Will the Internet Still Be Here in Tough Times?
Sharon July 30th, 2009
If you didn’t see Kris De Decker’s fascinating essay on the embodied energy cost of high technology, you definitely ought to. De Decker writes;
“Most important, however, is the energy required to manufacture all this electronic equipment (both network and, especially, consumer appliances). The energy used to produce electronic gadgets is considerably higher than the energy used during their operation. For most of the 20th century, this was different; manufacturing methods were not so energy-intensive.
An old-fashioned car uses many times more energy during its lifetime (burning gasoline) than during its manufacture. The same goes for a refrigerator or the typical incandescent light bulb: the energy required to manufacture the product pales into insignificance when compared to the energy used during its operation.
Advanced digital technology has turned this relationship upside down. A handful of microchips can have as much embodied energy as a car. And since digital technology has brought about a plethora of new products, and has also infiltrated almost all existing products, this change has vast consequences. Present-day cars and since long existing analogue devices are now full of microprocessors. Semiconductors (which form the energy-intensive basis of microchips) have also found their applications in ecotech products like solar panels and LEDs.”
De Decker’s conclusion is that it might well be harder to maintain access to the internet than we have imagined. Because the energy costs have to be frontloaded into the product, as energy and resource prices rise, we may see an end to the decline in technology prices and the expansion of availability. De Decker also points out that recycling is no solution – it takes massive amounts of energy to recycle the components of high tech materials.
I find this evidence dovetails with my own assumptions about energy-intensive resources – it is possible, of course, that they will disappear, but more likely (and thus, less easily believed) that people will simply stop being able to afford them. The planned obsolescence of most computers is already foretold – replacing them is cheap now, when w are affluent. It will not always be. And while public institutions like libraries and schools may maintain some of these resources, it is impossible to do the scale of work that most of us do on the internet relying on these alone.
John Michael Greer has made the case for the possible end of widespread internet access eloquently in his essay “The End of the Information Age” where he argues that we mostly don’t think this could happen because we don’t want it to happen. But in fact, the loss of the internet for the majority is not an unlikely occurance:
“Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them.
It’s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy, the quarter century between 1980 and 2005 when the price of energy dropped to the lowest levels in human history. Only in a period where energy was quite literally too cheap to bother conserving could so energy-intensive an information network be constructed. The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end, and the economics of the internet take on a very different shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again.
Like the railroads of the future mentioned earlier in this post, the internet is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Once the cost of maintaining it in its current form outstrips the income that can be generated by it, it becomes a losing proposition, and cheaper modes of information storage and delivery will begin to replace it in its more marginal uses. Governments will have very good reasons to maintain some form of internet as long as they can, even when it becomes an economic sink – it’s worth remembering that the internet we now have evolved out of a US government network meant to provide communication capacity in the event of nuclear war – but this does not mean that everyone in the industrial world will have the same access they do today.
Instead, as energy costs move unsteadily upward and resource needs increasingly get met, or not, on the basis of urgency, expect access costs to rise, government regulation to increase, internet commerce to be subject to increasing taxation, and rural areas and poor neighborhoods to lose internet service altogether. There may well still be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the free-for-all that exists today. Newspapers, radio, and television all moved from a growth phase of wild diversity and limited regulation to a mature phase of vast monopolies with tightly controlled content; even in the absence of energy limits, the internet would be likely to follow the same trajectory, and the rising costs imposed by the end of cheap energy bid fair to shift that process into overdrive.
The waning of the internet will pose an additional challenge to the future, because – like other new technologies – it is in the process of displacing older technologies that provided the same services on a more sustainable basis. The collapse of the newspaper industry is one widely discussed example of this process at work, but another – the death spiral of American public libraries – is likely to have a much wider impact in the decades and centuries to come. Among the most troubling consequences of the current economic crisis are wholesale cuts in state and local government funding for libraries. The Florida legislature was with some difficulty convinced a few weeks ago not to cut every penny of state support for library systems – roughly a quarter of all the money that keeps libraries open in Florida – and county and city libraries from coast to coast are cutting hours, laying off staff, and closing branches.”
Greer and I don’t agree on everything, but in this case, our visions are very much in accord. Just as I keep beating the drum that even more likely than grid failure is the likelihood we may find ourselves unable to afford electricity, I think the odds are good that even if the internet remains, it may be out of reach to many of us – technically, it is possible for each of us to have a private airplane, but the technical ability to have it doesn’t make it economically or structurally feasible.
We also agree on the importance of libraries and other methods of preserving information access. The more we rely on the internet, and assume it can exist as a repository of available knowledge, the more we lose.
And this is also true of community – so many of us rely on the internet to find like minded people, to find communities around us. And that time we spend on the internet is time we don’t spend in direct connection to other people. Now we may not be able to get from our neighbors what we get here – just as we may not be able to get in hard copy at our library what we can get on the internet. But it would be wrong not to recognize the possibility that at some point we will be left with only our library (or not even that if we allow state budget cuts to undermine that) and with only the people around us.
I once wrote an essay called “The Revolution Will Not be Blogged, Either” (now I should probably add tweeted or facebooked) in which I noted that no technology is without its unintended negative consequences – and I think the assumption that we are making, that the internet will always be here for all of us – and I think it is an assumption made even by many people who should know better – risks enormous negative consequences. Whether we are printing out valuable information (on the backs of other paper, of course) or remembering that even though we may like the people on the internet better, we still will have to live with our neighbors, perhaps exclusively, our assumptions should be that we may not always have things, just because we find it unthinkable to live without them.
Sharon