Imperialism and colonisation have not gone away. They’ve just become more clever in how they present themselves. The essential model is still the foundation of economic success for Europe and North America: Get the cheapest possible raw materials from poor countries. Turn these materials into brands and sell them back to these poor count... Read More »
Big Tech has done an absolutely marvellous job of convincing everyone that it is immaterial, ephemeral, light, green, sustainable. And yet nothing is more dependent on the physical material world than digital. The physical world can get along just fine without digital. Digital could not survive for one second without a vast array of phys... Read More »
The people of the United States are sucking their country dry of fresh water at frenetic rates. They will not stop, they cannot stop, because they are driven by the pump of capitalism, as it seeks—at all and any cost—to turn every material into dollars. As the scientists lay out more and more dire warnings about water scarcity, the data ... Read More »
There is a global freshwater crisis and this crisis is being accelerated by data centers’ and chip makers’ incredible thirst for water. Not alone that, the manufacturing of technology and the end-of-life e-waste is poisoning increasing quantities of fresh water. About 3% of all water on Earth is fresh, and about 2% of that is locked up... Read More »
All the world is a lab where, for centuries, scientists have released their chemicals. Once the chemicals were found to have billionaire-making capacity, they were approved. Even after harms were identified, they were still produced. Industry used as many delaying tactics as possible. It is never about the health of the environment. It i... Read More »
Most of us have a concept of home. It is something that is critically important to us. A place we feel comfortable and protected. We care much about our home. We like to keep it warm, clean, dry, safe, comfortable. At a most basic level, our home is a house or an apartment. Some of us think beyond the physical building we own or rent. ... Read More »
Around the year 2007, for the first time, we created a zettabyte of data in a 12-month period. In creating one zettabyte of data, we created more data in one year than we had created in the 20th, 19th, 18th and all previous centuries of human civilization. By 2010, we were creating two zettabytes a year. In 2035, we will create more than... Read More »
To understand why humans are driving life to extinction, we must understand how we use and abuse materials. We are destroying materials and creating toxic waste at a level that would have been unimaginable even fifty years ago. The materials we have on this Earth have accumulated over billions of years. The way these materials are orga... Read More »
There is no such thing as digital sustainability. There is no such thing as green computing. There is no such thing as clean energy. There is no such thing as renewable energy. There is no such thing as net zero. If we have any chance to survive long term as a species we must stop lying to ourselves. Digital is about as far from Nature... Read More »
It has always amazed me how governments, in particular, have handed over the findability of their information to Google. AI will compound this risk. Imagine if the German government outsourced the organization, filing and retrieval of its physical documents pertaining to the making of laws to a third party, because it felt that organiz... Read More »