There is much more still to be done, of course. But a new regime of carbon aware computing and a digital practice that draws off and feeds back into the imaginary of what is possible is exciting. From the institutional heft being thrown behind orgs like the Green Software Foundation, the Green Web Foundation, and other corporate digital sustainability projects, to proposals for the inclusion of CO2 emission calculations in the headers of HTTP responses – huge amounts of technical engineering work is also starting to move in this same direction. Perhaps we should not be all that surprised: it’s a climate emergency, after all.

So, what can conclusions we glean from these examples and experiments, about what it means to be a digital artist in this era of climate change? First, is that the answer to this question itself is still wide open, even as some of the necessary parameters of our response are certain: finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is critical. But the pathways towards those emissions reductions still passes through an unmapped terrain. It involves ad hoc solutions (without digital solutionism!) and some halting or half-measures. It’s also a terrain of paradox, being highly technical by definition with steep and slippery slopes making it easy to end up in Resource Man territory. But it also involves by necessity connected, networked, and ultimately ecological thoughts and practices.

I also think it means resisting the temptation of assuming a particular technological aesthetic. The concept of solarpunk seems to occasionally fall into this error to me. Following Surman’s lead, I suspect we need to think deeper, to probe at the shifts in cultural logic happening as the climate catastrophe unfolds. I suspect that the more critically essential core of a digital creative response to our collective situation (a situation of extremely unevenly distributed effects, a direct challenge to collectivity) align closer to a ‘whatever it takes’ war-footing or activist approach. I also see glimpses in fiction and theory, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s eco-terrorists the Sons of Kali in Ministry of the Future, who deploy swarms of drones to bring down private jets in the imagined near–future. Likewise, Andreas Malm’s ‘How To Blow Up A Pipeline’ might lead climate conscious digital makers to conclusions about the justifiability of certain cyberattacks: DDoS’ing climate financing banks, ransomware directed at fossil fuel infrastructure. IT outages routinely cause chaos at airports – what if more deliberate, climate politics of digital sabotage were to emerge? Nothing so extreme seems to be on the horizon – but I remain hopeful of a future where I am pleasantly surprised.