In the age of Homo digitalis, screens are indispensable; without them, comprehension itself seems impossible. Immediacy defines this new species—patience and waiting have become obsolete. Information must be instantly accessible, as fresh and abundant as the foods once sought in local markets: cheese, fish, vegetables, fruits, and flowers. Yet freshness now applies less to nourishment than to data. What humanity craves is information more perishable than food, more vital than rest. Haste defines this era, and fatigue is its inevitable consequence (González González 2021). As  Byung-Chul Han (2022) suggests in Infocracy, the digital condition cultivates a subtle nihilism: an age of information without truth, where immediacy replaces reflection.

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Although it encourages us to consider (incorrectly) a world economy that is not reliant on material resources, with digital activity being akin to an ethereal realm, it is undeniably true that no economy can exist without energy and matter, as key figures in ecological economics, such as Georgescu-Roegen (1979), have stated. This perception of immateriality contradicts a fundamental thermodynamic reality. Therefore, despite digital efficiency, meeting the rising demand for digital devices in the age of Homo digitalis requires increasing amounts of energy and resources. Thus, understanding how digitalisation influences energy use is crucial in assessing whether it supports or challenges environmental sustainability, especially in the context of climate change (Lange et al. 2020).

Over the past two centuries, human societies have undergone an unprecedented transformation in their energy use. The industrial age of the 19th and 20th centuries, powered first by coal and later by oil and electricity, saw per capita energy use quadruple and total global demand rise roughly twentyfold. A fundamental change in both the type and intensity of energy use emerged with the large-scale extraction and combustion of fossil fuels (Ritchie et al. 2020; Smil 2010). This expansion reshaped not only economies and landscapes but also temporalities and social relations (Urry 2014). Today, as the digital era unfolds, the imperative of sustainability is inextricably linked to it. Homo digitalis inherits this energetic legacy: every click, stream, and computation depends on extensive infrastructures of extraction, generation, and data circulation (Lange et al. 2020). The dematerialised appearance of digital life thus conceals an intensified material and energetic metabolism—one that binds the virtual and the geological in a single planetary circuit.

Energy Demand in the Homo Digitalis Age

Global electricity demand is projected to increase at its fastest pace in more than a decade through 2026, with anticipated growth rates of 3.3% in 2025 and 3.7% in 2026. This expansion is primarily driven (among others) by the increasing energy requirements associated with cooling systems, data centres, and the rapid adoption of electric vehicles. Current forecasts exceed the average growth observed between 2015 and 2023, signalling a structural intensification of global electricity consumption. On the supply side, by 2025 or 2026, depending on climatic conditions and fluctuations in fuel prices, renewable energy sources are expected to surpass coal as the leading source of electricity generation worldwide. Concurrently, nuclear power generation is projected to reach record levels, while natural gas continues to displace coal and oil in numerous regions (IEA 2025).

Electricity thus stands as the principal driver of the digital era, deeply intertwined with global efforts to advance sustainability and mitigate the escalating climate and socio-ecological crises. However, the pace of fossil fuel substitution remains insufficient to avert the worsening planetary crisis, revealing a persistent gap between the ambition of decarbonisation and the realities of material transformation. To date, the global energy transition has not replaced fossil fuels in absolute terms; instead, renewables have been added to the existing mix to meet ever-growing demand (York and Bell 2019; Thompson 2023).

Paradoxically, Homo digitalis remains largely oblivious to the energy that fuels its hyperconnected life, activating its digital devices without perceiving the invisible material flows that make such immediacy possible. As if that were not enough, as Bibri and Allam (2022) state, digital societies are rapidly adopting various invasive technologies, which have both immediate and long-term effects........

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