Research into the physicality of the Internet
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What are the physical and environmental impacts of our online habits ?
Research publication Media & Culture Design Academy Eindhoven 2015
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Intro 4
Today understanding the functioning and implications of global networks has become crucial for their users. We became perpetual inhabitants of the cyberspace, without fully realizing how our civil rights migrate and translate to the seemingly disordered omnipresent virtual environment. It is simply important to fathom that networks prolong way beyond our screens, and recognize the cloud as something more than a “fluffy thing in the sky”. Looking into the future of cyberspace governance, we should acknowledge the physical locations of its servers. The online data today is legally dependent on its location’s government and available physical resources, such as electricity and cooling. Moreover, modern states are still struggling with defining an application of their local laws within digital realm. Over last decades, there have been several attempts to acquire virtual independence from governments through establishing “data havens”. Few micro nations, such as the principality of Sealand, tried to tame the complexity of legislations through exploiting existing loopholes in geographical jurisdictions. Though first attempts have failed, today even bigger and more developed countries such as Iceland position themselves as future “Swiss banks for bits”. Icelandic servers are mostly fueled by renewable geothermal energy, allowing its data center industry to grow rapidly and outshine the rest of the worlds’ developments, thus introducing the feasible concept of eco-friendly data storage.
Acknowledging the physical aspect of cyberspace also implies that actions performed online have environmental consequences. A single data centre can take more power than a medium-size town, and it has been estimated that the level of CO2 produced by all data servers combined became almost as polluting as the entire airplane industry. Giant digital corporations, such as Facebook, are starting to introduce their own programs for more sustainable industry. Though individual users remain uninformed and therefore inactive in regard of this issue. We decided to investigate what can be done from the individual point of view, on the scale of one user with typical digital routines and habits. To answer this question we first need to determine the exact consequences, from energy consumption to produced CO2 emission.
Webpage viewing: 0,03 g CO2 /sec
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Transmit 1GB: 3 kg of C02 : 13kWh
1 Google search: 0,2 g CO2 : driving 10 cm
1 mail : 4g-50g C02 : driving 1-12 m 6
1 Spam email : 0,3g CO2 : 1 m driving a car
1 month OF wifi : 7kg CO2
In search for the factual information we found a variety of sources, from very scolding and pessimistic calculations to enthusiastic articles, highlighting the latest technological advances in solving this issue. We got confronted with conflicting data and numbers that would so drastically vary that we would not trust any. We got in contact with several professionals within this field, asking for more clarity and accurate numbers, but again, the answers were really vague and most of them would point out the futility of searching for exact figures or even of tackling this subject with seriousness.
The numbers that are presented in this publication are calculated averages, roughly rounded up from different sources, and are not intended to be taken as objective legitimate data. The goal of presenting the numbers through out publication is to purposefully shock, provoke and then confuse the reader in order to start a dialogue on the generally overlooked subject.
Warning! The numbers are not reliable.
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Information Ecosystem: Physicality of the cloud
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Renewable energy
Seattle wants to heat itself using waste heat from data centers. Apple built the largest solar panel field to power ICLOUD. Seafaring data center — near-shore data centers utilizing wave energy for power, and sea water for cooling servers.
Open Compute Project — open source technologies for greener data centers provided by Facebook.
Climate
The Node Pole — the ideal location for data centers and high-tech industry. The Node Pole is at the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, USA, and is the coldest region in Sweden, making it perfect for data centers establishment. In fact, the air temperature has not been higher than 30 degrees Celsius for more than 24 hours in total since 1961.
Green Mountain — hidden inside Norwegian mountain, next to a cold fjord which supplies cooling water, Green Mountain is the world’s most environmentally-friendly data center. Obviously all that tech creates a lots of heat, which is why it’s been built next to a fjord, to keep things nice and cool. In fact, that fjord supplies water at a pretty much constant 8 degrees Celsius.
Consumer habits
A majority of American think “the cloud” is an actual cloud, specifically a “fluffy white thing,” according to a survey by Citrix. One avatar on Second Life consumes as much energy as 1 Brazilian person.
In many facilities, servers are loaded with applications and left to run indefinitely, even after nearly all users have vanished or new versions of the same programs are running elsewhere.
Greenternet Software that tracks the user’s energy consumption and estimates the amount of pollution
Datox Centre An utopian urban infrastructure built around and on a data center centre in the most ideal environmental conditions (access to renewable energy, natural cooling, waste heat reusage for central heating).
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“Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid.�
The New York Times Power, Pollution and the Internet, James Glanz Sept. 22, 2012
Total internet industry : 30 billion w electricity : 300 million tonnes CO2 13
All data centres : 30GW : 30 nuclear power plants : 1,5 % all energy in world
All unused servers : pollution of 6,5 million cars
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All spam : 2million homes US /year electricity : 3 million cars CO2 emission : 28,5 million tons CO2 /year
Blog platform Tumblr: 183 million page views /day : 2,600 tons CO2/day
Interview with Birgitta Jonsdottir politician (poetician) and activist member of the Icelandic parliament
With the initiatives of the Icelandic Pirate party and IMMI (International Modern Media Institute), today Iceland is positioning itself as a new safe haven for data. How will the idea of data storage evolve in the future? What will be it’s relationship with the state?
When we started IMMI, the idea was to create a safe haven for data in Iceland, a safe haven from attacks that take down the information and attacks on privacy. The attacks on privacy are a much bigger issue as most of the companies that host your social media data, emails and search history are based in the US. With the Patriot Act it’s impossible to stop US government from going through your personal data, and all the mother companies are located in the United States as well. Our focus has been primarily on protection of the data that is important to our digital persona, such as medical data. [“OH MY GOD, there is massive ice storm out there!!” - Birgitta exclaims] So Iceland is the first step, and my original idea is to create a new standard for the future. We should have different safe spaces and safe havens in different parts of the world, as we don’t want to store all the data in one location. That would make the country where it’s located very vulnerable. It would be beautiful if instead EU would make a fortress around data. (Which they probably won’t.) Data havens are not necessarily a solution. Most of the data today goes up into clouds, and clouds can be moving between different territories, between different countries, making the idea of privacy very difficult. Instead, we can use technology to expand the idea of direct democracy, and create a much bigger involvement of the general public in policy and decision making in the societies. It’s very important to make sure that our digital shadow has the same rights as the person that reflects the shadow. The best way to describe it so the people can comprehend it, is to explain what happened to me once, when the US government wanted to retrieve my personal data from Twitter. Nobody really payed attention to it, except geeks, as it didn’t mean anything to them. But when I sent out a press release a year later, saying that FBI had broke into my home, you could see that people directly were outraged. They went through my backdoor and my front door — through the internet. So instead of seeing data as something you can create a fortress around in one country, we need to make sure we also have local laws to protect us. And thanks to Edward Snowden, the awareness on this issue keeps rising in modern society.
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In the future, how can digital technologies affect and transform our democratic systems ?
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I have been working globally, establishing new agreements, such as UN resolutions on the privacy issues in the digital age. If in the future we want to execute democracy in a digital way, we have to recognise that we can’t do it in the same way as we do it physically. Take an example of Rop Gonggrijp, the guy who stopped electronic voting system in Holland because its too easy to hack it. We are asking the same question in Iceland - if you are voting electronically, will there always be a person who knows how you voted? There have been no technological solutions to it yet. Talking about future vision, I would like to see a system when the representatives are no longer needed. People in the parliament are supposed to be the representatives, but many of them have very little impact as a minority, even if they represent a certain percentage of Icelanders. 49% of Icelanders that didn’t vote for the parties that now are in power, have no impact for 4 years. If we could change that, it would be wonderful. This idea evolves into liquid democracy, or what i call “active votes”. It is a very tricky system, and it is very smart if used correctly. The beauty of the active voting system is that I would trust you, I would know you are an expert in, let’s say, privacy. If we are on the same line, we would create the same policy about it, and I would trust you and transfer my voting rights in this particular issues to you, while focusing on stuff that I am myself god at. People would trust me, because they would have the same vision. And you don’t have to become an expert in everything, as it’s it impossible. Today it makes so many people not want to do anything — they can’t be successful with everything or have opinion about everything. People became unpolitical by having no opinions. We need to divide our systems. Our systems need to be structured in a way that they are not so big. In the ideal future we create circles of communities that are not alienated systems, that nobody feels they belong to. Modern democracy is a dictatorship by parliamentarians that are fully controlled by corporate sector. In the future societies will run systems, instead of systems running systems. Because if you separate yourself from the state, the state turns into what we are experiencing today. In order for people to be able to be engaged, you have to make sure that there are two things in place. If you want to entrust people with power, you have to make sure there is access to information and they can make informed decisions based on facts. You also have to make sure that people can vote anonymously. That is something we can’t promise people today. In the digital era, they are not anonymous. There are countries that have that sort of technology that can make all of us naked. Today information is being sold, including very private stuff, like, for example, 300 000 Danish citizens’ medical history. And I think there is going to be a tremendous development in data protection. Today encryption is the key element to it, but we cannot put all our trust in it. What if you send all the sensitive data to one person and share the key with this person, and then this person gets compromised? Today people who are aware become super schizophrenic, many have written statements on their phones, notes, Facebook accounts addressing the NSA people, starting with “Dear NSA, if you are reading this, … ”.
The online data today is legally dependent on it’s location’s government and available physical resources. A single data centre can take more power than a medium sized town, and Iceland is an example of how using renewable energy can make data storage ecofriendly. How should over countries, which don’t have Iceland’s geothermal energy and cooling capacities, deal with this issue ?
In many ways Iceland is depicted in a much nicer way than it is, even if we do use geothermal energy, there are continuous abuses. They are trying to use it for different purposes than just households like for industry. The data centres are chewing it up, the bitcoin mines, they are using up so much energy. The whole thing about sustainability, and environmental issues, we have to completely change our ways. There is going to be a tremendous shock, if we don’t find it in our hearts to change our day to day life in the West. I just came from Vietnam, and they are moving to the same place we are in now. They are building highways and using more and more cars. It demands tremendous resources. If you think about the way data centres are run, they use the computers and throw them away, if you think of all these resources used in modern technology, we have run into peak on all of them. In the future I think we have to rethink the structure of our society. We are lucky to find geothermal ways to warm up our homes. But the weather patterns are changing and now maybe in 2 decades Iceland is going to be inhabitable. There is not enough pressure in the weather system that would normally move the heavy storms away from Iceland. If we don’t tackle global warming in a real way, I don’t know if there is even going to be an Iceland in the future. The next generation still needs the possibility to live here and we don’t all have to move to Denmark or something. We take so many things for granted today, if we try to keep what makes it bearable to live and let go of this lust of endless new versions of things were going to be fine. We need to talk about the future. We need to discuss where are we going as humanity, in parliaments or in think tanks. It’s a massive collective project.
People are not acknowledging the physicality of cloud . Even after all the NSA Snowden revelations, they know — but don’t know what to do with this information. What do you think can be done on an individual level? How can you create awareness against the “I don’t have anything to hide why would I care” mentality ?
When people tell me “I have nothing to hide” I ask “can i have your password?”. Snowden said: “the NSA can look at your penis photos”. The best thing people can do is sit down one day, spend a Saturday, tracking down how much shadow they leave behind. Your phone is being tracked, who you’re with is being tracked. When somebody is in the same room as I am, with their smartphones, I ask: “How many of you have smartphones? Because you are in the same room as me, and I belong to a cyber terrorist group (Wikileaks), you are being tracked too“. Then they get nervous.
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I have this website I made at the beginning of the Internet. Some people got information from it and made a very weird profile of me. You can defame somebody very easily. The Internet also doesn’t forget defamation. All those teenagers today post al those drunk photos, and they can’t hide them from their future boss, or if they want to be a politician. It’s not about hiding, but how it is being used. Let’s say I’m researching ISIS. I was, because they used .IS domain for their website. If you take that out of context, I could be on a terrorist list. If you are researching pedophiles, and somebody wants to defame you, its very easy because your search history is kept. Or let’s say your mom has cancer, and you are researching things about this specific cancer online, then insurance companies can find out that you have this in your medical history and you won’t get insurance.
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People need to understand that everything is an open book. You are absolutely naked. You live in a transparent house with no curtains. I think we have to first make ourselves aware that we are naked. We can be accessed by your government, other governments, companies, or even hackers. So the first thing to do is to make yourself aware, and then ask: “Do i want to have a lock on my house, or do i want it to be open and have anybody come in, find my underwear and sniff at it”. If you decide to have a lock, there are two of them: first is a proper password, a good key to this house. Make a good system about how you create them and keep them. You have to constantly upgrade them. The best way to do that is to grab a book and use the first sentence. Make it a bloody long password. Do not have 12345678910 or your sons birthday. You create a key to your house. And then you want to decide if you want curtains in this house, and the curtains are about how you travel. Do you want to go on the highway naked on a bicycle? It’s about how you protect yourself. What is your helmet ? That’s encryption: you can have encrypted sms, chat, cryptocat. If you want to have private messages with friends family, lovers, or just don’t want anybody to see how you function, you can use TOR — it’s a special browser, it hides what you do on the world wide web. Be very careful what you put out there. What you put publicly available on your Facebook page. I am a public person, and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using Facebook. Have somebody organise a crypto party. Friendly geeks teaching you how to be secure online, how to put your online condom on. You don’t want syphilis and AIDS going around online with no condom. I strongly encourage people to have these parties. So in your school, have a crypto party. Teaching it face to face is best. Finally, it is mostly girls that do it.
07/04/2015
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Doyou youwant wantto topollute pollute?? Do Seriesof ofpop-ups pop-upsthat thatalert alertthe theuser userof ofhis his Series imminentpollution pollution imminent
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Dear ______, [...] we are not completely sure of the reliability of our sources. Would you be willing to help us by answering our questions or by providing any information which can highlight the relation between digital consumption and physical reality ? How much energy (kWh) is used and/or CO2 (g) is being produced by : - sending 1 mail ? - storing 1 mail ? - transferring 1GB of data ? Is it ever better to print a webpage than to continue reading it for a long time ?
René Post Green Web Foundation
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Beste Gwendolyne, Dankjewel voor je mail en interesse! De vragen die je stelt zijn best moeilijk te beantwoorden. Ik ben sinds 2007 bezig met dit onderwerp, en zie een hoop onzincijfers die eindeloos herhaald worden. Het komt erop neer dat niemand het precies weet. Voor toch wat indicaties kan ik je het beste naar het ‘clicking clean’ rapport van Greenpeace USA, eind vorig jaar verwijzen. Ik ben nu in Azië voor een mangrove-project, maar ben over een week weer in Zweden. Heb je een versie die je dan nog even wilt checken op grote fouten, dan zou je wat kunnen sturen. Wat is precies jullie idee qua vormgeving? Groeten en succes voor nu! René. PS: dat van die hummer, ik geloof het niet! Zo’n ding rijdt 1 op 1 toch?
Evan Mills Senior Scientist | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Hi Folks, Sorry, but I haven’t looked at this issue in a very long time. Please explore the literature. Jonathan Koomey has published on the topic. Regards, Evan
Jorge L. Zapico Greenalytics
Hi, It is quite difficult / impossible to give exact numbers on this, as the energy use and CO2 would depend on different factors, the energy use is difficult to allocate to individual actions, there is contradicting data, and the data gets outdated pretty fast as technical systems change (For instance the data in Greenalytics will be quite outdated right now). In general you can say that individual actions like sending 1 email or 400 emails have quite tiny impact, but as ICT has gotten so pervasive the aggregate impact, for instance of a website with hundred of million visits per month gets more significant. Some links that may be useful: http://cleermodel.lbl.gov/ http://www.google.se/green/bigpicture/#/ Research from my colleagues at the Centre for Sustainable Communications: http://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/record. jsf?pid=diva2%3A806963&dswid=1282 http://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:355962/FULLTEXT01.pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.12145/abstract http://www.cesc.kth.se/publications/all-publications/allpublications-1.441072
Some years ago I created together with some friends a tool to compare abstract co2 info with other things: http://carbon.to , one of the inspirations was a traveling site called doppler which used just that comparison with driving a hummer. See: https://raw.github.com/zapico/ PhD/master/Articles/2011%20Carbon%20Psychnology.pdf I hope this is useful, good look with your project! Jorge L. Zapico, PhD Researcher, Centre for Sustainable Communications, KTH, Stockholm. Research fellow, Centre for Learning and Knowledge Technologies, Linnaeus University, VäxjÜ. http://jorge.zapi.co
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Jonathan Koomey Energy policy research
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Anastasia, The following statement is clearly not correct: “For example, the CO2 emission of sending 400 mails equals a one hour drive of a Hummer.” Unfortunately, calculating correct numbers is not trivial, and many times is context dependent. For example, the efficiency of IT equipment changes rapidly, so exactly WHEN you measure the electricity use is critical, but most folks trying to do this aren’t careful. There’s an awful lot of misinformation out there. In general, IT uses a lot less electricity than people think, and your usage behavior generally isn’t an important factor. Better to have people worry about more substantial things, like buying a more efficient car or insulating their houses. You could recommend that they turn off their computers at night and on the weekends, and enable the power saving features on their computer, but those are about the only things people should be worrying about when they use IT equipment. Here’s an old takedown of a mistaken factoid about internet searching: http://evanmills.lbl.gov/commentary/tempest.html There is solid information about google searches there, but the data are now 6 years old, so lots has changed. So I don’t have a simple answer for you. I would recommend that you encourage people to focus on energy using activities that are more consequential. IT is too small for individuals to worry about, and the time it takes to worry about it could be better used improving other aspects of the energy economy. Best, Jon
Hummer : 400 mails : 6,6GB : 2 movie : 277 hours online 27
Small airplane : 3000 mails sending : 50 GB : 16 movies : 2083 hours online
Washing : 240 mails : 4GB : 1,3 movies : 166 hours online
Bulb : storing 1 mail for 1 day : 0,06 kWh
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Motorcycle : 260 mails : 4,3GB : 1,4 movies : 166 hours online
1GB : 3kg CO2 : 1271 cups of tea
“The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation.�
The New York Times Power, Pollution and the Internet, James Glanz Sept. 22, 2012
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Conclusion 30
During this research project we became more conscious of our own digital habits: keeping thousands of spam mails in our mailboxes, streaming online for many hours in a row, keeping the tabs open for indefinite periods of time. We started to look at it as we look at daily energy saving actions, such as switching off the light when leaving the room. As a practical experiment, we explored various method of communicating our findings to the uninformed public: from engaging in informal conversations to developing speculative proposals for problem-solving software. Aiming to translate our research into a tangible experience, we decided to operate with vernacular language of digital communication, making it more accessible for the viewer. The more we went along the more we questioned the relevance of our problematic and whether our inquiries can be answered at all. A specialist in energy policy Jonathan Koomey gave a very discouraging answer, saying that on a global environmental scale our investigation is irrelevant and those individual little actions have a very insignificant impact on the Earth. Just another click won’t be harmful enough to become a major concern.
As a reflection on the controversial feedback, we focused on fostering a discussion on the subject of technological solutionism in general. By proposing an ultimate solution to Internet pollution, we created a fictional operating system, OS:Ratio. In the form of an installation, it illustrates a link between the computer and the common electronic devices in the user’s close home environment. It works as an energy balancing system: the user has to choose between an action performed online or an ability to use a physical electrical device. Two screens create a dialogue of online and offline energy consumption. It starts off as a seemingly beneficial plug in, but over time the connection between the objects becomes uncontrollable in a sense that the machine makes decisions faster than a user can predict. In the end, the purpose of having this program in the first place becomes unclear. Illustrating the renowned idea of hyper connectivity between household objects, OS:Ratio becomes a reflection on the uprising concept of the Internet of things. After all, by allowing automated monitoring of every single activity, do we actually control the domestic environment, or does the environment start to control us?
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Gwendolyne Rottger : Anastasia Kubrak
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