The digital spirit of green capitalism. How the European Union tries to save ecological modernisation

<p>Why, by whom and how is digitalisation and sustainability twinning presently being driven? The paper asks how political, economic and civil society actors are working to legitimise a digital-green modernisation of the economy. It argues that the nexus amounts to revitalising both digital and green modernisation, which are both facing crises of legitimacy. On the one side green modernisation has been criticised for its market-based strategies that create new inequalities and ecological problems while failing to adequately address pre-existing ecological problems. Global digital capitalism, on the other side faces criticism not only for increasing surveillance, but also for the negative impacts that digital technologies have on natural and social environments (consider the rising energy use by data centres and extractivism in the Global South). Documents, speeches, conferences and policy papers of the European Union as well as an Action Plan for Sustainability in the Digital Age worked out by civil society groups, non-profit organisations and business associations serve as an empirical basis. By using the conceptional background of the sociology of justification and situational analysis mapping strategies the paper shows that digitalisation, both on a moral and common good level, on an economic level and on the level of individual self-realisation, endows green modernisation with new action-guiding structures of meaning and thus turn it into a worthwhile, meaningful and “exciting” capitalist endeavor. </p>