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The footprint of ‘digital’ – everything from cloud storage and cryptocurrencies to Netflix and emails – is currently estimated to be around 3.7% of global carbon emissions. That sounds small but is equivalent to that of the entire airline industry.
We generally assume that digital is the ‘green’ alternative to traditional ways of doing things, and it can be. However, when the marginal cost is zero, we tend to pay even less attention to the impact of our behaviour: Of the ~200 billion emails sent every day, around 84% can be categorised as spam. The impact of one email (or one Netflix episode) is negligible but in their hundreds of billions, emissions add up quickly.
Thanks to a new horde of efficiency advocates like Tom Greenwood, awareness of the environmental impact of digital is growing. His recent book Sustainable Web Design offers a concise overview of the topic, although – as with all climate-related issues – to really move the needle industry heavyweights like Amazon need to lead the way.
When it comes to the environmental impact of the internet, there is a second-tier effect that, in a way, is so obvious that we rarely talk about it. This short post brought it to my attention. Quoting Greenwood...
“Digital is really pervasive in our society now and it can be used for very positive things. But I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it’s an accelerant of consumption. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, both in allowing us to figure out how to do more things, manufacture new technologies, extract more resources. But it’s also an accelerant in enabling people and encouraging people to consume those resources through digital marketing and e-commerce. … by making things faster and easier, human nature is to consume more of it because it’s easier for us to do so. Anything that makes it easier for us to consume more resources makes us consume more resources.”
Today, a huge chunk of the web industry is devoted to conversion optimisation and frictionless UX. Digital facilitates a perfect marriage of convenience and consumption. It’s what makes the internet so enjoyable and potentially so disastrous. (Don’t miss the first piece in the Food for Thought section below.)
– Kai
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of technology, design, ethics and sustainability. Writing to you is Kai Brach, also the editor and publisher of Offscreen Magazine. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Reclaim Your Focus SPONSOR
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The minimalist email client for Mac
Don’t let the constant stream of interruptions mess with your workflow. Tempo reimagines the email client as a place to help you build healthier routines. Effortlessly clear new mail in batches and get longer periods of focus to do the real work. After all, our most impactful work happens outside of the email client.
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Apps & Sites
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With Tella you can create shareable video presentations that can include a recording of yourself, screencasts and slides. You can link muliple videos together and share them online instantly without having to wait for the upload to finish.
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Eagle is a native app (macOS and Windows) that helps you organise and manage a large catalogue of visual assets. A browser extension makes filling your library easy. You can then categorise and browse collections in different ways, e.g. through a colour picker, tags or ratings.
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Care guide for your plant babies
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This excellent resource on how to take care of the most popular indoor plants made the rounds on social media a while back. It’s so well done, it’s worth giving it another plug here.
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US incarceration visualised
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An outstanding, yet simple data visualisation piece that educates readers about the staggering amount of people in US American prisons and jails. Keep scrolling to gain more insights and learn about possible solutions.
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Worthy Five: Quinn Emmett
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Five recommendations by science curator, screenwriter, and dad Quinn Emmett
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A question worth asking:
‘How can I be a better ancestor?’ – stolen from my friend Bina Venkataraman, author of The Optimist’s Telescope. Focus the good you do on the long-term.
A video worth watching:
The audition tape for This is Me from The Greatest Showman. If this doesn’t fill you with joy, I don’t know what will.
A concept worth understanding:
The 80/20 rule asserts that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes. For example, we can reduce childhood asthma, urban heat, strokes, heart disease, lung cancer, and almost 5 million deaths a year, just by eliminating air pollution (PM 2.5).
A recipe worth trying:
The best fried chicken sandwich you’ve never had is made out of tofu. (Possible paywall)
An activity worth doing:
Go to bed early and park your phone outside your bedroom. You’ll sleep longer and better.
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Making sense of statistics
BBC presenter and economist Tim Harford makes a case for finding and trusting the ‘right’ statistics: “He takes us deep into the world of disinformation and obfuscation, bad research and misplaced motivation to find those priceless jewels of data and analysis that make communicating with numbers worthwhile. ... Using ten simple rules for understanding numbers – plus one golden rule – this extraordinarily insightful book shows how if we keep our wits about us, thinking carefully about the way numbers are sourced and presented, we can look around us and see with crystal clarity how the world adds up.”
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Tech entanglements with rural China
We cover some of Xiaowei Wang’s exploration of the surprisingly innovative side of rural China in our interview with them in the latest issue of Offscreen. What you discover is a version of China you probably didn’t know existed. “From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalisation, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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Don’t be afraid to go outside raw. No wallet. No phone. Your friends paying for everything and yelling at you to stay nearby.
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Food for Thought
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The convenience of same-day delivery at the click of a button requires city-sized areas of warehouses. This piece dives into how our love for online shopping turns vast natural landscapes into desolate logistical infrastructure. “The visions of frictionlessness demand empty space on an unprecedented scale. The more we buy, the more space we need to be emptied of life. Convenience — the learned demand for instant gratification — voids the world of its features, turning fields into town-size circuit boards. Yet at the same time, convenience demands that we forget the material costs of our desires.”
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A great dissection of the meaning of ‘success’ when seen through a long-term perspective. “I discovered that when we start to look at many of society’s ‘winners’ from a longer-term perspective, our common definition of success starts to buckle. Common images of what winning means focus almost entirely on a single moment in time: the winner on the podium, the announcement of a company’s annual profits, a legal battle won or the declaration of an electoral victory in politics.”
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A succinct overview of how Big Tech dominates the Global South through what can only be described as ‘digital colonialism’. “Digital colonialism is about entrenching an unequal division of labor, where the dominant powers have used their ownership of digital infrastructure, knowledge, and their control of the means of computation to keep the South in a situation of permanent dependency.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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These aerial photos of glacial rivers and streams in Iceland by Russian photographer Andre Ermolaev look like they’re from a different planet.
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Squint and step back from your screen and you can see them! I’m absolutely fascinated by these paintings by Lee Wagstaff, hiding faces inside simple patterns.
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French street artist Ememem ‘fixes’ potholes and cracks in the ashpalt with colourful mosaics.
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Love these gorgeous condensed styles of Pangram Sans Rounded, “a powerful and extensive geometric workhorse with 144 styles”.
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Classifieds
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Looking for a meaningful gift? Fondfolio helps you create a one-of-a-kind book to honour a special moment or person by collecting thoughtful words & stories from everyone they love.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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