Who formats our futures? Big tech, green myths, and data politics
Dr. Rianne Riemens and Bjorn Beijnon exposed two sides of platform power: its environmental footprint and its social consequences.
Published on October 25, 2025
Bart, co-founder of Media52 and Professor of Journalism oversees IO+, events, and Laio. A journalist at heart, he keeps writing as many stories as possible.
AI and digital platforms are not neutral technologies. They shape the climate crisis, our identities, and even our political imagination. At the event Who Formats Our Futures?, organized by the University of Amsterdam, Dr. Rianne Riemens and Bjorn Beijnon exposed two sides of platform power: its environmental footprint and its social consequences. In a three-part short series, we unravel their messages. This is part 1.
Everyday life increasingly runs through the ecosystems of Big Tech. From Google searches and Amazon purchases to Microsoft’s cloud services and Meta’s social networks, these companies don’t just provide infrastructure; they structure reality itself. The question, argued by both speakers at Who Formats Our Futures?, is whether societies will continue to accept this privately defined future, or reclaim the power to decide collectively.
Green AI or green myth?
Dr. Rianne Riemens showed how Big Tech’s sustainability promises collapse under scrutiny. Tech companies increasingly frame their climate ambitions around AI, touting it as a tool to accelerate the energy transition and fight climate change. But behind the glossy discourse lies a different picture: skyrocketing energy demand, water consumption, and carbon emissions.
“AI emissions are rising so fast they outweigh the potential sustainability gains,” Riemens warned. What she called tech-on-climate discourse is less about solutions and more about legitimacy: carefully crafted narratives that allow endless AI expansion to appear green.
Watt Matters in AI
Watt Matters in AI is a conference that aims to explore the potential of AI with significantly improved energy efficiency. In the run-up to the conference, IO+ publishes a series of articles that describe the current situation and potential solutions. Tickets to the conference can be found at wattmattersinai.eu.
Data subjects in the making
Where Riemens focused on infrastructures of energy, Bjorn Beijnon dissected infrastructures of identity. Platforms, he argued, don’t simply reflect users; they shape them into “data subjects.” Through profiles, feeds, and recommendations, people are conditioned to align their desires and actions with platform interests, while still feeling autonomous.
“A data subject is someone who sees themselves as a living archive,” Beijnon explained. “They document their lives through data while believing they’re in control. But this sense of control is part of the conditioning.”
His ethnographic research in conspiracy communities revealed a paradox: even groups claiming to resist platform power often end up participating cynically, reinforcing personalized “custom senses” of reality rather than building collective alternatives.
Cynicism or care?
Both speakers showed how myths sustain platform capitalism. For Riemens, myths like “AI’s impact is overstated” or “carbon neutrality is around the corner” greenwash the industry’s extractive infrastructures. For Beijnon, myths of personalization and “just for you” experiences legitimize datafication and surveillance capitalism.
The result is a dangerous convergence: platforms justify their growth through environmental solutionism and social individualism, while society absorbs the costs in energy systems, in democracy, and in truth itself.
Yet alternatives exist. Riemens suggested aligning AI development with planetary boundaries through stricter European regulation. Beijnon highlighted the Fediverse, a decentralized constellation of open-source platforms where care, rather than cynicism, becomes the binding ethic.
From private design to public governance
The combined conclusion was clear: platform power cannot be treated as a private design choice. It must become a matter of public governance. This means embedding sustainability goals directly into AI policy, demanding transparency in data infrastructures, and fostering collective digital commons that resist capture by corporate logic.
“The question,” Beijnon put it bluntly, “is whether we remain data subjects in the hands of platforms, or reclaim the power to decide what kind of collective we want to be.”
Riemens added the ecological dimension: “We need to ask whether endless AI growth is even compatible with planetary boundaries.”
Who formats our futures?
Together, Riemens and Beijnon challenged their audience to see beyond greenwashing and personalization. The stakes are not abstract: they touch the energy systems that power our lives, the identities that define us, and the democratic choices we face.
If platforms already format our futures, the task now is to decide whose futures they serve, and who gets to decide.
Tomorrow and Monday, we will publish parts 2 and 3 of this short series.