Dependence, division, dis-avowal, and destabilization

Across climate, computation, and care, one pattern keeps surfacing. It can be sketched in four words that rhyme with the problem itself: dependence, division, dis-avowal, and destabilization. This is less a slogan than a systems diagram—one that explains why we keep treating the social and ecological supports of the economy as background, and why those supports are fraying.

Dependence: an economy on life support

Modern markets lean on infrastructures they neither pay for nor properly govern. Forests absorb the waste, aquifers cool the servers, unpaid or underpaid carers reproduce the workforce, legal regimes protect assets, and resource frontiers supply minerals and energy. Tech’s cutting edge is no exception: data centers require vast flows of electricity and water; AI models are trained on labor-intensive datasets curated by poorly paid annotators; logistics depend on public roads and subsidized grids. Call it structural reliance: the money economy is constantly drawing value from realms it treats as “outside”—nature, households, public institutions, and racialized zones of dispossession.

Division: a map that hides the terrain

The trick that keeps this extraction humming is a conceptual split. “The economy” is framed as a self-contained engine of value, while its prerequisites are recast as externalities, private matters, or neutral infrastructure. Nature is booked as a sink, not a partner; care is privatized “love” rather than social labor; governance is a background app. In digital industries, this split looks like glossy dashboards that celebrate efficiency while energy, water, and human tolls are treated as back-office noise. Accounting categories do the ideological lifting: if it isn’t priced, it isn’t counted; if it isn’t counted, it can be ignored. The outcome is permission to extract without recognition.

Dis-avowal: denial as operating system

Denial here isn’t simple hypocrisy—it’s a managed refusal. Institutions publicly acknowledge climate risk, burnout, or supply-chain abuse, then proceed as if recognition alone absolved responsibility. Carbon ledgers that omit key emissions, “offsets” that promise more than they deliver, wellness programs that paper over impossible workloads, or community “engagement” processes that preclude real consent—all are forms of dis-avowal. In tech, the mismatch is stark: sustainability pledges coexist with ever-steeper compute demand; content moderation trauma remains invisible while platforms tout safety; “frictionless” design relies on very friction-full communities coping with pollution and water stress.

Destabilization: breakdown by design

Combine reliance on unpriced supports, the map-terrain split, and institutional denial, and you get turbulence that is neither accidental nor temporary. Heat and drought throttle hydropower just as AI demand spikes. Water-stressed regions host server farms that compete with households and farms. Care systems buckle under demographic shifts and austerity, feeding political resentment. Financial volatility meets ecological tipping points, while legitimacy erodes because promised fixes feel like accounting tricks. Instability, in other words, is not a bug. It is the predictable output of a system that consumes its own foundations.

Why this matters for ecology and technology

Seeing the four Ds together prevents category errors. Environmental policy that ignores care work leaves people without the capacity to adapt. Digital policy that ignores water and minerals merely relocates damage. Redistribution that leaves extraction untouched only shifts scarcity elsewhere. A clean transcript of the problem would state: the economy is nested in society and the biosphere; it cannot outgrow them without undermining itself. Any serious pathway must therefore reformat the system’s inputs, not just refine its outputs.

From diagnosis to design

Turning the pattern around requires making the supports visible, valued, and governed. That means changing rules, not just metrics.

• Bring supports on-budget: count ecological regeneration and care as core capital formation, not charity or “offsets.” Publicly fund care infrastructure the way we fund roads and grids.
• Integrate what has been split: planning that treats water, energy, data, housing, and biodiversity as co-managed systems. Site digital infrastructure where it strengthens, not cannibalizes, local ecologies and communities.
• End dis-avowal with enforceable accountability: binding climate targets that include full lifecycle emissions; due diligence laws with real teeth for labor and land rights; transparent reporting on data center water and energy use.
• Democratize the commons: watershed councils, community energy, and forest co-governance that give residents decisive authority over extraction and siting decisions.
• Design for sufficiency, not just efficiency: caps on total throughput (materials, energy, compute) where rebound effects are strongest; right-to-repair and longevity mandates to reduce material churn.
• Resource justice and repair: share the gains of the digital and green transitions with the communities bearing the extraction—through revenue sharing, free prior and informed consent, and restoration funds.
• Culture change as infrastructure: education and civic practices that cultivate attention to interdependence, so denial loses its social license.

A shared language for cross-movement work

The power of the four Ds is pragmatic. They offer a compact vocabulary that lets climate scientists, caregivers, coders, planners, and organizers talk about the same machine from different angles. Dependence reminds us what keeps the lights on. Division explains why that truth stays hidden. Dis-avowal names the institutional habit of looking away. Destabilization tells us what comes next if nothing changes.

The practical implication is sharp: stop asking systems designed to externalize costs to magically internalize them. Build new rules that align profits with planetary and social reproduction, or accept compounding crises as the price of denial. The choice is design or destabilization; there is no durable third path.

If we make the supports sovereign—care, commons, and community as first principles—technology can serve stability rather than erode it. The future of both ecology and innovation depends on that inversion.