Digital twins as planetary media in Europe and China: Optimization and resilience in scientific and socioeconomic domains

Abstract

This article formulates digital twins as planetary media—an assemblage of human and nonhuman elements that emerges from planetary-scale computation to observe and predict changes in the Earth’s human, geophysical, and socioeconomic spheres. It aims to revise Gabrys’ original concept of planetary media by revealing the collapse of the globe (as capitalist and human-centered) and planet (as geological and ecological) in digital twins applied to both Earth System Science and socioeconomic domains. Their collapse is also evident in scientific papers related to EU’s Destination Earth and China’s Digital Earth, policy reports on EU’s green/digital transition and China’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and documents on the smart cities in both regions. All of these share optimization and resilience as not only digital twins’ technical requirements but also key values for establishing them as sociotechnical imaginaries of transforming the Earth’s human activities and natural environments in the service of its sustainable future.

Keywords

China digital twin Earth System Science European Union optimization planetary media resilience scalability smart city sociotechnical imaginary

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