Soltani began her talk by\nexplaining the bottom-up approach she and other activists have taken to\ncalculating the carbon footprint of the Internet in the absence of definitive,\ntrustworthy sources: identify all the components and processes that make up the\nInternet, calculate the energy consumption of each, and identify the energy\nsources of each and convert that energy amount to the CO2 equivalent. To date there\nstill exists no surefire way to calculate the carbon footprint of the Internet,\nand therefore estimates of the energy intensity of the Internet diverge by a\nfactor of 20,000, which can in part be explained by different definitions of\nwhat the Internet is and what it includes (Hilty & Aebischer, 2015). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Current estimates state that the Internet accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Belkhir & Elmeligi, 2018), which is both significantly less than what I would have predicted and still too abstract to comprehend. For comparison, in Greenpeace\u2019s suspiciously optimistic 2014 report on renewable energy and the Internet, Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet<\/em>, the authors state that if \u201cthe Cloud\u201d were a country, it would be the 6th<\/sup> largest consumer of electricity on the planet (Cook et al., 2014).<\/p>\n\n\n\n One fact that is generally agreed upon\nis that the most energy consumptive element of the Internet is the manufacture\nand maintenance of its physical infrastructure, beginning with client devices\n(49%), Telecom infrastructure (37%), and data centers (14%; The Climate Group,\n2008). For example, client devices, which refers to all of the devices we use\nto access the Internet (mobile phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc.)\naccount for the highest proportion of energy consumption; depending on the study,\nestimates vary from 40% (Belkhir & Elmeligi, 2018) to 53% of the total\nenergy consumption of the Internet (Raghavan & Ma, 2011). Most of this energy consumption is due to the\nmanufacturing phase of client devices (referred to variously as either Embodied\nEnergy or Grey Energy) and accounts for 45-80% of the total device life cycle\nenergy (Hischier et al., 2015). <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are numerous complications\nwith this measure and others like it because not all of these devices are used\nto access the Internet 100% of the time\u2014someone can use a laptop to write a\npaper, for instance, without ever using the Internet, nor are device lifecycles\nconsistent across all users\u2014one person can use a phone for 6 months and another\nfor 6 years. These are just some examples of the nuances that make definitive\ncalculations about the carbon footprint of the Internet very difficult, if not\nimpossible. (Ingrid Burrington touches on the difficulties these metrics pose\nin her article \u201cThe Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge\u201d in The Atlantic<\/em>.) I found Soltani\u2019s research commendable\nbecause despite the scarcity of data available and the opacity of the data that\ndoes exist, she has forged ahead and brought attention to this timely topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was also surprising about her\ntalk\u2014and where she differs substantially from Burrington\u2014is she remains\noptimistic about the overall positive impact that the Internet could have in\nreducing net carbon emissions in other sectors despite the Internet\u2019s own significant\ncontributions to global greenhouse gas emissions. While she herself strays away\nfrom a techno-optimist stance, she does cite some suspiciously sanguine (and perhaps\noutmoded) views, such as those from an optimistic 2008 report by The Climate\nGroup: \u201cThe scale of emissions reductions that could be enabled by the smart\nintegration of ICT into new ways of operating, living, working, learning and\ntraveling makes the sector a key player in the fight against climate change,\ndespite its own growing carbon footprint,\u201d (The Climate Group, 2008). As an example of this, she mentioned that\nteleconferencing takes about 7% of the total energy cost that a face-to-face\nmeeting would, taking into account factors like different modes of\ntransportation, etc. (Ong et al., 2014). <\/p>\n\n\n\n She does concede that other\nexamples of the \u201cdematerialization\u201d of information, including the move from\ntraditional modes of music and movie distribution to digital streaming\nplatforms, have less of a positive environment impact: depending on the study,\nstreaming video is either only slightly more efficient than DVD distribution (Shehabi\net al., 2014), or has an even higher net energy impact that is still rapidly\nincreasing (The Shift Project, 2019). Whatever the exact figure is, it is\nhighly impactful due to the fact that video streaming accounts for 64% of all\ninternet traffic (Ejembi & Bhatti 2015). <\/p>\n\n\n\n The onus of finding environmentally\nsustainable solutions to this predicament we are all in should undoubtedly lay\nwith the tech companies and governments with the greatest carbon footprints,\nand not on individuals. If one trusted\nthe government to oversee the private sector, we could take inspiration from Paul\nFord\u2019s proposal to establish a government agency which he calls the Digital\nEnvironmental Protection Agency, responsible for protecting citizens in the\nevent of repeated \u201cdata spills,\u201d (Ford, 2018). How fitting, then, to also\nimagine tasking this hypothetical branch of a rotten bureaucracy with the additional\ntask of disciplining the tech industry and cleaning up its messes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the absence of government\nlegislation and private sector self-regulation, Soltani says that individual\nconsumers can also take action. Her suggestions\ninclude extending the life of your client devices, using ad blockers (online\nadvertising is very energy consumptive), protecting your data privacy (the\nstoring of your personal data is also energy consumptive), and \u201cstream lower\nquality videos, I guess,\u201d (Soltani, 2019). \nAll of these actions, save for electing to stream grainy YouTube videos,\nare all actions that have manifold benefits for consumers: less money spent on\nreplacing devices and less personal data being collected, stored and sold to\nmarketers and insurance companies at our citizenry\u2019s expense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While these actions she suggests may benefit individual consumers and make a small environmental impact, they do nothing to challenge the structural logic of late techno-capitalism and its extractivist methodology.\u00a0 Capitalism has always benefited from the dislocation of earth materials from Earth, the dematerialization of commodities and the invisibilization of labor. What is unprecedented at this stage of capitalism is that these existing abstractions of capitalist production have themselves become further abstracted and etherealized in the image of the Cloud. The semiotics of the Cloud further mystifies the terms of commodification and shrouds its mechanics in a blanket of mysticism. Divorcing the Internet from the materiality of the Internet in the image of the Cloud directly benefits the Internet\u2019s profiteers and limits people\u2019s ability to see the ideological machinery at work in their daily lives.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n To uncloak this mantle of mysticism\nsurrounding the Cloud, Nathan Ensmenger proposes treating the Cloud as a \u201ctype\nof factory\u201d and interrogating it as such: <\/p>\n\n\n\n [W]hat kind\nof a factory is it? Who works there, and what kind of work to they do, and how\nis it different from the type of work previously performed by factory workers?\nWhere does it fit in a larger technological, labor, and environmental history\nof human industry? And perhaps most importantly, how did it come to be seen as\ncategorically different? (Ensmenger, 2018, p. 20)<\/p>\n\n\n\n This historical-materialist critique of the Cloud is a\npromising start towards resituating the Internet in its material, political,\nsocial, and cultural context. Only by bringing the Cloud back down to Earth can\nwe begin to imagine a more equitable distribution of power in our\nhyper-networked reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n This talk raised many questions I\nam still grappling with weeks later. As libraries and cultural centers move\ntowards digitizing their assets and moving more and more services online,\nendeavors often hailed as universally beneficial and in line with our coupled\nmissions to make information more accessible and to preserve it for posterity, we\ndo so with little to no heed for how this impacts our shared environmental\nfuture. When environmental collapse comes to a head it won\u2019t matter if our\nbooks are conserved in print format or preserved digitally. As long as the\nlifecycles of the hardware we\u2019re using to preserve digital formats continue to physically\ndeteriorate, and the software we use for the same mission continues to rapidly\naccelerate, information professionals are forced to continually endeavor on the\nperilous journey of continuous data migration, making us complicit in the whole\nsystem of filling the earth with toxic, obsolete electronic equipment and\nmining the same earth yet again for more rare minerals to inaugurate another\nterminally obsolete technological lifecycle, ad infinitum. Infinite, that is, until we run out of\nminerals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLooking from the perspective of\ndeep time,\u201d Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler write in their essay on the human\nlabor and planetary resources required to operate an Amazon Echo, \u201cwe are\nextracting Earth\u2019s history to serve a split second of technological time, in\norder to build devices that are often designed to be used for no more than a\nfew years,\u201d (Crawford & Joler, 2018). All media is an extension of the earth,\nbe it codices made of paper manufactured from trees which took hundreds to\nthousands of years to grow, or be it a PDF viewed on a laptop composed of\nlithium, cobalt, and silicon (and the 14 other rare earth minerals necessary to\nmanufacture a single laptop or smartphone) that took billions of years for\nEarth to produce. Where we now differ from Gutenberg\u2019s time is the dizzying\nrate of acceleration at which we are moving towards total depletion of the earth\nmaterials needed to produce the information communication technologies that are\nembedded in the infrastructure of every branch of daily life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Belkhir, L., & Elmeligi, A. (2018). Assessing ICT global emissions\nfootprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations. Journal of Cleaner\nProduction<\/em>, 177<\/em>, 448\u2013463. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.jclepro.2017.12.239<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Burrington, I. (2015, December 16). The Environmental Toll of a Netflix\nBinge. Retrieved from The Atlantic website: https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2015\/12\/there-are-no-clean-clouds\/420744\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cook, G., Dowdall, T., & Wang, Y. (2014). Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet<\/em> [Greenpeace USA report]. Retrieved from Greenpeace website: https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/usa\/wp-content\/uploads\/ legacy\/Global\/usa\/planet3\/PDFs\/clickingclean.pdf. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Crawford, K., & Joler, V. (2018, September 7). Anatomy of an AI\nSystem. AI Now Institute and Share Lab<\/em>. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.anatomyof.ai<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Efoui-Hess, M. (2019). The Unsustainable Use of Online Video<\/em>.\nRetrieved from https:\/\/theshiftproject.org\/en\/article\/unsustainable-use-online-video\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ejembi, O., & Bhatti, S. N. (2015). Client-Side Energy Costs of Video\nStreaming. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Data\nIntensive Systems<\/em>, 252\u2013259. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1109\/DSDIS.2015.49<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ensmenger, N. (2018). The environmental history of computing. Technology\nand Culture<\/em>, 59<\/em>(5), S7\u2013S33.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ford, P. (2018, March 21). Facebook Is Why We Need a Digital Protection\nAgency. Bloomberg Businessweek<\/em>. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2018-03-21\/paul-ford-facebook-is-why-we-need-a-digital-protection-agency<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hammond, R. (2009, April). In search of Lithium: The battle for the\n3rd element<\/em>. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/home\/moslive\/article-1166387\/In-search-Lithium-The-battle-3rd-element.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hilty, L. M., & Aebischer, B. (2015). ICT for Sustainability: An\nEmerging Research Field. In L. M. Hilty & B. Aebischer (Eds.), ICT\nInnovations for Sustainability<\/em> (pp. 3\u201336). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-319-09228-7<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ong, D., Moors, T., & Sivaraman, V. (2014). Comparison of the energy,\ncarbon and time costs of videoconferencing and in-person meetings. Computer\nCommunications<\/em>, 50<\/em>, 86\u201394. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.comcom.2014.02.009<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Raghavan, B., & Ma, J. (2011). The energy and emergy of the Internet.\nProceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks<\/em>, 9. ACM. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/2070562.2070571<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shehabi, A., Walker, B., & Masanet, E. (2014). The energy and\ngreenhouse-gas implications of internet video streaming in the United States. Environmental\nResearch Letters<\/em>, 9<\/em>(5), 054007. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1088\/1748-9326\/9\/5\/054007<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/i\/pix\/2009\/04\/01\/article-1166387-03D2CD1C000005DC-409_634x372.jpg\")
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