New Republic - Kevin Lozano*
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| Illustration by Kiersten Essenpreis |
In a tiny apartment in
the Spanish coastal town of El Masnou, just outside of Barcelona, Kris de Decker runs a
website completely powered by a small solar panel crammed into the corner of
his balcony. With its light blue background and low-res imagery, the site for
Low-Tech Magazine is intentionally
retro—a callback to blogs and self-hosted sites from the mid-to-late 1990s.
Each web page uses only .77 megabytes of data, making it more than 50 percent
leaner than the average web page. It is also static, meaning it lives entirely
on its locally hosted solar-powered server and as a result is only generated
once, requiring less computing power than a dynamic site that generates anew
for each visitor. Low-Tech has no ads
and doesn’t use cookies. Even if the site were not powered by solar energy,
these choices would make it that rare thing: an environmentally friendly web
page.
According to a
tool
developed by the web design firm
Wholegrain Digital, Low-Tech’s carbon
footprint, i.e., the amount of electricity required to run it,
is around 0.24 grams of carbon per page
view. This
article on
The New Republic’s
website
uses
around 2.6g of
carbon, more than 10 times as much. Every website on the internet
requires energy—and
in a global economic system that’s mostly reliant on fossil fuel, that
means
more pollution. Even the most basic internet activities incur
eye-popping costs: Streaming one hour of Netflix a week requires more
electricity, annually, than the yearly output of two new refrigerators.
The
articles on
Low-Tech, mostly written by de Decker, are focused on novel solutions to
our energy and tech predicament. In one piece, he explains how to get
your
apartment off the grid;
in another, he advocates for an
internet speed limit to
reduce the energy costs of rapid data usage. From design to content, Low-Tech is a thought experiment about a
possible DIY future for the web. It’s an internet that is locally governed,
slower, and sustainable.
There are some
downsides to the solar-powered site—a cloudy day in Barcelona might force Low-Tech to go off-line. And since Google
search prioritizes faster and more reliable websites, sites like
Low-Tech might always be relegated to
the margins of the mainstream web. But de Decker suggests we will all have to
make sacrifices and adjustments if we want a web that is ecologically viable,
rather than the one we know today: owned and operated by massive telecom companies,
reliant on the dirty power of cloud computing, and geared toward profit.
“One of the reasons why the energy use of the internet
keeps increasing is that we are always online, and from the moment we wake up
until the moment we go to sleep, we’re connected,” de Decker says. “We thought
it was important to question always being online. Do we really need to be
connected every minute of the day?”
The internet is the largest coal-fired machine on the entire
planet.
How the internet
adapts to the pressures of the climate crisis will change daily life as we know
it, from high-speed trading to shit-posting, from email to aircraft control.
It’s an open question whether the internet of the future will be as reliable as
it is today. In fact, it’s likely that internet access will be among the many
scarce resources that future generations will fight over, and that this
unequal distribution could create two different internets: one for the poor and
another for the rich.
Everything is going to
change, and quickly.
Sites like Low-Tech
offer one possible future, but generally speaking, the internet is likely to
face changes to its basic infrastructure that will be both sweeping and hard to
predict. In the last few months, I’ve talked to dozens of people—web designers
and futurists, computer scientists and activists—who are all increasingly
concerned about the internet’s own climate impact and its operational
vulnerability in a fast-warming planet. What follows, pieced together from
their observations, is a provisional picture of the internet’s future in the
age of global warming.
The internet is
inextricably tied to the coming horrors of the climate crisis. It is both a
major force behind that crisis and one of its likely casualties.
It
is the largest coal-fired machine on the entire
planet, accounting for 10 percent of global electricity demand. And the
internet’s climate impact is only going to get worse: Around
half of the world has yet to log on—a presently disconnected population
of more
than three billion people eager to begin streaming videos and updating
Facebook
accounts. The internet’s cut of the world’s electricity demand will
likely rise to 20 percent or more by 2030, at which point it will
produce more
carbon than any country except China, India, and the United States.
As the world gets
hotter, as the forests burn and cities flood, our devices will start to fail,
too. In data centers around the world, where the vast majority of the internet
is stored, cooling and energy costs will rise exponentially. The
electromagnetic frequency that Wi-Fi travels along will be disrupted, mangled
by the increased intensity of ultraviolet rays from the sun. In the next 15 years, the
coastal tubes and wires (4,067 miles of fiber conduit, to be exact) that
transmit Americans’ data will drown under salt water. The materials that prop
up the web, such as rare earth minerals, will become harder and harder to come by.
How do we even begin
to confront this array of systemic issues? A good place to start is by creating a
more ecologically friendly web, along the lines of de Decker’s site and other
projects now being prototyped by engineers within the nascent community of
sustainable web design. They agree on a few core tenets: Advertising is bad, the
growth of video streaming must slow, web pages are too bloated, and corporate
surveillance has to end.
Chris Adams, a web designer and climate activist in
Berlin, tells me he thinks a green internet must be free of advertising.
“Ninety percent of a web page being ads requires servers, and those servers are
taking electricity, and that electricity is generated by burning coal,” he
says. Adams has written that the European site for
USA Today is a model of efficiency. It removed all of its tracking
scripts and ads to be compliant with recent General Data Protection
Regulation legislation in the European Union. The site size immediately shrank
from 5 megabytes to 500 kilobytes, but it still basically looks the same—there are just no ads.
The leaner site, based on Adams’s rough calculations, saves more energy and
pollutes less. Its monthly reduction in carbon dioxide, based on traffic numbers, is the
equivalent of a flight between New York and Chicago.
Relatedly, with ads and tracking scripts gone, energy cost
and data usage doesn’t just plummet—there are also fewer people looking over
your shoulder when you visit
USA Today’s
website. “Is a climate-friendly internet one in which you’re not surveilled?”
asks Tim Frick, CEO of the green digital agency Mightybytes. “I absolutely
believe that.”
But a web that is free of advertising is a difficult
proposition, because, well, ads pay for most of the internet. Frick says the
ad-generated internet is not going to go away anytime soon. He advocates a
streamlining of internet process—keeping bandwidth down with more responsible
and efficient ad tech, for example. “We have to rethink how we get our
information and how we access it,” Frick says.
A web that is free of advertising is a difficult
proposition, because, well, ads pay for most of the internet.
Still, the web is also getting larger, not smaller, and
that will create additional carbon costs down the line. File compression and data management may get more
efficient, but it will be very difficult to contain the “
tsunami of data”
that billions more users will unleash. Tom Greenwood, the co-founder of
Wholegrain Digital, tells me, “We’re living in a golden age of cheap data, and
people only start saving water when they think there is a limit on how much
they can use.” He predicts that there will be a “rapid transition” away from
our current usage trends as data becomes more scarce and more expensive.
Mike Hazas, a computer scientist at Lancaster University in the U.K.,
is particularly concerned about streaming and its growing data burden, which he
believes could be catastrophic. He predicts that videos, “both subscription and
advertising based,” will grow “exponentially.” The internet’s data load will
only get more unwieldy with the expansion of the faster 5G wireless network,
higher-fidelity products like 4K and 8K video, cloud gaming, and streamed
virtual reality. All that means more pollution. “Beyond 2030,” Hazas says, “we
could see the total electricity usage of the internet rise to more than 50
percent of the global usage—which will in turn contribute to global warming and
disadvantage large parts of the global population.”
We’ve grown used to
communicating in videos, memes, and animation. Most websites are packed with
video players, blaring banner ads, pop-ups, elaborate layouts. But the glut of
data costs actual energy. And do we actually need any of it? “Streaming could
easily be 10 percent of global electricity by 2030,” says Hazas, “and will that
be OK?” In many ways, the campaign to make the web environmentally friendly is
also a campaign to make it less wasteful, chaotic, and toxic.
Paul Barford, a University of Wisconsin computer scientist
who discovered that most of the internet’s coastline infrastructure in America
is poised to drown in the next decade, believes the internet is going to get a
lot less reliable. But outages and other impacts will likely be wildly
disparate, depending on geography and wealth. “With countries that don’t have
the scale of infrastructure … we enjoy in the U.S.,” he says, “the situation
is potentially dire.”
For the biggest companies, business will continue
unabated. “Will Google go down? Will Amazon go down? Of course not,” Barford
says. These tech giants, which control swaths of the market, prioritize staying
online at all costs. With their resources, political power, and user base, it’s
not hard to imagine them weathering a changing planet no matter the price.
They’re too big to fail.
That doesn’t mean that everyone will be able to afford to
log on to them, though. Gary Cook, an information technology expert at Greenpeace, says financial
inequities are going to define the future of internet access. Giant
internet companies will find ways to harden and protect their infrastructure.
Wealthier individuals, meanwhile, will also be able to safeguard their
internet-enabled lifestyles, as they come to depend even more on permanent
connection, and smart-home gadgets and wearables inundate the market. “Customers
with the wherewithal to pay for more reliable services will still get [them],” Cook
says, “and there will be a wider divide between those who do and don’t.”
Those predictions track with a general consensus that
climate change will exacerbate global economic inequality. A recent report
delivered to the United Nations Human Rights Council envisions a coming era of climate
apartheid, in which the wealthy will pay whatever it costs to escape hot,
hungry, and conflict-laden regions, while the rest of the population suffers.
Historian Mike Davis predicted all this a decade ago in a 2010 essay “
Who Will
Build the Ark?” An increasingly warm and unstable climate would, Davis warned,
accelerate the existing divide between the rich and the poor. Earth’s
“first-class passengers,” as he called them, would invest in selective
adaptation and protective measures to wall themselves within “green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an
otherwise stricken planet.”
“Streaming could easily be 10 percent of global electricity by 2030, and will that be OK?”
Xiaowei Wang, a geographer and internet researcher at University of California, Berkeley, who studies internet usage in rural China, says that, when it comes to
the online experience there, such oases have already emerged. “Will there be
two siloed internets? One for the urban elite? And one for the rest of us? This
is happening now!” she says. People in the Chinese countryside already access a
different internet than their urban counterparts because the “material
realities are drastically different.”
The downside of making the
internet greener is that those without money might not be able to access a web
experience that is not subsidized by advertising and corporate surveillance and
pop-ups. If you have money, you’ll be able to afford more data, more bandwidth, and a more reliable connection. The wealthy will move freely in the web’s comfortable walled gardens.
What’s to be done? The
market, from insurance companies to investment banks, is already calculating
the damages that might occur once the global economy at large
starts to blow past the markers laid
out by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Paris climate agreement. But even as more people
get online, and more data circulates, and more energy gets used, the march toward
renewables and a carbon-neutral internet remains halting.
There are some wild
moon shots being proposed, such as Amazon’s promise to create a satellite-distributed
internet and Microsoft’s claim that it will revolutionize data centers by
storing our files on “
manufactured DNA.”
But as David
Wallace-Wells points out in his recent book
The
Uninhabitable Earth, “We think of climate change as slow, but it is
unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as
fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by
just how soon we need it.” Paul Barford stresses the same basic point: “I don’t
think technology is going to save the day here. There isn’t going to be some
tech waiting on the horizon and once that becomes cost-effective, suddenly
we’re good.”
A more realistic
option in the near term might come in the form of new infrastructure programs
and industry regulation. Currently, Bernie Sanders is the only presidential
candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary to recognize that the internet is
essentially a utility that will very much be affected by the climate crisis. He
is proposing to “build resilient, affordable, publicly owned broadband
infrastructure” through $150 billion worth of infrastructure grants. Elizabeth
Warren has also made a series of proposals that would empower municipalities,
specifically in rural areas, to build their own public networks rather than
relying on private telecom companies and internet service providers. She has recommended
the
creation of a
federal Office of Broadband Access, which would oversee $85 billion worth of
grants to communities to take on these infrastructure projects.
“Will there be two siloed internets? One for the urban elite? And one for the rest of us? This is happening now!”
Other candidates, like
Joe Biden, have similar proposals about building out rural broadband access and
infrastructure, but Warren’s and Sanders’s plans are the most detailed and
generous. Still, no one has done much work to curb the greenhouse gas emissions
that the internet creates—no proposal to tax streaming, for example.
Warren
does tackle the industry side in a very broad way, with her plan to
break up Facebook,
Amazon, and Google. If her proposed regulations were to pass, the
landscape of
the internet would change dramatically, and the ad-tech empires and
data-collection operations of these companies would no longer be so
hegemonic. What
impact this would have on the climate, specifically, has not been
outlined by
the Warren campaign, but it would necessarily limit the ability of giant
tech
corporations to use their clout to protect their polluting ways.
“Breaking them
up would make it easier to impose solid environmental regulations on
tech
companies,” said Tom Greenwood.
In many ways, the
future of the internet is already here. You don’t have to imagine how some
superstorm will wipe out power, clean water, and internet and phone service.
This has all already happened. In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York,
Goldman Sachs’s headquarters, located in a relatively vulnerable part of the
Financial District in New York City, was protected by thousands of its own
sandbags and backup power generators. Just a ferry ride away, in Red Hook,
the power would remain off for weeks after the storm passed.
A few years earlier,
Greta Byrum, who was working with the New America foundation at the time,
launched a pilot program in Red Hook to construct a MESH network: a local intranet
system built on the rooftops of homes in the area. “This little
infrastructure was being held together by wire and string, and still ran after
Sandy, when a lot of the major systems failed,” Byrum told me. “People did a lot
of organizing, distributed supplies, and sent out emergency messages using the
MESH network and Wi-Fi-enabled devices.”
For
Byrum, the lesson of MESH’s success is that vulnerable
communities reliant on the internet need to become self-sufficient. New
America
has since trained Red Hook residents to build and maintain its
still-growing
network. Byrum also helped launch MESH in Far Rockaway, Gowanus, Hunts
Point,
East Harlem, and Sheepshead Bay—neighborhoods particularly susceptible
to sea-level rise and extreme weather. These independent, small-scale
networks are
important, Byrum says, because they “enable people to stay in touch with
their
neighbors regardless of what’s happening in the wider world.”
Now
at the New School’s Digital Equity Lab, Byrum continues to focus on
infrastructural inequalities in the communication sector.
She saw Sandy repeat itself in Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria in 2017,
though
on a larger, more horrific scale. It was “a case study in disaster
capitalism,”
she says. “They basically lost their entire communication
infrastructure.”
Byrum says the issues raised by Maria revolve around core
questions of political economy: “who owns infrastructure, and who
should own it, and who makes the rules.”
She adds, “People really felt after the storm that they were at the mercy of
folks who didn’t have their best interests at heart. And so it sparked a
conversation about decolonizing technology, communication infrastructure.”
If you look at the margins, where the poor and the
neglected live, you can see an early version of how climate change will make
internet access even more unequal. But it’s also in these places where you’ll
see innovation steering the net’s infrastructure away from the corporate quest
for profit. Xiaowei Wang is already seeing this happen in rural China. “China
has a huge amount of state control over the internet and these very tight
restrictions on who even gets to put up a website,” she says. “Rural China is
good at subverting that, creating a subculture that is very anti-government. And
they’re doing it over live streaming platforms in China.” Her optimistic
reading is that places like rural China offer an example of “indigenous
innovation and a more free, more decentralized internet.”
This internet might be slower, but it would also be more
community-oriented and heterogeneous. “The global internet is fracturing,”
Byrum says, “and maybe that’s not a bad thing, given the global internet is not
governed in a coherent way.” What’s of vital importance to her is that people
have more democratic control over their own piece of the internet. “What I’m
talking about is building our own infrastructure and making choices about
governance and design that are based on principles of equity and resilience.
Communication systems are the nervous system of our culture and society, so
let’s build them in a way where we feel and see and hear each other and be in
relationship with each other.”
A more localized internet is something to root for. Maybe
an internet owned and operated by the dispossessed and vulnerable could tackle
the problems that the internet for the rich and comfortable could never
address. The big, homogenous, world-consuming internet we know today is
unsustainable. And if this network is going to have any chance of surviving, it
has to be disrupted, destroyed, and broken down.
*Kevin Lozano is a Brooklyn-based editor and writer. His work has appeared in The Nation, Artforum, GQ, Bookforum, Pitchfork, and elsewhere.
Links
At the North Pole, scientists were shocked to see temperatures reach a relatively balmy 35 degrees Fahrenheit in February 2018, which is a full 50 degrees warmer than usual for the season, The Washington Post reported. In 2012, Arctic sea ice cover dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. The planet’s natural iceboxes were dramatically defrosting, and people were starting to take notice.
