Caring for the Digital Garden: Toward a Paradigm of Digital Environmental Ethics

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have profoundly shaped our relationship with the world and with ourselves. As they are no longer merely tools or media, many scholars now describe these technologies in terms of environments. Although the concept of the digital environment has been extensively examined from a theoretical perspective, an ethics of digital environments qua environments has not yet been developed. In this paper, we advance a framework for an ethics of artificial environments, beginning with the fundamental questions that define this field of inquiry. The article develops this proposal in three steps: first, it examines the form of intrinsic value that may be attributed to digital environments; second, it considers the ways in which humans inhabit and dwell within these environments; and finally, it elaborates the metaphor of the digital garden as an ethically significant space in which responsibility is articulated through cultivation, co-dependence, and sustained care.