to adopt in moving towards frugal AI.The method has been developed using a global approach, i.e. it covers all the digital resources mobilized to deliver the service. Starting with data centers (servers, storage bays, network equipment), which host and process digital data. Next come the network infrastructures that ensure data transmission to users. And finally, the terminals (smartphones, computers, televisions, etc.) that operate, receive and consult content.The entire lifecycle of a system is taken into account, from design to development to commissioning. This implies a reflection on the very necessity of using AI versus less resource-intensive solutions. AI must not become a systematic response to every need.Frugality also means minimizing the material and energy resources mobilized to create the AI system. This includes rationalizing AI models, reducing the volume of data used to train them, and optimizing the infrastructures they mobilize, such as data centers. The compression of algorithms and the use of open source data are also encouraged to reduce their carbon footprint.Throughout the AI lifecycle, the standard then requires measurement of the direct impact of the AI (energy consumed, CO2 emitted, resources consumed) as well as its indirect effects, such as the rebound effect, where an improvement in efficiency can lead to an increase in consumption.Finally, clear governance must be put in place to ensure that frugality principles are integrated into every stage of an AI project. AI suppliers and producers must communicate transparently on the actions implemented to limit impacts, providing precise assessments and clear methodologies.

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• Environment

Published on 07/01/25



Can digital technology serve the ecological transition? An overview of social science research

ForewordAt a time when the environmental critique of digital technology is gaining considerable momentum, a large number of players intend to put digital technologies at the service of the ecological transition."We mobilize computing technologies to reduce pollution by optimizing industrial production, or by limiting agricultural practices that impoverish soils or contaminate the environment. We equip environmental policies with measurement tools - for biodiversity, carbon emissions, atmospheric or aquatic pollution, soil carbon storage capacities, etc. - to plan and steer the ecological transition. - to plan and steer the ecological transition. Instruments are made available to consumers in the form of applications, so that they can adopt behavior that is less harmful to the environment. Digital platforms are being set up to link consumers and producers of agricultural goods in short circuits, and to encourage car-sharing and other less polluting practices.This issue of Réseaux takes a closer look at these approaches, which Sylvain Parasie and Sébastien Shulz, who coordinated this issue, describe as " greening through digital technology". A priori paradoxical, this "greening through the digital" raises a series of questions to which the investigations in this issue provide some answers: to what extent can the digital contribute to reducing environmental damage? What are the epistemological, political and social implications? What kinds of ecological transitions in our economies are supported by these technology-based approaches?Overview of social science researchSylvain Parasie, researcher at Médialab, and Sébastien Shulz, postdoctoral researcher at the Université Technologique de Compiègne, open this dossier with an overview of social science research, structured around the four main ways in which digital technologies are equipping the ecological transition: the computerization of the environmental question; the instrumentation of ecological mobilizations; the rationalization of production and consumption systems; the experimentation of economic alternatives to the productivist logic.The two authors distinguish three sets of questions that are emerging for the social sciences.The first set of questions concerns the information infrastructures that make the environment visible. "These play a crucial role, in conjunction with the worlds of science and technology, in uncovering climate change, pollution affecting the atmosphere, soil and oceans, and the erosion of biodiversity.A second set concerns the role of digital instruments in governing the ecological transition. "Mobilized to know, monitor and govern the environment, do technologies enable publics to make environmental problems visible and to organize themselves to deal with them? Are they likely to encourage citizens and consumers to adopt more virtuous environmental behavior? On what representations of individual action are these instruments based?"The final set of questions concerns the way in which digital technologies are mobilized to initiate the ecological transition of our modes of production and consumption. How do these players (whether economic or activist) go about "scaling up" their alternative technologies in the face of the hegemony of digital capitalism? " And in turn, what does this imply about the transformation of commercial discourses, business models, work organization or even advocacy activities, from large firms to start-ups?"Jean-Baptiste Garrocq, a doctoral student at Sciences Po's Medialab, uses the ethnography of a network of alternative measures of air pollution to examine how micro-sensors are used to form causes. To understand the conditions under which these causes are formed, he analyzes "the ways in which the ordinary sense of justice of individuals or collectives and the production of data by micro-sensors are articulated". Starting from the moral attitudes that individuals adopt in relation to these objects, he identifies two forms in which the causes are deployed: the alert and the case.Robin Leclerc, a doctoral student at INRAE's Ecosystems and Societies in Mountains Laboratory, has investigated a seemingly modest climate policy instrument - a spreadsheet that offers, for each French commune, a complete diagnosis of soil carbon sequestration capacities - to study the formation of a soil carbon public at local level. His investigation shows that this tool, designed at national level, is finding a wider audience than had been anticipated, formed of "carbon engineers", who are using it in unanticipated ways, and sometimes at the cost of invisibilizing scientific knowledge about soils.Jeanne Oui, post-doctoral researcher at Université Paris-Dauphine, investigates the environmental promise associated with "precision agriculture", according to which the use of digital technologies would make it possible to limit environmental pollution by optimizing agricultural production. By studying several French agronomic communities, the author shows that precision agriculture does not escape the dominant productivist and reductionist prism, and contributes to bringing agronomic technoscience closer to its commercial applications.Jean Tassin, a doctoral student in sociology at ENS Lyon, shifts our focus, offering an ethnography of the "return to the land" of young Chinese entrepreneurs. Against a backdrop dominated by food scandals and government plans for transition, these individuals are using e-commerce platforms to sell organic products presented as healthier. The survey shows that "digital technology is playing a major role in the recomposition of food trust in China, but that the phenomenon of 'back to the land' is paradoxically contributing to the processes of depaysanization and rural differentiation engendered by the agrarian reforms of the last forty years".Sébastien Shulz examines the construction of the car-sharing platform market and seeks to understand how car-sharing, which represented an informal and supportive practice, was constituted as a commercial solution to support the ecological transition of the mobility sector. The author reconstructs the process by which the French state favored platform capitalism, helping to build an economy of capture. He concludes with a discussion of the tension between the state's objectives of greening the mobility sector, and its support for capitalist platforms whose model is likely to generate "rebound effects".Aurélien Béranger, a doctoral student at Costech, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, has been investigating communities that build small wind turbines to meet their energy needs autonomously. These people deploy a particular relationship to matter, which the author calls the "politicization of the smallest part". "The great originality of these low-tech movements is that they strive for the greatest possible sobriety, with the least possible use of digital or high-tech technologies. This is accompanied by a large number of tensions between values and practices, which the players manage to reduce through compromise". Aurélien Béranger shows that, while ecologization can be achieved away from digital technology, " this distance can only be maintained in relative terms, and at the cost of constant mobilization".ContentsSylvain Parasie, Sébastien Shulz: Digital technology at the service of ecological transition? An overview of social science researchJean-Baptiste Garrocq: Challenging pollution from around the corner. Forms of criticism within a network of air pollution micro-sensorsRobin Leclerc: Soil carbon and its public. Aldo as a tool for local climate policy?Jeanne Oui: Precision agriculture and environmental changeInvestigating the epistemology of an agricultural model based on digital dataJean Tassin: Peasant e-commerce platforms in China. An ethnographic survey of a digital "return to the landSébastien Shulz: The commercial capture of carpooling in France. How policies to green mobility promote platform capitalismAurélien Béranger: The politicization of the smallest part. Tensions between low-tech and high-tech in small-scale self-built wind turbine communities

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• Environment

Published on 20/11/24