While the dominant discourse, from both private and public organizations, promotes Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a solution for the environmental transition, it is now well documented that the digital world, on the contrary, is severely impacting the Earth. To tackle this issue, Digital Sobriety, the voluntary reduction of digital consumption appears essential, but it involves deep behavioral changes for which individuals and organizations are not ready.

For a better understanding of the obstacles to change, we propose to analyze underlying ethical values of Digital Sobriety. Values are general principles that guide people or groups of people. Often tacit, these values are also at stake in narratives, and their identification may help to build relevant narratives related to Digital Sobriety.

In the domain of Digital Sobriety, we have identified four ethical axes on which values and anti-values could be positioned: new/old, fast/slow, individual/common, and progress-oriented/frugal. We claim that in order to achieve Digital Sobriety, it is necessary to promote a lifestyle that moves away from new, fast, individualistic and progress-oriented solutions. This initial set of ethical values is tentative and should be refined in the future.