This article interrogates one of the latest manifestations of the ideology of “green techno-optimism”: the belief that new digital technologies—now artificial intelligence (AI)—can and will save the planet. Drawing on political economy and energy humanities, we probe the new discourse of “green AI” which is emerging across corporate, governmental, and media spheres. While this discourse represents AI platforms and apps as capable of addressing the problem of global climate change, it also obscures their material, labor, and ecological costs. We thus critique the green techno-optimist ideology surrounding AI today in support of a greater “green tech consciousness” and “green tech conscience.” We conclude the essay with “nine laws of AI-ecology,” inspired by the “Four Laws of Ecology” Barry Commoner (1979) introduced in The Closing Circle. These distill our critique of green AI into a useful heuristic for reading what AI does to the world, and what it asks us to ignore. These laws are: (1) everything is connected to everything else; (2) everything must go somewhere; (3) nature knows best; (4) there is no such thing as a free lunch; (5) there is no infinite energy on a planet of finite resources; (6) efficiency increases consumption; (7) planned obsolescence negates efficiency gains; (8) efficiency cannot mitigate the environmental consequences of economic growth; and (9) all “green” is greenwashing. The most important task is not to make machines more intelligent in the hope that they will do the labor required to save the planet for us, but to make humans more intelligent about the true planetary consequences of AI systems, so they may find more environmentally responsible and sustainable ways of making and using AI.
Against the backdrop of cultural contraflows led by digital platforms from non-Western contexts, the paper examined Bilibili’s internationalization strategies through the integrated lens of cultural discount and cultural proximity theories. More specifically, it investigated how Bilibili’s original animation IPs negotiated cultural discount through narrative design and what institutional frictions shaped the challenges and opportunities for its platformed cultural contraflows during transnational expansion. Methodologically, the paper combined a narrative analysis comparing To Be Hero X and Link Click with 15 semi-structured interviews of Bilibili employees across content planning, localization, overseas operations, and strategy development. Key findings revealed two strategic narratives: cultural reductionism by diluting specific Chinese symbols for broader acceptability, and fictional universalism by constructing a culturally rootless worldview resonant with global youth values. The latter, exemplified by To Be Hero X , suggested greater effectiveness in minimizing cultural discount. Moreover, Bilibili still faced major challenges, including cultural discount in its interactive system, value conflicts in local markets, and heavy dependence on third-party distribution channels. The study extended cultural discount and cultural proximity theories to focus on the strategic positioning of IP products and platform promotion, and specifically proposed fictional universalism as an alternative pathway for negotiating cultural discount in transnational contraflows. By grounding the theoretical extensions in the empirical case of a Chinese digital platform, the research would respond to the call for more comprehensive understandings of how non-Western media could strategically navigate the structural constraints of global cultural circulation.
The current fetish for artificial intelligence awaits the habitual fate of new transportation/communications technologies: wild over-investment in a financial bubble, sudden collapse, and eventual utility—consider the history of the bicycle, railway, radio, or internet. But unlike those technologies, whose ecological significance took decades to emerge, debates over artificial intelligence’s environmental impact are already underway, because construction of the data centers on which it depends has disclosed astounding needs for water and power. This article investigates the socioenvironmental impact of those centers in the shadow of political economy, drawing on global data and examples from the United States, Britain, Spain, and México. We chart the material expansion of data centers fueled by speculative overproduction and corporate and governmental public relations, as well as AI’s underlying model of inter- and intra-national inequality and labor exploitation, followed by a discussion of the technology’s ecological perils and resistance to it. The paper concludes by calling on scholars to collaborate in that resistance, especially through the participatory design of regulatory public policies.
This paper proposes a deep interface framework to analyze how transmedia IP circulation is organized, governed, and made to extract value in China’s platform economy. Drawing on Bratton’s theory of interface and Terranova’s concept of informational modulation, we reconceptualize the transmedia chain not as a stable distribution network but as a succession of gates and chokepoints whose connectivity requires continuous labor across organizational, technological-algorithmic, and legal-regulatory registers. Through detailed analysis of China Literature (阅文集团), the dominant platform in China’s online fiction market and the source gate of its transmedia relay, we derive three concepts that name the specific form this apparatus takes at scale. Accumulated affect names the informational surplus that IP accumulates as it traverses the relay. A networked IP polity names the heterarchical governance structure that coordinates stakeholders across gates. Distributed authorship names the ideological formation through which the platform’s appropriation of that surplus is legitimated. By analyzing how infrastructural coordination transforms narrative production into a scalable platform asset, the paper contributes to debates on platform governance, cultural production, and the political economy of digital media.
Seeking to expand its outward soft power strategy, China has rapidly grown its International Communication Centers (ICCs), media institutions whose work is carried out by local and regional departments to enhance international familiarity with local regions and the collective shaping of China’s national image. While previous studies recognize the unique role ICCs play in exerting soft power to both domestic and international audiences, there has been limited attention on the methods in which they do so, particularly online. This paper addresses this gap by examining how ICCs have adopted Western social media platform X/Twitter and use digital modes of communication to reach external audiences. A 1-month content analysis of three overtly active provincial-level ICCs enabled a comparative examination of their communicative characteristics and behaviors. Findings reveal that the state continues to operationalize Chinese soft power while continuously reinventing the methods through which it attracts and persuades audiences.
