Thematic Book Series: How to Build a Low-tech Internet? | Low Tech Magazine

kingludd, 9 months ago

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.

zeazide, 9 months ago

sorry I’m lagging on responding, I’m adapting to life and shakeups in the fediverse

initially negligable

yeah this problem is with tech in general, I think it’s called jevon’s paradox: every time tech is invented, the idea is it will save labor or resources, but people end up just using more resources a lot of times. Like a light bulb that is 10x more efficient, means people just buy 11 more light bulbs instead.

ebooks as being more environmentally friendly

well it’s better than audiobooks or video I think; I think they can possibly be ecofriendly, it may depend on the device you consume on (a desktop computer + monitor would probably consume a lot more energy than a phone or ereader)

speed limit

we don’t have to have a regulation, it could just be a culturally adapted norm (if this is thought to be a good thing); or we could find ways to make better use of data resources

If I can read it instead of watch it, I will

I’ve thought of some experiments like this before, like for instance listening to audio I think is way more energy efficient with headphones versus a speaker (1000x?)

I don’t know if you’re a /datahoarder/ at all but that’s another thought, hard drives only last so long and people buy new ones to keep their data going… I don’t know how sustainable this is but it seems a bit concerning that new hard drives are needed so frequently. /digitalminimalism/ might be a topic worth discussing

kingludd, 9 months ago

jevon’s paradox

Humans and all animals, really, use up whatever resources are available, while they’re available. Certainly it’s possible to overcome that tendency as individuals, but have we ever in human history seen a culture voluntarily refrain from using a valuable resource? I don’t know if that’s a thing that can be changed. Not just with technology, but with resources in general.

culturally adapted norm

Culture shift is the only way to make lasting change. So I guess that’s like education system above all, followed by religious beliefs and media portrayal. But at the moment none of them seem to be even slightly interested in “less” of any kind. Quite the reverse; they still push growth. So I see no hope for it, as things currently stand.

datahoarder

I feel what I know as civilization stands at the brink of a new dark ages, teetering on the brink of information oblivion. How fragile the net of free information we have enjoyed! How little thought we have taken to future generations, and to what knowledge will be available. To this end you could say I have dedicated my life so far: to the collection, sorting, organization, and preeservation of the knowledge that I think is critical to building on the best of humanity’s past, and learning from the worst of humanity’s mistakes.

In the end, the digital formats are a viable method distribution, but not preservation, of knowledge. And here’s where this diatribe meets the topic at hand. Reliance on any method for knowledge preservation that requires a constant energy input will eventually result in the loss of that knowledge.

So I’ve taken to approaches that parallel the suggestions from your links. Books are pretty damn good, in terms of cost/availability vs longevity. But some things deserve to be preserved for the long haul. There are people working on this, like etching ceramic microdiscs for the arctic world archive or selecting the world’s best books by the long now.

We can’t expect the digital freedom of information that we have now to outlive its energy budget.