still testing this out/trying to figure out how to phrase it: maybe we should just focus on the electricity and water use of computation instead of extrapolating to carbon because 1) companies flimflam with offsets/power purchase agreements and 2) a future of net zero carbon electricity sources will necessarily be constrained
your company can have midjourney or email but it can't have both
@ingrid Focussing on electricity ignores all of the energy - the majority of which is direct from fossil fuels, rather than electricity (renewable or otherwise) - involved in production.
It's much harder to power mining, transportation and industrial processes with electricity than it is datacentres and offices.
For consumer devices, production is approx 80% of the lifetime GHG cost. It's less for infrastructure that runs 24/7, but is still far too substantial to ignore...
@ingrid and ignoring those production-related costs is typically what big tech chooses to do when presenting greenwashed claims about carbon neutrality that look at solar power + offsets for their datacentres!
@sy totally, though in this case I'm specifically thinking about how to target the ongoing dodge of large (ostensibly) software companies who I think can probably be more effectively held to account for data center consumption than other parts of the supply chain
@ingrid While the cloud platform model provides a convenient excuse for those who're 'just renting' hardware, pretending that all the datacentre hardware which runs their software (and the network hardware that connects people to that) somehow isn't a totally necessay part of their system, so it's outside the boundary we draw seems to me to concede too much.
@ingrid I wrote a bit about this in relation to AI with Monique Mann and Laura Bedford in this edited volume https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/economies-of-virtue-the-circulation-of-ethics-in-ai/
@sy I guess to me it's more about setting boundaries for which actors you're targeting with various tactics? like I don't think Microsoft can be made to concede to a grand accounting of their entire consumption apparatus, (however more precise that may be). Could they be made to concede that ChatGPT is a waste of resources, maybe?? Whereas putting a dent in what's fucked in mining to me is a matter of land reparations and dismantling the global military industrial complex more than Apple.
@sy like on a theoretical level, totally with you. on a harm reduction level of trying to strategize in a collapsing empire full of deeply unserious people with too many guns I'm just thinking through potential organizing angles.
@ingrid I guess the intersting thing about that is that Apple do already acknowledge that the supply chain is part of their issue! While they still fudge with offsets etc. and use an unsustainable infinite growth model, if Apple have already conceded that hardware energy costs are part of their system, it shouldn't be beyond the pale for MS, Google etc to be forced into following.
@ingrid Looking at Microsoft's 2022 environmental report, they already concede that scope 3 emissions are 96% of their total emissions, with the vast majority of that being purchased goods and services and capital goods.
IMO we should not ignore that 96%. That concession has already been made by MS. We urgently need to make that concession more visible.
(sorry for ranting, this is something that tends to really set me off)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability/report
it has been pretty easy to convince people that proof of work crypto's resource use is A Problem because it concentrates wealth toward a legible discrete group of people w/o broader benefit but I think tech that 1) mostly is killing creative jobs and 2) at best diffuses profits to CEOs and shareholders is not really that different!