The Internet is destroying the environment

To most people I think that the digital world seems untaxing on the environment. After all bits have no real physical form that we can see so it’s counter-intuitive to think that have any physical value. However, the first law of thermodynamics would tell us otherwise. All the information being transferred across fiber optics cable is created by something physical. Beyond the energy spent creating the devices that power the machines or the production of silicon and other metals, the real drain I see now comes from the electricity used to power these bytes. For every new computer connected to the Internet, the power drain grows exponentially. Computers are no longer used in isolation so as the numbers grow, their effects grow exponentially in a large network.

There has been a lot of discussion about ‘information overload’ since the early 90s but to me it is a term that has carried little significance because it is poorly defined. Nobody is really overloaded when they get on the web. There are plenty of filters that keep information from simply streaming onto your desktop. Users, decide where they go, which sites they visit or what to search for. The real overload happens in that the meaningless information out makes these processes all inefficient. To give a counter-example, wikipedia.org has provided well-filtered content all in one repository. While the site’s sustainable efforts are seemingly never cited (most likely because I don’t think this was a direct goal of the creators), the site provides a model nonetheless. Before wikipedia, to find information about a country, I would use a search engine. This will probably result in wasted time and energy sifting through mis- or irrelevant information. Now, wikipedia has decreased both. When I say energy, I’m not simply talking about my personal energy but the energy that is powering the data transfer between my computer and the servers that host the information. I’m sure the energy wasted is not great but multiply this by the number of searches, and the effect is quite noticeable (I should note that I have absolutely no data…just a ramble).

Searching is only one example of unsustainable ‘digital practice.’ I recently came across an article that discusses the electricity consumed by electronic avatar. According to some stats and extrapolation, the average avatar in a virtual world such as Second Life consumes around 71% the electricity of a human! This is the first ‘mainstream’ article I’ve found that actually tries to put a natural cost on something digital. As I look at images of server farms like the one Google is building (I think this was in January’s Wired), I would hope that this happens more in the future. I am not proposing that wikipedia be a model for this or that Second Life is bad. Simply, more notice needs to be taken about how the digital is physical.

UPDATE: I have actually found a great resource that at least gets at part of this issue. Megan Prusynski wrote about some sustainable web hosting services that have more sustainable practices on the server side. She provides a great list on this topic. Green Options alone is a great resource for practical sustainability issues–it’s listed in my blogroll.