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166 lines
11 KiB
166 lines
11 KiB
4 years ago
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Title: The Pandemic's Dark Cloud
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Author: Mel Hogan
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"The Pandemic\'s Dark Cloud" was written in November 2020 as a
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reflection on the relationship between the pandemic and environmental
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media, with a focus on "the cloud" and its undergirding networked
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infrastructure. The central idea of this piece is to demonstrate the
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interconnectedness of all things -- covid, care, community, nature,
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ewaste, racism, greed -- in both the making and undoing of our modern
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communication systems.
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This piece is intended as a provocation, so your thoughts and feelings
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are very welcomed!
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*Mél Hogan is the Director of the *[*Environmental Media Lab
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(EML)*](https://www.environmentalmedialab.com/)* and *[*Associate
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Professor*](https://www.melhogan.com/)* at the University of Calgary,
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Canada. She is also an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of
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Communication. Career highlights so far include keynoting the 2020
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McLuhan lecture at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and giving a plenary
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at transmediale 2020.\
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\@mel\_hogan / melhogan.com / mhogan\@ucalgary.ca*
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# The Pandemic\'s Dark Cloud by Mél Hogan
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As the pandemic settled into consciousness across the globe, humans
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devolved. People in countries where the response to COVID-19 was most
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mismanaged started to snack a lot.^[^1]^ Pre-sliced packaged
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charcuterie. Ritz crackers. Oreo cookies. In their growing helplessness,
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people also sharply increased their consumption of alcohol, especially
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women in the US.^[^2]^ For some it was drugs. Those lucky enough to keep
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their job doubled down on work, staying at their stations or desks for
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longer hours -- part avoidance and part stuckness into systems that
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could offer no other plan.
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The dread by now is cumulative. Pick your pain: covid19, white
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supremacy, climate catastrophe. People are reaching new levels of
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"doomscrolling" on social media, playing online video games, and
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"binge-watching" Netflix as ways to pass the time, waiting on the virus
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to run its course, or for politicians to make a plan. As things shut
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down, Zoom quickly took over as the way to communicate at a safe social
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distance. Education quickly became clicking at screens. No more shopping
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in person meant ordering by way of interfaces. All of these screens more
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or less allowed things to continue, if not as normal, as a viable
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alternative in the meantime. It remains to be seen if this online world
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we've adopted so quickly is the new normal, and here to stay, or if
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it'll reflect to us the inefficiencies of how we lived before and save
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us from ourselves. Or, maybe it will call into question the terrible
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inequities that are only made more evident by this pandemic.
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By April, the news media were already reporting that lockdowns had meant
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cleaner air and clearer water.^[^3]^ Satellite images showed less
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pollution over China and the US. Animals were found roaming freely in
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different parts of India.^[^4]^ "Nature is healing" became a popular
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meme celebrating the lessening of human impact and nature's
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recovery.^[^5]^ But were the effects of lockdown, or quarantine, of
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humans being trapped in their homes, and of doing everything online,
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truly a more sustainable way of going about life? Had the turn to "the
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cloud" proven to be the weightless way forward? Social isolation and
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disinformation propagation problems aside, could the internet become a
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tool to inadvertently save the environment?
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In thinking of the internet and the many devices connected to it, these
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account for approximately 2-4% of global greenhouse emissions, which
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only promise to double by 2025.^[^6]^ Data centres and vast server farms
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(where data is stored and transmitted) draw more than 80% of their
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energy from fossil fuel power stations. Online video alone -- porn,
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Netflix, YouTube, Zoom -- generated 60% of the world's total data flows
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before covid19 hit. A Google search uses as much energy as cooking an
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egg or boiling water in an electric kettle.^[^7]^ Yearly emails for work
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(and not accounting for spam) have been calculated to be equal in terms
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of CO2 emissions to driving 320 kilometres.^[^8]^ These numbers have
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likely gone up considerably since the pandemic.^[^9]^ This way of living
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wasn't sustainable then, and it certainly isn't now.
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There are search engines (eg. Ecosia^[^10]^) and add-ons (eg.
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Carbonalyser by The Shift Project,^[^11]^ green-algorithms.org^[^12]^)
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that help measure user impacts on the environment, but these miss
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addressing the bigger questions -- such as moving away from confronting
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personal use to the systemic, material, and ideological issues baked
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into the internet. Why is the internet like this? The question is more
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political than it is purely technological. It's more emotional, even,
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than it is political. Because we've drifted so far away from
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understanding nature as inherent to human and non-human wellbeing alike,
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towards unrelenting and exploitative capitalism and extractivism, it
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means we now have these massively entangled systems that reinforce one
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another, generate profit for the very few, but in the end benefit
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nothing and nobody.^[^13]^ These systems are harder to abolish or undo,
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so instead we turn to solutions that lessen their impacts, and we
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consider the rest inevitable -- or worse, natural. We might, for
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example, shift data centers to cooler climates to save on cooling costs,
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we might develop more efficient software, we might offer carbon
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offsetting and plant trees, but none of these technofixes reach the
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heart of the our current predicament: our solutions and our problems
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originate from the same short-sighted, greed-driven, competitive, and
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market-driven agendas that caused this global deadly pandemic in the
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first place.
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In 2020, we are generating 50 million tons worldwide of electronic
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waste, with an annual growth of 5%.^[^14]^ This means that we produce
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e-waste at three times the rate that humans reproduce. Much e-waste is
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toxic and severely impacts land, water, plants, animals, and humans.
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This damage is permanent. At the other end of the supply chain, fields
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of wheat and corn have become lakes of toxic sludge to accommodate the
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rare earth mining industry.^[^15]^ From Mongolia to China to the Congo,
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people labour in dangerous conditions, mining through the ore-laden mud
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to find rare minerals to power our devices. Elsewhere, people work
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endless shifts to assemble computers, phones, tablets. It should be no
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surprise then that the internet that connects this all is toxic too,
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evidenced by both the work of content moderators who filter the
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internet, and the shady tactics used by Big Tech to evade taxes to get
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filthy rich off the backs of this global human-powered machine. As Ron
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Deibert put it recently in his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, "If we continue
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on this path of unbridled consumption and planned obsolescence, we are
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doomed."^[^16]^
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So we can either become extinct from the repercussions of our centuries
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old destructive neoliberal colonial institutions, as the planet pushes
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back with more pandemics, storms, and violence, or we can get together
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and admit to our failures as colonisers. These failures tap into
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something profound, deeply broken, about what settlers have historically
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valued and continue to enact. We are living largely in the dark
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fantasies of ghosts -- and these old, settler ideas haunt and break us.
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We can imagine better. We can make other decisions. We can tune our
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emotions to move from awareness to anxiety to action. We return public
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lands to Indigenous peoples. We defund police and dismantle white
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supremacy. We transform ourselves, and our communication systems will
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follow.
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[^1]: [*https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic\_Marketing*](https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic_Marketing)
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[*https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/*](https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/)
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[*https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic*](https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic)
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[^2]: [*https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/*](https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/)
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[*https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/*](https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/)
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[^3]: [*https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921*](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921)
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[^4]: [*https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/*](https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/)
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[^5]: [*https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus*](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus)
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[^6]: [*https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think*](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think)
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[^7]: [*https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google*](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google)
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[^8]: [*https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think*](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think)
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and
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[*https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423*](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423)
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[^9]: [*https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/*](https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/)
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[^10]: [*https://www.ecosia.org/*](https://www.ecosia.org/)
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[^11]: [*https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/*](https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/)
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[^12]: [*http://www.green-algorithms.org/*](http://www.green-algorithms.org/)
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[^13]: [*https://landback.org/manifesto/*](https://landback.org/manifesto/)
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[^14]: [*https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189*](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189)
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[^15]: [*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html*](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html)
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[^16]: [*https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert*](https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert)
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