| Flyover Easy @eiratansey |
Dr. Amanda Visconti retweeted:
What if we stopped trying to save so much digital shit? Big data is not just a huge fossil fuel suck, it’s increasingly taking up land
A provocative, systems question. What if we stopped sending out so much signal? What if we rationed bandwidth? What if the carbon footprint of storage got so large that it became a national crisis? Any amount of added carbon now adds to the crisis, so this is not as crazy as it sounds.
Would you willingly submit to a voluntary reduction in digital storage if it was reasonable to assume that you were damaging the eco-commons on a global scale?
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I save your work.
You save mine.
You also back up to the cloud.
Half of the people who you share my work to also back up to the cloud.
Still, I do NOT wish that the system “knew” about all the duplicates and did data reduction by using a system of pointers.
It sort of reminds me of the days when all paper books were handwritten copies of an original. (No. I wasn’t there.)
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My point is that it takes energy to save to the cloud. We produce that energy and that adds to the carbon sink. What can we do about that? Should I respond here or just shut up? I remark upon that because it had never occurred to me that I was adding to climate problem with a few clicks. I know we are already all in on that. And that is a big problem I am only now thinking about.
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Time for a low carbon data usage info-graphic/good practice/has someone done the maths? Can I offset say 1GB of cloud storage with planting 5 trees? … You can tell I never thought about it that way either. Hm.
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And thanks for dropping in 😉