Digital lives

Thinking about digital lives involves grappling with every-where and every-when entangled lived experiences and relations, as humans and more-than-humans morph in relation to the digital, in a mixture of mundane and spectacular ways. While some theorists have extended the term ‘more-than-human’ to include digital entities such as data, this chapter takes a different stance to recentre how particular humans, and human institutions, are highly agential with respect to the digital, and that responsibility for their impacts, both negative and positive, cannot be eschewed. Diminishing of institutional and corporate responsibility for digital lives tends to be growing, as captured in recent declarations of pending human extinction from/by AI. Rather than perpetuating obfuscation of such responsibility and agency with respect to the digital, there are valuable opportunities to reset our digital lives, to take better care of human and more-than-human presences and futures that centre equity and sustainability. Drawing on the work of Tomás Saraceno's Web(s) of Life, an eco-social energy transition project that foregrounds extractive digital lives of the Global North and the impact of these on the Global South, this chapter offers a way to think about refusal of digital damages and instead resituates multi-scale responsibility for different futures.