Paper short abstract:

A Chinese app allows users to convert carbon savings into real trees that are planted by a feminized and aging workforce in the decarbonizing countryside. The exploitation of their green labor entrenches inequality at the nexus of financialization, environmental work, and neosocialist ideals.

Paper long abstract:

In China, digital users and green workers connect through a green fintech app developed by Alipay, the country’s largest e-payment platform. In the “Ant Forest” app, consumers use their carbon footprint savings to grow digital trees. Over time, these e-trees can be converted into actual physical seedlings that rural women and senior citizens plant in the deserts of northern China. During fieldwork with app users in the decarbonizing coal region of Shanxi and green afforestation workers in desertifying Gansu Province, those connected through the app presented themselves as part of a labor vanguard in the service of green development and a new ecological subjectivity. The app seemingly connects the virtuality of financial speculation and carbon metrics with the actual work of the green transition. However, the app entrenches new forms of inequality through its reliance on an eco-precariat, a workforce wedged between digital labor and environmental work. These workers not only bore the brunt of ecological devastation from accelerated carbon-intensive industrialization, but they are now being made responsible for environmental clean-up. They are precarious in multiple ways, economically, socially, and ecologically. As green finance and decarbonization entrench their precarity, workers nonetheless praise their green jobs. However, their elevation of green labor is not rooted in neoliberal subjectivities and decarbonization finance, but neosocialist imaginaries. I therefore argue that the financialization of nature is a partial, variable, and uneven process of globalization, and relies on both speculation and spectacle to create its values.