Putting the digit back in digital: Zero as number and concept in the digitisation of forests

Abstract

Recent scholarship defines the digitisation of environmental data practices and governance as technological revolutions that have not just expanded but fundamentally transformed the technical, political, social and historical structures that mediate environmental relations. The growing body of literature around digitisation of the environment usefully foreground transformation: specifically, the material, technopolitical and economic changes that emerge out of and produce new calculative practices and infrastructural relations. What the digital turn fails to acknowledge is continuation, specifically, the way said transformations serve as vehicles for many of the same colonial relations and logics. These logics are not part of the externalised practices that coalesce around data practices but are internal logics that are located in the semiotic density of the digit. Of all the digits that contain colonial logics, none is more central to the digital than zero – one half of the binary strings of 0 and 1 on which digital relations are built. This article examines the two forms of zero: zero as number – numerical object of no value, and zero as concept – the signifier of nothingness, absence and void. Through these two forms of zero, explored in vignettes of the Brazilian amazon and an upland Jamaican forest, this article reveals digitisation as driven by processes of Othering and the production of nothingness.