Benjamin Selwyn (University of Sussex): Global Value Chains, Digital Tech, Systemic Ecocide

Digital technologies are often claimed to enhance sustainability and profitability in global value chains (GVCs). This article challenges that view, showing how digital innovation and GVC expansion continue a historical trajectory – steam engines, railroads, automobiles – of epoch-making technological progress through environmental destruction. GVC growth stimulates digital innovation, and vice versa, producing environmentally destructive multiplier effects. The article traces how digitalisation 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.