“The Internet has a color (green), a smell (of rancid butter) and also a taste, as salty as sea water”. Guillaume Pitron is a French journalist and documentary maker. Award-winning in France, he writes for Le Monde Diplomatique. The sentence in quotation marks is taken from a book just published in these weeks in Italy. Digital hell (Luiss, 223 pages). An investigation book that tells the material side of the internet and digital. Made of datacenter and coal. The world that hides behind every selfie, behind every like on social platforms.
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In your book, the impact of the digital economy on our planet is effectively described as “no selfies without carbon.” Can you explain what you mean?
“I would first like to explain the expression ‘no selfies without carbon’. Digital technologies consume 6% of the world‘s electricity today and this figure is set to multiply by two by the end of this decade. The Internet – and digital technologies in general – consume a lot of electricity. Electricity is necessary for the extraction of the metals necessary for the production of billions of tablets, smartphones, computers. In addition, electricity is needed to keep data centers running 24/7 without any interruption. We must not forget that coal is the main source of electricity production in the world (35% of the world electricity mix is now made up of coal, before gas and oil).
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Is the Internet a threat to our planet?
“Digital technologies are responsible for about 4% of CO2 emissions, more than civil aviation! And this figure is bound to explode. In short, yes, the Internet is becoming a major environmental threat to our planet. I even believe it will be one of the most critical ecological challenges of the coming decades ”.
We are used to thinking of the Internet as something immaterial and clean, but in your book it is clear that this is not the case. Is this dangerousness something inherent in Internet technology or did it develop alongside the data economy?
“By their very nature, digital technologies have a strong material impact. You cannot surf the Internet – and tomorrow, who knows, enter the Metaverse – without the metals and minerals needed to place 34 billion electronic equipment on the market. The data economy comes from these devices, because you produce and consume data through your smartphone. These two families of pollution feed each other: consumers need more electronic equipment to produce data … the volume of which has become such as to require new and more powerful digital devices ”.
Why is it so important to show the material side of digital technology?
“The way digital technologies are developed is now inconsistent with the 2015 Paris Agreement and we need to react before this threat gets out of control. Humanity opens a new chapter in its environmental impact with digital pollution. If we do not take into account the rapid evolution of this pollution, we will never reach the limit of two degrees set in 2015. Furthermore, we tend to look only at CO2 emissions to appreciate our ecological behaviors. But we must not forget that the impacts on soil, water, oceans and the depletion of resources deriving from the material intensity of digital technologies are also colossal and must be taken into consideration if we want to leave a sustainable planet for future generations ”.
Another effective image he used is that “the Internet is hot”. You have visited many datacenters located in the most remote places in the world. Why place the datacenters there?
“The internet produces heat, as servers in datacenters heat up to around 60 degrees Celsius. To cool this equipment to 25-27 degrees, data centers need cooling infrastructure. Half of the electricity consumed by a data center is used by air conditioning equipment. One of the solutions found by FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, ed) is to reorganize the geography of the cloud, moving datacenters to colder areas of the world, such as Lapland, where the cold is free. Free cooling allows data center companies to save on electricity, with less impact on the environment ”.
Which of those you visited impressed you the most?
“I visited a datacenter in Lapland, Sweden, owned by the Hydro66 company. It is no different from any other datacenter in the world, except that buildings are surrounded by snow for part of the year. Let’s not forget that many of our e-mails, cat videos and photos are stored under meters of snow, because the internet seeks the cold ”.
Is there a cleaner and more sustainable way of thinking about the Internet industry?
“A series of increasingly stringent laws require the data center industry to consume electricity more efficiently, improving the PUE (Power Efficiency Unit) ratio. Hyperscale infrastructures, i.e. the massive storage of data to allow economies of scale in terms of electricity production, can also contribute to achieving this goal. Data center companies can also recover waste heat from their infrastructure and use it for agriculture or housing. But more than these technical answers, we need to rethink the free Internet business model ”.
Explain to us.
“We don’t pay for a gmail account, which means that Google will in turn tap into your personal data for advertising purposes. The free Internet model therefore has two side effects: excessive consumption of technologies thanks to their apparent gratuitousness and greater storage of our personal data. It is not easy to question such an economic model, because it contradicts the fight against inequality in Internet access, but it is worth asking whether we should not reintroduce a price signal “
What can individual users do?
“Individual actions will certainly help. The most important of all is to keep our electronic devices as long as possible. 75% of the world‘s digital pollution is due to the production and use of these devices. Their life must last longer. Personally, I bought a second-hand iPhone 7 on a resale platform over two years ago. In the meantime I fixed it 6 times (twice the batteries and 4 times the screen). My phone looks like a brand new item and I intend to keep it for at least another two years. The reuse of old devices and their repair will be the key to greener and more responsible digital technologies ”.