Patrick Brodie & Patrick Bresnihan's new book, From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland, is out now!

We'd like to extend a hearty congratulations to Patrick Brodie - former organizing member with the GEM Lab - and his co-author Patrick Bresnihan on the publication of their new book From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland (Bristol UP, 2025). You can order the book here!

About the book:

The green digital transition is underway. But what does this transition look like when dictated by the energy and resource demands of monopoly tech? How has this situation come to be? And where is it being resisted?

This provocative book uncovers the hidden intersections of land, resource extraction and climate policy in the transition to “greener” and “smarter” economies. Challenging eco-modern and techno-solutionist approaches, the book links narratives of sustainability with colonial histories and uneven development, arguing that tech-driven transitions replicate exploitative patterns of imperial capitalism. Using Ireland as a focal point, the authors show how the history and depth of the country’s postcolonial dependency on multinational investment, especially US technology companies, comes into friction with disparate land-based struggles.

Thinking with these movements, the book offers a critique of dependent models of development and proposes an anti-imperialist approach to environmental politics.

Patrick Brodie is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the environmental politics of digital infrastructures, and specifically the relations and entanglements of internet and other communications technologies with energy systems, global supply chains, and extractivism. He is the author and editor of two more forthcoming books: an edited collection called Media Rurality (with Darin Barney, Duke UP), which centres on the rural politics of global media systems; and a single-authored monograph entitled Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke UP). His ongoing/future research projects coalesce around the study of environmental datafication and the political ecologies of resource-making through "sustainable" industrial calculabilities in peatland management and fish farming.

His research has been published in Big Data and Society, Media, Culture and Society, New Media and Society, Information, Communication and Society, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, among other venues and public outlets including The Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, and Rupture: Eco-Socialist Quarterly. He is also the co-editor of the Journal of Environmental Media. He was previously FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University and a Scholar-in-Residence in the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University.

Patrick Bresnihan is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University.