Uncovers the hidden environmental costs and colonial histories of contemporary digital culture.

Earthy Algorithms undoes the fallacy of digital immateriality by revealing instead the material infrastructures—minerals, extraction, energy, labor, and waste—that sustain the contemporary digital world. Through close readings of digital artworks, literature, and cultural practices from Spain, Latin America, and their diasporas, the book traces how old histories of colonialism, capitalist abstraction, and environmental damage continue to shape the algorithmic present and power automatic writing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on media studies, environmental humanities, literary analysis, and decolonial thought, Earthy Algorithms offers an original materialist framework for understanding global digital culture in the current ecological crisis. The book also pushes against the limits of conventional academic prose. Alex Saum-Pascual moves between theory, criticism, poetry, and other forms of fabulation, inviting audiences to rethink the relationship between digital technologies and the living world they so often conceal here on Earth.