Benjamin Selwyn
Digital technologies are claimed to enhance environmental sustainability and profitability in global value chains (GVCs). This article challenges that view, showing how digital innovation and GVC expansion continue a historical trajectory of epoch-making technological progress — steam engines, railroads, automobiles — through environmental destruction. GVC growth stimulates digital innovation, and vice versa, producing environmentally destructive multiplier effects. The article traces how digitalization enabled the rise and expansion of GVCs, and examines ecological impacts of digital-tech GVCs, digitally enabled GVCs, and their interaction. Rather than creating win-win scenarios, the digital tech–GVC nexus is driving systemic ecocide. This article explores alternative ways of organizing digital technology and production.