Can the earth pay the price for our foolish actions forever?
Communications used to be deliberate one-off acts of individual self-expression. Now they are continuous, often anonymous, interactions which are potentially eternal. In our age of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ data runs continuously in the background of all digital activity. And as we know, this is now the most prevalent of activities.
Why does this matter so much? Because digital activity requires energy to produce, energy to consume and energy to store forever. It requires a planet-wide system of non-renewable resources such as Rare Earth Elements, manufacturing systems creating waste, shipping producing pollution, fossil fuels to transport, underpaid and mistreated labour, and non-recyclable waste. These are all externalities hidden in the price you pay.
I am not aware of any educational campaigns about the benefits of thrifting versus undoing those benefits by promptly posting about your thrifting. Of course, educating others is good, but you must also educate yourself.
Data is seen as the ‘new oil’ – the perfect analogy, being both profitable and polluting! – that is driving global commerce. Personal human experiences are easily and cheaply available, and are harvested greedily by state actors, corporations and scammers. This data is then processed and stored at massive data centres, requiring enormous energy and huge volumes of water to run. The ‘virtually weightless’ digitisation that was meant to save us from the dirty physical world, is now a major cause of pollution and waste itself.
The world’s communications systems use 7% of global electricity. Devices, appliances, towers, networks and platforms draw huge energy loads. Viewing a web page for 5 seconds produces 1g of CO2, one Google search produces 1-7g of CO2 and sending an email about 4g of CO2 (versus 15g when boiling one cup of water). And after these deeds are done, digitisation and storage continues to consume electricity forever.
And that’s set to increase exponentially with AI. As images are digitized and converted to a matrix of data points, algorithms and AI systems sift and sort them. Training one single AI model can emit as many emissions as the lifetimes of 5 cars. And we can only wonder about the coming Metaverse’s requirements.
Electricity may be drawn from sustainable sources, of course, but huge dams, solar panels and wind turbines don’t make themselves. They are part of the problem and solution also.
The dominant social paradigm of our societies is economic growth via technological solutions and free markets. The IPAT formula of Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology guarantees that the (Environmental) impact of economic growth will be exponential unless the Technology factor becomes much more efficient.
This is often cited as a multiplying factor of the current level of efficiency. For example, F2 would be twice as efficient, and F3 would be thrice as efficient, as the currently available technology. For mitigation of our environmental impact, there is talk of requiring F4 and even F10. Good luck to us with that.
If we don’t manage to produce such factors, the increasing global population multiplied by their reasonable expectations of living better lives, will lead to massive environmental degradation. Greater production of vehicles and devices, digital communications and social media requiring more data centres, cameras everywhere and the auto-surveillance of selfie-culture. Rather than looking into our cameras so often, we should be looking into our full-length mirrors. Seeing the energy being wasted here, there and everywhere, forever.
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