Abstract

This article investigates how digital platforms are implicated in the neoliberalization of conservation by turning nature and protected areas into tourism commodities. We mobilize Ash et al.'s (2018) heuristic of unit, vibration, and tone to analyze TripAdvisor's interfaces for contributing, exploring, and reviewing nature-based points of interest in Patagonia-Ays & eacute;n, Chile. We contend that digital tourism platforms express what we term digital environmental biopower, which designates these platforms' capacities to enlist digital users as agents who engage in biopolitical practices such as classifying, scoring, and raking natural areas as objects whose value is reliant on their tourism attributes. We argue that these digital modulations both sustain and are sustained by an environmental biopolitical regime in which pristine natural areas are made to live or allowed to die in the global digitally mediated (eco)tourism marketplace.