Hey so it took me awhile to read all this, and then a few more days to think about it. There are some really interesting ideas that I hadn’t ever heard before.

tldr; data costs the earth resources, so we should use less.

The main premise seems to be that data storage and transfer bandwidth has a rapidly growing embodied cost in energy and ecological damage. While initially negligable compared to the analog and mechanical infrastructure it was meant to replace, the internet backbone and the server farms that make the internet what it is today have become a major resource consumer. They go on to explain that the high embodied costs in the internet infrastructure have not, generally speaking, replaced analog and digital communication methods, but rather have supplemented them. We now consume far more resources per capita than before the internet.

I had never before thought of bandwidth use or data storage as being an energy cost. I mean, I guess I knew it cost something, but the figures they give are quite alarming. As a society, we definitely consume far more frivolous media than we did before the internet. Some poeple even use the earth’s limited resources to create, store, and transmit pointless pictures of monkes.

'I’ve always thought of my ebooks as being more environmentally friendly and more minimalistic than my paper books. But maybe there were costs I wasn’t counting.

Calculation of embodied energy is always frought with subjectivity and error in a network system with no ends to grab hold of. I have a hard time believing things are as severe as these guys claim. But the point still stands that every stupid youtube video I watch does consume resources, and my significant data and media collections spend energy to maintain. My books only use space.

The second major point, related to this issue, is that using more bandwidth uses more resources. As the world continues to replace literacy with videos, bandwidth use skyrockets, and the infrastructure bohemoth grows apace. Video is more expensive to the earth than pictures, which are costlier than text. Furthermore, local data is cheapest; data conveyed by cables is next, then wifi. Cellular data is the most expensive, and also the fastest growing form of communication.

To address these escalating issues, they propose a speed limit for the internet. Personally I despise nearly all regulation, but I have been convinced that bandwidth and data use matters. I’m not going to adopt the proposed solutions of typewriters and dot matrix printers, but I am going to change my internet habits a bit.

At least for awhile, I’ll try this: If I can read it instead of watch it, I will. If the image can be smaller, compressed, or dithered, I will. If I can watch, listen, or read locally rather than streaming, I will. If I can take notes on the youtube video rather than watching over and over, I will.

I’m also going to post about low-tech internet for a little while.

We’ll see how it goes.

There’s a lot more to read on this magazine. Some of it is thought provoking, some is perceptive, and some is very impractical. A few things I read I would consider misguided.

Thank you for posting, it’s been interesting.

If anyone read this far, congratulations on your attention span.