An extract from The Dark Cloud
Dive in to this edited extract from The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World is Costing the Earth by Guillaume Pitron & Bianca Jacobsohn (trans.), a gripping investigation into the underbelly of digital technology and the carbon footprint it leaves behind.
Let’s turn back the clocks. Tame the furious charge of time. And reflect on the daily life of our pre-19th-century contemporaries. Their endeavours, both big and small, from growing crops, raising armies, or building pyramids, depended very much on the muscle power of the enslaved, the flow rate of rivers, and the unpredictability of ocean winds. Today the vestiges of certain ancient communication networks remain, such as Roman roads, colonial trading posts, and the old Pony Express stables built in the American West by postal workers.
The sixth of October 1829 marked a turning point for these ancient routines, some spanning thousands of years. On this day, British engineer George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ – the first modern steam locomotive – clocked up a speed of forty kilometres per hour on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, relegating stagecoaches and caravels to the annals of ancient history. With the telegraph and then aircraft, our connection to time was changed, as people, goods, and ideas could now criss- cross the globe at unprecedented speeds, thanks to a worldwide transport network of ports, air terminals, and transmission towers.
The second of October 1971 marked a new step when American engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email on Arpanet – the computer network prized by US scientists and military personnel. This technology would project humanity into the era of immediacy. Today, everything shifts and moves at the speed of light, or just about. After the gently paved streets of antiquity and the railroads of the industrial era, have you ever wondered what makes our daily digital life possible? What happens when you send an email or a ‘like’ on social media by hitting that ubiquitous thumbs-up icon? What is the geography of those billions of clicks, and what is their material impact? And what environmental and geopolitical challenges are we not seeing?
That is what The Dark Cloud is about.
The Internet has given digital technologies the means to colonise the furthermost reaches of our planet. The transformation of every possible tangible activity into a computerised process has given everything we do an invisible digital shadow. An application on your smartphone to monitor your sleep cycles makes sleeping a digital action; the same applies to praying once you download a meditation from any of the online spiritual communities out there; an ISIS solider waging war in Syria also exists in the digital world, as the US stores the geolocation of his mobile phone as part of its ‘Gallant Phoenix’ project aimed at turning data into justice; and even playing with your cat becomes a digital action once you post clips of its adorable antics on social media.
In short, our every move in the real world is now duplicated in the virtual realm – a process of digitalisation that Covid-19 has accelerated. This virtualisation of the perceptible world is only in its infancy. By 2030, the giants of the Internet will have connected all of humanity to the World Wide Web. The concepts ‘Internet of senses’, ‘merged reality’, and ‘green artificial intelligence’ will become part of everyday language, energising an astounding cross-pollination of ideas and cultures. Having taken control of cyberspace, the US and China will dominate the world. Yet, despite all this, the vast majority of us cannot explain the infrastructure behind our connected computers, tablets, and smartphones.
This is firstly because of the common misconceptions about the digital realm, which is touted as being no more concrete than the much-vaunted cloud where we store our documents and photos. But it is in fact more like a blob – a unicellular organism fed by a network of slimy, amorphous veins. In this digital world synonymous with ‘nothingness’ or a ‘void’, we are invited to make online purchases, play virtual games, and spill our guts on Twitter, seemingly without involving a single gram of matter, the tiniest electron, or a drop of water. In short, the digital world has the reputation of having no material impact at all. ‘We don’t even know how much power a single room with the lights left on consumes’, comments Inès Leonarduzzi, director of an organisation for more eco-responsible digital. Let alone the power consumption of the digital networks ...
A supposed lack of physical barriers gives digital capitalism the freedom to grow and thrive. The digital industry can even boast its positive role in preserving the planet by optimising our farming, industrial, and service methods, as we shall discover. According to such accounts, only by using digital technologies wholesale will we ‘save’ the planet. Besides, it is very difficult to explain what exactly this ‘blob’ is. Like a growing forest of sequoias, or ocean acidification, the expansion of the digital industry is real, but invisible to the naked eye. And what cannot be seen is seldom understood.
But crucial questions need to be addressed.
For two years, across four continents, I followed the trail of our emails and the ‘likes’ of our holiday photos: from the steppes of northern China, to find a metal that makes our smartphones work; to the vast expanses of the Arctic Circle; where our Facebook accounts cool off; to one of the most arid states in the US, where I investigated the water consumption of one of one of the world’s biggest data centres, that of the National Security Agency (NSA). I wanted to understand why the tiny Baltic country of Estonia had become the most digitised nation on the planet, to investigate the secretive and coal-hungry world of algorithmic finance, and to track down the connection of a transoceanic cable to Western Europe’s Atlantic seaboard.
I discovered that the Internet has a colour (green), a smell (rancid butter), and even a taste (salty, like seawater). It also emits the strident din of an enormous beehive. All senses were engaged as I sized up the sheer excess of the digital world. To send a ‘like’, we use what is set to become the largest infrastructure ever created by humankind. We have built a realm of concrete, fibre, and steel that is hyper-available and at our command within a microsecond; our very own ‘infra-world’ of data centres, hydroelectric dams, coal-fired plants, and strategic- metals mines, all aligned in the triple quest for power, speed, and cold.
History has shown that we should distrust the fears sparked by new inventions. From newspapers, cinema, and paperbacks, to the telephone, ‘New forms of media have always caused moral panics’, Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker points out. In the fifteenth century, the printing press was seen as a ‘danger to the soul’, and in the twentieth century, the radio was disparaged as a threat to good morals and democracy. In the 1960s, it was argued that television would destroy our mental and physical wellbeing. Information and communication technologies attract similar criticism, along with the novel addition of causing harm to the environment. It seems that digital technologies mirror our contemporary concerns and our new environmental angst.
Yet these technologies also offer the prospect of astonishing progress for humanity: longer lifespans, exploration of the origins of the cosmos, broader access to education, and modelling pandemic scenarios. They will lay the groundwork for incredible ecological initiatives. But let us not be so naïve in our commitment to this early century’s mother of battles. The digital world unfolding before our eyes is, by and large, for the good of neither planet nor climate. The paradox is how something so intangible can so starkly confront us with our planet’s physical and biological limits. That is the driving force of this investigation whose substance eludes us. I want to make sense of the dark side of this industry as it shies away from the light; to explore the geography of a supposedly abstract notion; to reveal the anatomy of a technology that, in the name of a dematerialistic ideal bordering on the mystic, is building a modern world that is completely materialistic; and to expose the plain fact that every email and ‘like’ we send produces enormous challenges that have so far escaped our senses.
