143 lines
9.9 KiB
Markdown
143 lines
9.9 KiB
Markdown
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Title: The Pandemic\'s Dark Cloud
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Author: Mél Hogan
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Category: Articles
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# The Pandemic\'s Dark Cloud
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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 charcuterie.
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Ritz crackers. Oreo cookies. In their growing helplessness, people also
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sharply increased their consumption of alcohol, especially women in the
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US.[^2] For some it was drugs. Those lucky enough to keep their job
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doubled down on work, staying at their stations or desks for longer
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hours -- part avoidance and part stuckness into systems that could offer
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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 meme
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celebrating the lessening of human impact and nature's recovery.[^5] But
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were the effects of lockdown, or quarantine, of humans being trapped in
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their homes, and of doing everything online, truly a more sustainable
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way of going about life? Had the turn to "the cloud" proven to be the
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weightless way forward? Social isolation and disinformation propagation
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problems aside, could the internet become a tool to inadvertently save
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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. Carbonalyser
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by The Shift Project,[^11] green-algorithms.org[^12]) that help measure
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user impacts on the environment, but these miss addressing the bigger
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questions -- such as moving away from confronting personal use to the
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systemic, material, and ideological issues baked into the internet. Why
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is the internet like this? The question is more political than it is
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purely technological. It's more emotional, even, than it is political.
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Because we've drifted so far away from understanding nature as inherent
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to humans and non-humans alike, towards unrelenting and exploitative
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capitalism and extractivism, it means we now have these massively
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entangled systems that reinforce one another, generate profit for the
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very few, but in the end benefit nothing and nobody.[^13] These systems
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are harder to abolish and undo, so instead we turn to solutions that
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lessen their impacts, and we consider the rest inevitable -- or worse,
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natural. We might, for example, shift data centers to cooler climates to
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save on cooling costs, we might develop more efficient software, we
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might offer carbon offsetting and plant trees, but none of these
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technofixes reach the heart of the our current predicament: our
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solutions and our problems originate from the same short-sighted,
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greed-driven, competitive, and market-driven agendas that caused this
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global deadly pandemic in the 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 CBC Massey Lectures, "If we continue on
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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 and dismantle white supremacy. We
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transform ourselves, and our communication systems will follow.
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[^1]: [[https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic\_Marketing]{.underline}](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/]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](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/]{.underline}](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/]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](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/]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think)
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[^9]: [[https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/]{.underline}](https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/)
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[^10]: [[https://www.ecosia.org/]{.underline}](https://www.ecosia.org/)
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[^11]: [[https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/]{.underline}](https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/)
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[^12]: [[http://www.green-algorithms.org/]{.underline}](http://www.green-algorithms.org/)
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[^13]: [[https://landback.org/manifesto/]{.underline}](https://landback.org/manifesto/)
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[^14]: [[https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](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]{.underline}](https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert)
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