Framing digital industry into planetary limits and transition policies
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:21
Gautier Russell investigates the impact of the digital industry on the environment and how we can actually reduce this industry's footprint, ecological footprint. One example is his own homepage.
00:42
It's visually appealing, but it only loads in 450 kilobytes. Gautier, the stage is yours. So thank you for inviting me here. So my talk will look at digital industry, but in a broader scope,
01:06
we're going to look and analyse what is digital industry nowadays, looking at what is possible to do within transition, which would be our goal altogether. So to just give me a sense of who I am and from which position I'm speaking of,
01:27
first of all, I'm a designer. I don't know if there is much designers here, but it's quite a nice practice I recommend, which means I make digital services.
01:41
I don't have a technical expertise on programming or coding, but I do understand a little bit. But most of my work as a designer and also as a PhD candidate, I've been looking at transitions policies, energy policies, environmental policies,
02:00
legal policies when it comes to the Anthropocene and the paradigm change, the paradigm shift that we need to operate regarding that. So within the scope of transition and climate crisis, environmental crisis, I've been looking especially at the digital industry, its footprints,
02:23
the way it will evolve and if it's going far away from transition goals or if it's going in the same direction. I use sometimes the term low-tech, which I don't really like and I will explain later why, but basically looking at what does sustainable digital industry look like,
02:45
which is quite a long way. And also I'm doing a site research on economics as it is very interesting to look at that when doing this kind of stuff. At the same time, I was also director of an online documentary called Ethics for Design,
03:02
looking at the responsibility of designers. When you put goods and services massively in people's everyday life, what is your responsibility? So today my position as a speaker will be mostly looking at at least making
03:22
a transition politics argument linked to a social argument, but I will not focus on technical arguments per se. I will focus on techniques and technologies through the scope of transition. So please remember that. I'm not that much of a technician.
03:42
So first we need to set up the framework. I will not give you a lecture on the state of the planet right now. I don't think you need me to go through that and I think there is far better people to talk about that. Anyway, I prefer to talk about transition. So what are the targets? There is a first target. We all know it.
04:05
That's a two degrees target, Paris Agreement, which means we need to stabilize carbon concentration in the atmosphere to 480 ppm, particles per million. To stabilize that, to stay under two degrees average on Earth,
04:24
we need energy transition. We need to operate energy transition. And sometimes we reduce it to just shifting our energy mix to less carbon intensive energy mix. When actually the first step is firstly to reduce energy consumption,
04:42
then you can make it less carbon intensive. But if you don't learn how to reduce energy consumption, there is not that much to do. So I'm going to go through that first. And first, because I think we've been talking about carbon quite a lot, just before and also since morning with Chris Adams.
05:01
But I realize that not that much people understand why we picked carbon between how the greenhouse gases that are on Earth, why do we set up a target on carbon. Carbon has two specificities. Time lag, residence time. First thing to know about carbon is on average,
05:24
a particle of carbon that is just being emitted from your car will on average take 20 years to reach its maximum heating effect on the atmosphere. So when we are doing transition now or engaging through transition policies, we are doing it to have a result and effect 20 years ahead.
05:45
So when we are doing stuff now, we are doing it for 2040 on average. So which means also that the transition, I mean the emission for the next 20 years are known, or we have pretty good estimates.
06:02
Secondly, carbon has the highest residence time from all the greenhouse gases, one of the highest at least. It will take 10,000 years for all the carbon that we emitted so far to go through the atmosphere. We add carbon. It doesn't go through the atmosphere happily and going into the outer space.
06:24
We add carbon. And the carbon that will emit today, right now, it will stay at least for 1,000 years. And some of it will go through the carbon cycle and will stabilize,
06:40
but we are adding more carbon in the atmosphere. And carbon has a specific nature of staying a very long time in the atmosphere. That's why all targets are looking at carbon, because it has a maximum heating effect regarding its residence time in the atmosphere. So if we look at France, because you have to remember that in this talk,
07:04
I'm speaking from the perspective of a French designer, and most of the work I've been using or the research I've made is through the French perspective and the French research. So on average, on France, we emit 12 tons of carbon equivalents per person per year.
07:28
In Germany, I don't know, I think you are roughly around the same number. What's interesting here is that digital industry in this total is almost 1 ton and 200 kilograms of carbon equivalents.
07:48
That's where we are looking right now with this talk. We are looking only at this small portion in green, in goods and services, but it's dynamically linked to all the other sectors. So when I'm operating transition in this sector,
08:03
I'm also looking how does it link to everything around. And we have to know that if we want to reach Paris Agreement, we have to stabilize our carbon emission per person per year to 2 tons.
08:20
So in France, we have to reduce by 10 tons of carbon emissions per person per year. Roughly the same thing goes with Germany. So this is another calculation with just a smaller amount because they don't integrate digital industry as much as the precedent one.
08:43
But basically the road here is 11 to 2. And what's interesting, it's a French 2D looking at what is my responsibility as an individual to go to the target. And they estimated that with a realistic individual behavior change,
09:07
eating less meat, not taking planes, using less carbs, cycling more, I can only do one quarter of the effort needed. So when companies are focusing on individual behavior change,
09:21
it's bullshit. Because individual behavior change always goes with systemic change, which is three quarters of the road we have to take. So you cannot engage in individual behavior change without asking or fighting for systemic change. So here, most of the road that we have to make is through decarbonizing
09:44
or making less carbon intensive industry, agriculture, transport, public services, energy production, things I cannot do for my own individual behavior. But my own individual behavior is needed if I want to act on a political scale, on a systemic scale.
10:05
So we live in a paradox that every individual change is necessary but insufficient, but we need it.
10:21
So looking back at digital industry, we need to frame digital industry in the 0.6 tons of carbon left for goods and services. That's where we need to put new imaginaries, new ways of practicing digital in this target. And we have to share it with other goods and services, clothing and so on.
10:45
So going quickly through the impacts of ICTs right now. In 2019, 3% of the worldwide energy is consumed by ICT.
11:03
Its main primary energy, fuel, coal, gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, everything that we need to power transport, boats, cars, your phone, data centers. 3% of worldwide energy is consumed by digital industry.
11:22
Accordingly to that, now we have almost 4% of greenhouse gases emitted worldwide are coming from digital industry. But there are only numbers, so we need to see how they will evolve. Right now, the growth rates of these two numbers are quite shocking.
11:41
So basically, the energy consumption of digital industry is doubling every 8 years, I think. 9% of growth rates. That's the only industry worldwide having that kind of growth rate.
12:01
And it goes with greenhouse gases emission, 8%. So which gives us perspective that digital industry in 2025 will be 5% of all the worldwide energy consumption and 7.5% of greenhouse emission.
12:21
The fact is greenhouse emissions are going faster than energy consumption is because the increase of energy demand coming from digital industry cannot be absorbed by renewables. You need coal power plants or carbonated energy to go with this fast growth rate of digital industry.
12:46
So if I look closer at energy, you can see that right now, on the global average, 45% to 50% of all energy is used to manufacture.
13:00
And the rest of energy is for making things work when you are using them. But it's a global average. And when we are looking at that, in the calculation methodology, we have three places we are looking at.
13:21
Consumer equipment, networks, data centers. So we are looking at the energy consumption of these three places. Both to manufacture them and to use them. But it's a global average. So if I look at a specific consumer equipment, like a smartphone, it will look like that.
13:41
So mainly when you are buying a smartphone, 90% of all energy have already been used. And if you charge it every day for three years, it will be the 10% left. So when you are using a phone, changing a phone, you are actually trashing 90% of energy,
14:02
and then there is water, minerals, and so on. But I don't have time to end on this topic. So today, the main impact of digital industry is manufacturing and producing electricity to make other infrastructure work. So when we think of web design or designing digital services,
14:24
it's little compared to these impacts. But we need to think of services that enable to reduce these impacts. That's how we link it together. And these infrastructures have been used mainly for videos.
14:41
So Chris Adams showed his graph today. I was part of the study that looked at the impact of online video on the internet. So mainly 20% of all data moving in the world is not video. 80% is video. So as Chris shows his morning, most of it is Netflix.
15:04
Pornography, Tubes, and others. The fact is Netflix, with 150 million users worldwide, is basically representing 15% of the global internet traffic.
15:21
And they launched the streaming services 10 years ago, I guess. So that's quite a big growth rate. But this graphic, I want to challenge it because I was part of the study, so I also know its limits. This doesn't show pollution or energy consumption. It just shows you data moving.
15:43
And one gigabyte of Netflix data, video data, has way less energy consumption than one gigabyte of banking data. Especially if it's running on all data centers that have been updated for 30 years. Netflix has an incredible infrastructure.
16:03
So moving one gigabyte through Netflix is less energy. So it doesn't represent energy consumption. It's just data moving. So how do we do with that now? We know the transition framework in which we're operating.
16:22
We know the impacts. How do we do differently knowing that? First we need to challenge the discourse that has been put up when we speak of internet and digital infrastructure. When digital infrastructure arrived in civil society, there was two discourses.
16:43
First, that it was dematerialized. Secondly, that it will create a global village. I think now we have enough data to say that both of these discourses were myth or lies. If anything, digital industry is hyper-materialized.
17:03
It requires an astonishing amount of minerals, resources, water, energy, infrastructures that have never been seen before for such a young infrastructure. So when you are dematerialized, you don't account for resources,
17:23
you don't account for energy because there is no impact, at least in public discourse. When you think of a global village, it's quite an aggressive thing when you say global village. It means basically you raise culture, geography,
17:40
and history of places in which you are implementing your infrastructure. So I think we need to challenge both these discourses if we want to look at what digital industry can be in a paradigm of sustainability. And we have to understand that because of these two things
18:03
that have been said about digital industry, by default, at least in my perspective, most of the uses were created with the current digital industry by default energy-intensive or high energy-based. By default.
18:21
I can show you quite easily with Netflix. So Netflix, one of the biggest data movers on the Internet. But actually, when you think of it, being able to broadcast to 150 million users worldwide, high-quality videos,
18:43
is already based on the fact that they don't pay that much energy. Secondly, to be able to insitate people, to watch more, to create an interaction of autoplay so people can see more and more videos,
19:01
can watch more and more videos, it's because you don't account for energy. It's not a cost. It's not really something that matters. But also to look at Netflix precisely, Netflix also created one of the very efficient network
19:21
to broadcast its videos. So to be quite precise, when you are watching a Netflix episode, it will never go through the Internet because in each data center of Internet service providers, there is this little red box, this little service from Netflix,
19:45
that's actually caching all the catalog every morning. So when you are clicking on Play on Netflix, it's just streaming you a video from your ISP data center. So it will never go through the rest of the Internet. So they actually don't...
20:01
They optimize a lot the streaming services. But the fact is, even if it's very energy efficient, they are growing so much that the gain of energy are being completely overwhelmed by the growth rate that they are fostering through that practice.
20:20
And yet Netflix accounts for, if it was going through the Internet for real, it will account for 37% of all the peak Internet traffic. So if we look at the way we think of designing websites, applications, and so on,
20:42
normally we start with money. So money is giving you money and goals, targets, that we, in design, we say KPIs, so Key Performance Indicators. They will tell you, I want that much audience, I want that much engagements, I want that much people buying my stuff. Do a service, a web service, a website, application,
21:04
so you can reach my targets. So from my perspective, you are giving money for people to move data because also data is getting back to the people paying for it. But in this framework, when do we think of energy?
21:25
When do we think of resources? Because so far we've been very good at creating efficient equipments. And in design, in the design practice, energy never really mattered. In computer sciences, it's different.
21:41
We created fantastic energy-efficient equipments, but the fact is the more efficient our equipment became, the more we consume of it. So there is a constant rebound effect that is not giving us any possibility to transition
22:01
in a less intensive infrastructure. So the fact is we never account for energy, we never account for resources from the design side. And I've been trolling quite a few designers with that, asking them, can you make me a website for two watts per hour? Nobody knows how to do that.
22:21
No designers. No designers can answer this question. And they might be very senior. As senior designers or students, junior designers, nobody could answer this question because energy never mattered. So from the way I see it, I'm designing from energy.
22:42
So I start with energy budget because my goal here is to reduce carbon emissions. To reduce carbon emissions, I need to reduce the amount of energy I'm consuming. To reduce the amount of energy I'm consuming, I need to reduce the amount of data I'm moving. And from that, I can decide how much money I'm spending
23:02
to design a specific service. I don't start from carbon. It's very inefficient and it's unfair because for most countries, if I give a carbon threshold, in France, we could do an amazing website,
23:23
spending a lot of energy because we don't have a very carbon-intensive energy mix. Australia or USA will end up with very crappy websites because they will have maybe three kilobytes to move. So it's better to start from energy than from carbon
23:41
because energy is fair to some extent. And it's more efficient to reduce because it's more important to reduce energy than to reduce carbon emissions because if you reduce energy consumption, normally you will reduce carbon emissions.
24:00
So I did that with my website. When I start to realize all the blind spots in design practice, I'll go through my own transformation. So my website is consuming one kilowatt per hour for 1,000 visits. It's quite an average website. I mean, no, it's not average anymore.
24:21
It's 458 kilobytes on average. And I will add a new thing next month. I will limit my traffic to 5,000 visitors a month because if you want to constrain energy budget, if you want to apply a real energy budget,
24:41
you need to constrain traffic. So you have to decide how much visitors you want to come every month. And once there will be 5,000 visitors, then the other one will wait for the next month. And it's fine. It's not that important to get information all the time. So if you are not up to do all this calculation
25:03
that I can explain with you later, I designed a Firefox extension that shows you the amount of data moving and shows the energy consumption and the carbon emission linked to this data moving on your computer from your browser
25:24
and shows you where is the data going. And it gives you some equivalences on charged smartphone and kilometers in a car. So I did that for a lobby in France called the Shift Project
25:41
that also published a lot of the studies looking for impacts of digital industry. It's called Carbonalyzer. So as I was saying, to do an energy budget, you need three things.
26:00
You need to describe or to reclaim energy infrastructure. Where does your energy come from? It's very important. You need to reclaim the digital infrastructure. What is hosting? What is a network? On which user equipment, consumer equipment? So you have to define in which territory you're operating. So at that point, the global village is dead
26:23
because you cannot be global anymore. You need to precisely know where is your energy coming from, which are the impact of the data center you're using on a specific place, and you need to decide about traffic. So now when I'm working sometimes with clients, we decide how much traffic they want to go for,
26:41
and we put a hard cap on that. So a good example of that, I think you all know it, is the low-tech magazine. First, they reclaim energy. They build a solar panel. I mean, they installed a solar panel on a balcony in Barcelona. Now that it's powering a website,
27:01
you can see the battery in the yellow part on the website. So first, they reclaim energy. Then they reclaim digital infrastructure. So they are doing a self-hosting with Raspberry Pi. And they're not looking at traffic so far, but it will come.
27:22
That's kind of the example I want to show you because the territory here is paramount to the design. You don't design stuff without knowing what it actually be, what is the materiality of what you're doing. And you can see here in the footers, they're also giving the weather for the next coming days in Barcelona,
27:42
where they are based and where their energy is coming from. And because I was thinking of low-tech, I just want to do a quick heads-up on when we speak of high-tech or low-tech. I'm coming from a social science background, especially anthropology of techniques, philosophy, political sciences, and so on.
28:03
So I've always been shocked by the word tech. What does it mean? Is it technology, techniques? Nobody defines it. So it was interesting to say that when we think of low-tech in our perspective of transition, we are speaking of low-technology and high-techniques.
28:23
When you are speaking of high-tech from the Silicon Valley perspective, you are speaking of high-technology, low-techniques, which means you are relying on black-boxing technology, making it less open to people, which means you will reduce drastically the skills and the knowledge that people can get from the technology you are deploying.
28:42
So low-techniques, low-skills. On the other way, when you think of low-tech, we are also relying on technology. You cannot do digital without thinking of high-technology infrastructure. But you are relying less on that.
29:01
And you are relying on techniques. How do you spread knowledge? How do you share skills? How do you learn to maintain stuff is important. And I think you've been doing that for quite a while here. I'm not telling you something new. But what's changing here is a perspective of drastically changing living conditions on Earth
29:24
and also the material condition of production are drastically changing. So the way we've been extracting minerals, producing energy, using water for mining exploitation will change forever and nothing will be the same anymore on that level.
29:46
And it's more of my anthropology side speaking here, but I've seen much more interesting stuff of empowerment of what is technology, what is digital infrastructure in other places in the world,
30:00
especially El Paquete Seminal in Cuba, which is basically people coming to an office in Cuba with a hard drive. They get one terabyte of TV shows, film, whatever, tutorials, books, and they go back and they pay a little fee for that. It's basically a content distribution network, except that you don't need network.
30:22
You just need your feet. Darknet in North India is quite interesting too. They don't have access to cellular or mobile networks as we can have here, so they deal with the problem quite interestingly. So sometimes there is a guy on a motorcycle with a little antenna and server in the back of the motorcycle,
30:43
and he's basically going to every village in a specific place. He broadcasts a signal, he creates hotspots, everybody is sending their stuff, and he goes from village to village, and he goes back to the city, he plugs on the main network, and everything is sent. They also do that with buses that are picking up kids going to the school.
31:06
Also in Brooklyn, every network tells a story. Great initiative. People getting to design their own networks and to understand the materiality of networks. Or the association of French internet providers in France. Fantastic initiative too.
31:24
So I will kind of conclude on that. This is my own framework to think of digital industry now in the context of transition. So we're going to start from the inner circle, materialization. That's the issue with digital industry. That's the only infrastructure that has been, to my knowledge, that has been publicized.
31:45
And there's a discourse of being dematerialized. You cannot do that with roads, with roads network, or any other infrastructure. That's unique to digital infrastructure. So the first step is always to materialize it. That's why we did the plug-in.
32:00
So you can see that there is impacts. But these impacts, you need to frame it in two different ways. You need to frame the impacts on the territory in which your energy and your infrastructure is hosted, and also the impacts at the scale of the earth. Watching porn is emitting carbon.
32:20
So you have a global impact with very intimate use of the internet. Then you need to define your territory. Very interesting. Because since we've been living in the myth of the global village, we never thought on how the territory can actually influence the way we are designing web services or websites.
32:47
So we need to start from the territory, as the low-tech magazine did, accepting the constraint of Barcelona and playing with it. And then you need to understand that we are also working on the planetary scale,
33:02
what I call terrestrialization, which is kind of a mouthful. But that's what it is. We need to understand the effects of digital industry on the global scale, on the planetary scale. And the fact that the living conditions on earth are quickly changing, are impacting territories, which will also impact the way we think of services.
33:26
So starting from the territory is a good place to start because that's where there is a materiality of digital industry, the ones that have been hidden so far or we didn't want it to look at.
33:41
And I wanted to finish with this little picture because right now in France we are striking because of the reform of the pension system. And there was something quite interesting in the way the strike evolved in the last days because in between, there is many people striking in France right now, lawyers, firefighters.
34:03
So the Paris Opera Ballots because they want to change the pension system. So we have moments now in Paris where the ballerinas are performing for the strikers and it creates something very interesting because it goes beyond act of resistance.
34:20
It creates beauty and opportunities in a way we think of changing a system. It goes beyond resistance. It creates imaginaries. And that's the most important thing that we need to do right now for the digital industry. Sustain and create imaginaries. Thank you.
34:46
Gautier, merci beaucoup. We have five minutes time for a couple of questions. Please line up at the microphones and is there a question already from the internet?
35:00
No question from the internet. Please, to the microphones. Number three, please. Okay, still formulating it but I'll try. I've been looking a lot about how the new push in the digital industries is framed around the fourth industrial revolution, which is pushing us more towards internet of things,
35:26
always on the artificial intelligence ideas the industry is coming up with. And I'm wondering if there's a way to push us in the opposite direction to go away from personal devices and more towards library modes of technology.
35:46
So like trying to create places like the hack labs, the hack spaces, where we go to use things instead of people constantly having their devices on, feeding the data surveillance capitalism.
36:02
And so going against the grain of pushing against this expansionism. And if you have looked at that in that way. Well, I can give you like a prime experience from the French landscape because I think that I'm only legitimate to talk about that.
36:21
One thing that will be quite dramatic for the way the industry is going to evolve is, in my own perspective, the deployment of 5G. Because through 5G then you get autonomous cars, IoT, 4K videos, streaming in a tube. It's not going in a good direction.
36:42
The massification of 5G at least is not a solution. And I was recently giving a talk in the biggest French telecom company called Orange. And there is actually like an inner revolt inside the company because engineers don't want to deploy 5G because it's useless. We don't need that.
37:01
And right now that's kind of the shift that we are observing in France. We think there is a momentum of people. I mean, also some laws are getting passed at the parliament regarding that. But companies in France have understood that they cannot do... They will be accountable for the environmental impact of chain industries.
37:23
Several cities have contacted me to influence or to give them advice on the digital strategy, going far away from the fourth industrial revolution, the Rifkin thing. So I think right now it's about resistance
37:40
and trying to stop the coming flow of whatever techno solution is coming from the Silicon Valley to actually stop at a specific moment which the next big infrastructure would be 5G. Fighting against 5G in my regard is what creates space to rethink what we want from the digital industry
38:02
and what digital use we want to foster. Okay. We got time for one more question. Microphone number two, please. Hello there. I found your model very, very interesting of terrestrialization, territorialization, materialization.
38:21
I'm looking for worked examples of what design decisions you would make differently as a result for that, and I didn't quite get that from the talk. Where would I look to find a really concrete example of this? So there are three projects going on now. The first one, I got a European fund actually to do a specific project that I'm very keen on
38:43
because I don't come from a big city. I come from a rural place in France and I always keep this perspective of thinking from the territory, thinking from the rural aspect of life while digital use are also less excessive. So I received funding to make a low energy template to make cities websites.
39:07
And so I want to spread this open source template so all the little village cities or little cities of France can get the best of what we can do regarding low energy web design
39:21
and spread it through the territory of France. That's what we are doing right now. The first version will be pushed in March. Secondly, we are also doing another website for the low-tech lab in Brittany. What we are doing here is documenting how to think differently of maps, digital maps especially,
39:45
because Google Maps is not something I want to foster, especially in terms of energy impacts, because even if it's very efficient, there is so much growth regarding its use that we need to think differently. And when you think of digital maps, I look at it from a design perspective,
40:03
so I see four uses. Localization, where I am or where is the point I'm looking for, orientation, hard north or relative, or modernization of the map, or what's the fourth one, giving a route. When you are using Google Maps, the four sources of use are given at the same time
40:25
because it was fought on a high-energy perspective. But you don't need to display the map if you don't know where you want to go. So it's not necessary to show the map if you haven't decided where you're going next.
40:41
So most of the use has been developed on the digital industry so far. We are trying to rethink it very differently with the lowest energy possible. And it means that we need to break down some of the things that have been made, and it will be documented in February. So I have things to show, but not yet.
41:03
Encore un fois. Merci beaucoup. Thank you. Gautier.
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