Communication technologies are inscribed into our social and cultural life for good. After experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, some of us remember the image of ourselves sitting in front of the computer, working from home, homeschooling, throwing surprise parties or going to online dates. During this time, a massive flow of data was going through the web infrastructure.

The debate on the invisible side of the internet has only started rather recently. The invisibility refers to the users’ everyday experience, but is well known to people who actually create the internet. This invisible side concerns its infrastructure. Kilometres of cables with optical fibre streaming straight to us; quite palpable, large server farms located in places where it is easy to cool them down   ^1  1   Google makes the largest foreign greenfield investment ever in Finland, “Business Finland”, https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/whats-new/cases/2018/invest-in-finland/google, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎. Our experience of the internet as a service we profit from rather than an object in our possession leads us to think of new technologies as something that is literally “in the air”. Those who create the internet know, however, that this infrastructure has its capacities and limitations, and that the software that operates on it is rather reminiscent of a pile of empty cardboard boxes stacked one on top of the other, full of plug-ins and updates – designed in such a way as to cooperate with other boxes. It would be surprising for many that the world’s biggest communication network works this way.

The environmental cost of technology has become an increasingly vital subject. It is well known that server farms need electricity to store data and to cool down the heated hardware. It is estimated that new technologies are responsible for generating a carbon footprint similar in size to the footprint of the entire aviation industry (1.4 and 2%, respectively).

Data-based technologies are a dynamically growing sector today. Scale is said to be the biggest gain most often mentioned while shifting online services to a data- and cloud-based model. Thanks to data, you can offer more, faster and cheaper. The cloud as a business model allows for easy scalability of services via connecting them to one centre. This service-building model is the most beneficial for those who can achieve the potential of the scale. Thus, big players are the group most interested in this model – they have the relevant amount of data and can afford to subscribe to computational cloud services, and thus nurture the potential of their business.

Three narratives

In the tech milieu, the ongoing discussion on the problem of an increasing environmental cost of the technological growth resulted in the development of three main narratives:

1. The monk way
2. The Big Tech Green
3. The carbon-aware way

Each of these solutions points to the main political forces on the one hand, and on the other to the weaknesses of the current social and technological assemblage, in which new technologies, their infrastructure and their users are entangled together.

The monk way

A website is one of the first things we have in mind when we think of the internet. It is therefore obvious that, when we think of how to build an eco-friendly internet, we seek to “ecologise” its basic product. This is the direction of many individuals who, as far as they are able, struggle to contribute to change the way the current system functions. They intend to design websites in such a way as to decrease the carbon footprint emitted while using them. It is therefore somewhat justified that this way is called “the monk way”.

What is paradoxical about the internet is that it provides a vision of an individual’s own agency: you can build a website and thus have a platform through which to express yourself. You can own a website, but if you don’t promote it using the tools offered by profiled and specialised businesses such as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or Facebook ads, nobody will ever get to know about it. Believing in this individual agency on a large scale can be dangerously misleading. What will change in the context of the internet’s carbon footprint if a website consumes less energy? Not much, really. The amount of the individual’s labour, engagement, experience building, learning, knowledge development and the work performed while sharing this knowledge with others will likely exceed the outcome. Nevertheless, this is one of the current models and is worth considering.

A Danish group, inspired by the Dogma 95 film manifesto, has set itself the task of creating its own manifesto for building an ecologically responsible internet   ^2  2   J. Hyldahl Fogh, 10 Rules for Building a Low-Impact Website, “Branch”, https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-1/10-rules-for-building-a-low-impact-website/, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎. As web developers, the members of the group addressed the cost of using an e-commerce website offering sustainable, fair-trade fashion. Their actions revealed a set of rules that are inscribed in web design and that were developed along with the growth of the web and visual communication possibilities, with total disregard for the environmental cost. As a result, they built their website guided by the following premises:

1. Images should be loaded only after the user clicks on them.
2. Minimise energy use on the user’s device.
3. The website adapts to reflect the level of renewable energy it consumes.
4. The website informs the user about the implications of their behaviour while browsing.
5. The website does not use video.
6. It stores data locally on the user’s device, to minimise data transfer.
7. The website compresses all data as much as possible.
8. The website loads only the most necessary programming scripts, frameworks and cookies.
9. It reduces the amount of light emitted by the screen.
10. It optimises and reduces the use of non-standard fonts.

The environmental cost of using a website is based on the fundamental question: how much data needs to be transferred in order to display information. Data informs us of every component needed for using a website – starting from whether the image will be displayed, to the brightness of the screen (something that can be controlled by introducing a black screen) or disabling pixels. As a result, less energy is consumed while we use the device and so, less energy is transferred within the entire infrastructure between computers and servers.

Such an individual case of using a sustainably developed website gives a false impression of empowerment, similar to the feeling we have when we stop using paper in order to curb deforestation. Despite the trend, our fascination with the entire DIY movement and the possibility of developing websites independently to create one’s own platform, the internet remains a project heavily dependent on two sources of influence: the technical possibilities and infrastructural restrictions on the one hand, and business on the other. These two elements have a much greater impact on what the internet is currently like and how green it can be.

The Big Tech Green

Data-based technologies are currently the most vital area directing technological growth. Data is not stored in thin air. There are bits of information physically stored on discs, even if the metaphor of the cloud might indicate otherwise. Let us remember that the cloud is a computational cloud and not a data cloud – which means that the computing performed on data is happening in the infrastructurally shared space of the cloud, which adapts to the current market demand. And data is kept in it all the time, in its physical form. Server farms need energy to store data and cool the servers. The servers store the data and perform computational work.

The very fact that we own an unimaginable amount of data, which we brag about within the tech industry and as a society aiming for the 4.0 revolution – i.e. the technological revolution based on data is yet another part of the sentence we pass on the natural environment, unless server farms transition to renewable energy sources.

Business is the biggest player as far as the internet and data-based technology are concerned. Not only does it have the greatest impact on what kind of internet we use, via the services it creates, but it also owns the largest number of resources with which to conduct the 4.0 revolution. None of the other players – not the state, nor the third sector, nor individuals – have the resources to learn new skills such as data analysis. Working with data requires considerable human, financial and infrastructural resources. Human – i.e. data scientists. Financial and infrastructural – because only large companies have the power to create and operate the infrastructure; it can collect data and has resources to store it and manage it.

The second model of making the internet greener proposes that firms managing server farms transition to renewable energy sources, which would relate to businesses shifting to using these farms. The questions are: how many such green server farms are there available now? How widespread is awareness about their existence? And finally, how important is it to consumers? This is still mostly ahead of us. The Green Web foundation has published a list of almost 400 “green” server stations, of which as many as 168 are in the Netherlands   ^3  3   https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/directory/, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎. In Poland, there are currently none. Another question is: who the clients of such a server farm are and, as a result, who should know about it so that, when choosing services, they can take the opportunity to reduce their impact on the environment. Here, again, we come back to the issue mentioned above that small, individual websites owned by individual users have, overall, little impact on the way the internet affects the environment. Therefore, such server farms should seek their clients among companies and the business environment who: a) want to make use of an easy way to scale their business, which is the main promise offered by the data-based internet services model; b) are aware of the environmental costs of their operations; and c) can afford it.

Human resources

The Internet is not a monolithic structure. Every internet-based service is built out of “programming boxes” that are matched with one another. Each of these “boxes” has its own specifics and knowledge about it is of high value in the IT market. This is how new professional roles and specialisations emerge. As a result of the Big Green Tech model, it has become necessary to create new jobs on the market for people specialising in building eco-friendly infrastructures and using “sustainable boxes”. The marketisation and professionalisation of the infrastructure mean that it is necessary to hire people who know about this new infrastructure. Since consultancy is now a separate specialisation, it may be that the knowledge will be costly – and thus available only to a select few. Of course, considering the fact that only those select few have the largest impact on the carbon footprint, we might say that it would be okay. However, the problem is that this would lead to a repetition of the capitalist mechanism – to a problem caused by the system, the system generates a solution that is compatible with its internal rules. The beat goes on, but the machine is stuck in its cogs. The market creates, the market consumes. Therefore, this solution is a market-based solution rather than an infrastructural one or one proposed by individuals.

This also shows our lack of consciousness regarding the centralisation and marketisation of the internet infrastructure. Not only do individual designers or users have little impact on the consequences of their use of the web, but only large actors (e.g. big business) can somehow change what we ultimately use, and only they can change what we ultimately suffer the consequences of. We will not change the internet through our individual, democratic behaviours, although we certainly would like to. This is not a democratic infrastructure. It is dependent, inscribed in dependencies as much as anything else. And the dependency on the market and business is extremely strong in this context.

The carbon mode

The third model discussed by the IT community is the carbon model – the carbon-aware way. It is based on the premise that, when using a web page, the user could reload the page if another version, based on renewable energy sources, was available. Right now, the first version of a Firefox plug-in is available   ^4  4   “Carbonalyser”: the browser extension which reveals the climate impact of internet navigation, https://theshiftproject.org/en/carbonalyser-browser-extension/, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎.  It informs the user about the amount of energy consumed by the website viewed. When the user enters a website, the plug-in informs them about the loading time in relation to the available source of energy.

This solution is addressed to individual users. There are some pros and cons of this. On the one hand, it is seemingly a fantastic opportunity for everyone to have even a slight impact on how they function in this vast infrastructure. On the other hand, one can say that this is again a solution that cedes responsibility onto the end-user. The user would have to: a) know about this app; b) install it on their device; c) have it launched; d) read the notifications provided; and finally e) act based on the information provided. None of these steps refers to the business side, and nothing actually changes on the side of infrastructure. The producers of services are also intact. We can only count on the possibility that, at some stage, when the data about using this app is published in an attractive, marketable way, there will be an argument from the infrastructure for the business to transition to green energy on a wider scale

The infrastructure that enables the transmission of such information to the user was not created with the aim of broadening our awareness of the ecological side of the internet   ^5  5   https://www.scion-architecture.net, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎. It was built to ensure greater security to the information transmitted – which was one of the key changes when the IP v.6 protocol was introduced. Security has proven to be such an important value that it has inspired the development of a data transfer technology that adds additional authentication criteria when deciding on the data transfer path. All that was needed was for one of these criteria to be information about the source of energy, and thus the environmental value became represented in the interface of internet use. When using SCION, the user is informed about the source of energy required to load the website and has an opportunity to make a choice   ^6  6   S. Scherrer, M. Legner, T. Schmidt, A. Perrig, Footprints on the path: how routing data could reduce the internet’s carbon toll, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/internet-carbon-emissions-data-path-scion/, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎.

Quantified or qualified

The issue with these solutions is that they cede the responsibility onto the individual users. Yolande Strengers writes about design for the “resource man”   ^7  7   J. Strengers, Smart energy in everyday life: are you designing for resource man?, https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2014/smart-energy-in-everyday-life-are-you-designing-for-resource-man, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎. This type of person was defined in response to the ever-greater need to translate our everyday chores, such as doing laundry, using the media and artificial light, or listening to music, to the cost of electricity. The resource man manages his errands according to the criterium of energy used to perform the task, with support from many monitoring devices. Strengers poses a question to the creators of such technologies: is it possible at all to translate our daily world into data, allowing our activities to be measured and managed? Or, on the other hand, should our attempt to subject our life to energy, which is inevitable in the context of the climate crisis, be dealt with differently? If so, how?

Every system has its wisdom. Contrary to the currently dominant practices of tracking, Strengers proposes to make use of the wisdom of the daily routine of the home to support frugal energy management, not by cleaning up the mess, but simply appreciating it. She states that the projects of organising chaos with the use of data have not proven successful so far and that the mess and disorder that run in our lives have their own rhythm and structure. We just need to start observing them, listening to them and experiencing them as “order” that can be enhanced by design. Another design method would be to include non-human inhabitants of the household, e.g. animals. Cats and dogs can find the warmest and the coldest corners of the house, providing useful information in the context of domestic energy management. Animals are apt at communicating with us and can express their needs – so why not make use of it? Teenagers, on the other hand, are very concerned about their bodies – the way they look, smell, etc. They spend a good deal of time in the bathroom. But at the same time, they are not really interested in managing energy or water at home – subjects that are vitally important to their parents. Designing a service for such consumers, hitherto not taken into account in “top-down” processes, seems worth considering.

Strengers explicitly shows how taking advantage of data in the context of a household influences the way we experience our life. These strategies have the potential to be implemented because they are not based on a central system (as in the case of the internet), but on household appliances. How can we draw from her approach in the context of the entire internet?

Strategies for infrastructure

The issue of technology design in times of limited infrastructure capacity is developed in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. “Computing within limits”  ^8  8   https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎ is just a small workshop, surprisingly and frighteningly small in respect of the importance of the problems it deals with. Among the talks given at the 2021 edition was a presentation of research into creating a new model of connectivity that would work in areas with underdeveloped infrastructure and would not be based on its centralisation   ^9  9   P. Schmitt, E. Belding, Navigating Connectivity in Reduced Infrastructure Environments, dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2926676.2926691, accessed 10 May 2022.  ↩︎.

Three locations were studied: 1) the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, where three network providers operate. The inhabitants usually profit from the network compatible with the SIM card they are given by the camp’s administration. The infrastructure was built for villages that previously existed in this area. Therefore, it proved insufficient in relation to current needs. Beyond the administration buildings, EDGE transmission is available, but it cannot meet the needs of the inhabitants; 2) San Cristobal Verapaz in Guatemala, the poorest country in Latin America, where two out of three providers have stations in rural areas. Network load problems, similar to those in the Za’atari camp, are noted. 3) Macha, Zambia – a sparsely populated sub-Saharan region of Africa where the local community of farmers have built their own system with 2 Mbps access in collaboration with an NGO. Building new infrastructure in such a landscape has proven unprofitable for the network providers.

The first model that went under scrutiny was to validate the possibility of building locally accessible networks ad hoc. Significantly, the researchers checked not only the possibility to connect to the internet but also the possibility of telephone communication (voice calls and text messages). Such user-built and user-adaptive infrastructure could work by switching from the local network to the main network in the event of heavy traffic. In the case of Za’atari and San Cristobal Verapaz, telephone communication was the only option available. In Macha, where a local internet network was built, the study was halted as it was not possible to verify whether the infrastructure could work longer and on a wider scale. It also operated in the grey zone, on frequencies of the licensed radio spectrum. The issue of licensing and sharing the spectrum is the main obstacle to the model of building networks from the bottom up. On the other hand, studies using unlicensed spectrum are conducted exclusively from industrial base stations, the argument being that a good quality connection is required. The researchers advocate the use of the WiFi connectivity model, which is widespread due to the availability of equipment, and it being separated from the exclusivity of network providers.

Another model is to use LTE-Direct technology, which enables text messaging and voice calls, provided that the users are not far away from one another. If this model was to become an alternative to the centralised infrastructure, then we would have to think about how mobile phone should be adapted to become a stable tool for network distribution.

The third model, which, rather idealistically, is being considered by researchers, is to recover the original, non-hierarchical nature of the internet. In its original model, the internet was a network of local networks. The centralisation of its infrastructure and the way we use the internet today is a result of the growing impact of businesses on the network and the services it provides. The current modus operandi not only prevents the free creation of stable local networks, but also limits the stability of communication in the event that the infrastructure breaks down.

Conclusion

Measuring and control are tools of rationalisation, surveillance, and power. Data, technology and the models described above come from the same paradigm: one that connects business, technology and the capitalist relations between the producer, the infrastructure, the market offer, the service, and the client. In order to reshape such a complicated reality full of interdependencies, it would require multiple actors to act together. I hope that, when this change happens, the values of care, empathy and respect will lead the way. Will we be able to look at our experience from a qualitative perspective, based on relationships, emotions, and presence? Can technology translate it? And is it necessary for that?

Bibliography:

“Carbonalyser”: the browser extension which reveals the climate impact of internet navigation,https://theshiftproject.org/en/carbonalyser-browser-extension/, accessed 10 May 2022.

Google makes the largest foreign greenfield investment ever in Finland, “Business Finland”, https://www.businessfinland.fi/en/whats-new/cases/2018/invest-in-finland/google, accessed 10 May 2022.

Fogh, J., 10 Rules for Building a Low-Impact Website, “Branch”, https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-1/10-rules-for-building-a-low-impact-website/, accessed 10 May 2022.

https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/, accessed 10 May 2022.

https://www.scion-architecture.net, accessed 10 May 2022.

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/directory/, accessed 10 May 2022.

Scherrer, S., Legner, M., Schmidt, T., Perrig, A., Footprints on the path: how routing data could reduce the internet’s carbon toll, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/internet-carbon-emissions-data-path-scion/, accessed 10 May 2022.

Schmitt, P., Belding, E., Navigating Connectivity in Reduced Infrastructure Environments, dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2926676.2926691, accessed 10 May 2022.

Strengers, Y., Smart energy in everyday life: are you designing for resource man?, https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2014/smart-energy-in-everyday-life-are-you-designing-for-resource-man, accessed 10 May 2022.