From Participation to Exposure: NFTs and the Socio-Environmental Tensions of Digital Innovation

Digital innovation is typically discussed in terms of inclusion, efficiency, and value creation. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) reveal a less visible dimension of digital innovation: their benefits can accrue to a relatively small number of actors, while their environmental and social costs extend beyond those who participate in, or benefit from, the technology. Using NFTs as a revealing case, we examine the tension between digital value creation and socio-environmental cost externalisation. Drawing on the Anthropocene and, in particular, the Capitalocene as a productive interpretive lens, we examine how digital artifacts, often perceived as intangible, are embedded in economic, infrastructural, and institutional arrangements through which benefits, responsibilities, and socio-environmental consequences are unevenly distributed. We argue that this tension adds an important dimension to digital inequality because participation and exposure need not coincide. We therefore call on Information Systems scholars to examine not only who accesses, participates in, and captures value from digital innovation, but also who bears responsibility and who is exposed to its (unintended) consequences. We outline avenues for doing so through multidimensional approaches to digital inequality, climate justice, socio-environmental externalities, and critical futures thinking.