In front of the smart mobile phones that fit in the palm of your hand and can do almost anything (even though they still struggle with the simplest tasks…), an old desktop computer looks like a whole information processing factory. Something like the PPC’s power plants in Megalopolis compared to an elegant array of photovoltaic panels. Just comparing the size of a computer’s power supply to a mobile phone’s battery would be enough to condemn all computer users as environmental criminals. And how much more elegant and environmentally friendly a hybrid car or a Tesla looks compared to a gasoline car from the 1920s? Capitalism is therefore rapidly heading towards a green revolution! Although the transition of the Western energy model towards renewable energy sources does exist to some extent – among other reasons also for reasons that have nothing to do with environmental sensitivities but with technological competition against emerging capitalist forces – however, the devil is in the details.
The share of the telecommunications and information technology industry in carbon dioxide emissions currently stands at a “humble” 3%. But how humble is this percentage really? Not so much, if one takes into account its growth trends. Over the past decade it has already tripled, and in the next twenty years it is expected to reach 14% – a percentage double that of the entire transportation industry! And there are very specific reasons for this trend.
The perception that smartphones are simply computers in miniature is as accurate as the one that sees cars as more efficient carriages with more “horses.” No, mobile devices are not autonomous machines, but something much “simpler” and at the same time insidious. They are controllers, interfaces between their owners and the cloud. The truly autonomous machines are thousands of miles away and are called data centers; that’s where all the (critically important) user data is collected and processed. What users ultimately see is what such a data center returns to them. Every time you check your email on your mobile, all it does is send a request to some remote servers, and there a process begins to search for your emails within huge, distributed databases. And this process is expensive, environmentally very expensive. Of that humble 3% we mentioned, nearly half is precisely for the operation of data centers. Without the Internet of Things even getting started yet.
However, the story doesn’t end there. If you change a smartphone within less than two years, then the carbon emissions resulting from its use during this period of operation are fewer than those caused by its production process. The reason is that electronic devices, and even more so mobile phones, make extensive use of rare earth elements whose mining is extremely energy-intensive. The same, and perhaps to an even greater extent, applies to hybrid and electric cars. In the case of electric vehicles, their manufacturing ecological footprint is so heavy that it has been calculated that buying a used gasoline-powered car, especially one with a good ratio of kilometers per liter of gasoline, ultimately proves to be more environmentally friendly. And here, the calculations don’t even take into account the energy cost arising from the use of the electric car (perhaps it is considered self-evident that the electrical energy it consumes comes in some magical way entirely from renewable sources).
We’ve said it before. The 4th industrial revolution is not going to be immaterial and clean—just as the 3rd wasn’t. Behind the controls of every kind, whether they are touchscreens or steering wheels, there is a dirty and very worn-out world. In fact, it doesn’t just exist, but its existence is a prerequisite for filling the showcases with new models of mobiles and cars. Every free app on your phone is born charged with a few callsoused hands, with battered miners going up and down in mines, and most likely, with a few lives.
Separatrix
cyborg #12 – 6/2018