a-nourishing-network/content/Essays/Mel-Hogan_Pandemics-Dark-Cloud.md

Title: The Pandemic's Dark Cloud
Author: Mél Hogan

"The Pandemic\'s Dark Cloud" was written in November 2020 as a
reflection on the relationship between the pandemic and environmental
media, with a focus on "the cloud" and its undergirding networked
infrastructure. The central idea of this piece is to demonstrate the
interconnectedness of all things -- covid, care, community, nature,
ewaste, racism, greed -- in both the making and undoing of our modern
communication systems.

This piece is intended as a provocation, so your thoughts and feelings
are very welcomed!

*Mél Hogan is the Director of the *[*Environmental Media Lab
(EML)*](https://www.environmentalmedialab.com/)* and *[*Associate
Professor*](https://www.melhogan.com/)* at the University of Calgary,
Canada. She is also an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of
Communication. Career highlights so far include keynoting the 2020
McLuhan lecture at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and giving a plenary
at transmediale 2020.\
\@mel\_hogan / melhogan.com / mhogan\@ucalgary.ca*

# The Pandemic's Dark Cloud

As the pandemic settled into consciousness across the globe, humans
devolved. People in countries where the response to COVID-19 was most
mismanaged started to snack a lot.^[^1]^ Pre-sliced packaged
charcuterie. Ritz crackers. Oreo cookies. In their growing helplessness,
people also sharply increased their consumption of alcohol, especially
women in the US.^[^2]^ For some it was drugs. Those lucky enough to keep
their job doubled down on work, staying at their stations or desks for
longer hours -- part avoidance and part stuckness into systems that
could offer no other plan.

The dread by now is cumulative. Pick your pain: covid19, white
supremacy, climate catastrophe. People are reaching new levels of
"doomscrolling" on social media, playing online video games, and
"binge-watching" Netflix as ways to pass the time, waiting on the virus
to run its course, or for politicians to make a plan. As things shut
down, Zoom quickly took over as the way to communicate at a safe social
distance. Education quickly became clicking at screens. No more shopping
in person meant ordering by way of interfaces. All of these screens more
or less allowed things to continue, if not as normal, as a viable
alternative in the meantime. It remains to be seen if this online world
we've adopted so quickly is the new normal, and here to stay, or if
it'll reflect to us the inefficiencies of how we lived before and save
us from ourselves. Or, maybe it will call into question the terrible
inequities that are only made more evident by this pandemic.

By April, the news media were already reporting that lockdowns had meant
cleaner air and clearer water.^[^3]^ Satellite images showed less
pollution over China and the US. Animals were found roaming freely in
different parts of India.^[^4]^ "Nature is healing" became a popular
meme celebrating the lessening of human impact and nature's
recovery.^[^5]^ But were the effects of lockdown, or quarantine, of
humans being trapped in their homes, and of doing everything online,
truly a more sustainable way of going about life? Had the turn to "the
cloud" proven to be the weightless way forward? Social isolation and
disinformation propagation problems aside, could the internet become a
tool to inadvertently save the environment?

In thinking of the internet and the many devices connected to it, these
account for approximately 2-4% of global greenhouse emissions, which
only promise to double by 2025.^[^6]^ Data centres and vast server farms
(where data is stored and transmitted) draw more than 80% of their
energy from fossil fuel power stations. Online video alone -- porn,
Netflix, YouTube, Zoom -- generated 60% of the world's total data flows
before covid19 hit. A Google search uses as much energy as cooking an
egg or boiling water in an electric kettle.^[^7]^ Yearly emails for work
(and not accounting for spam) have been calculated to be equal in terms
of CO2 emissions to driving 320 kilometres.^[^8]^ These numbers have
likely gone up considerably since the pandemic.^[^9]^ This way of living
wasn't sustainable then, and it certainly isn't now.

There are search engines (eg. Ecosia^[^10]^) and add-ons (eg.
Carbonalyser by The Shift Project,^[^11]^ green-algorithms.org^[^12]^)
that help measure user impacts on the environment, but these miss
addressing the bigger questions -- such as moving away from confronting
personal use to the systemic, material, and ideological issues baked
into the internet. Why is the internet like this? The question is more
political than it is purely technological. It's more emotional, even,
than it is political. Because we've drifted so far away from
understanding nature as inherent to human and non-human wellbeing alike,
towards unrelenting and exploitative capitalism and extractivism, it
means we now have these massively entangled systems that reinforce one
another, generate profit for the very few, but in the end benefit
nothing and nobody.^[^13]^ These systems are harder to abolish or undo,
so instead we turn to solutions that lessen their impacts, and we
consider the rest inevitable -- or worse, natural. We might, for
example, shift data centers to cooler climates to save on cooling costs,
we might develop more efficient software, we might offer carbon
offsetting and plant trees, but none of these technofixes reach the
heart of the our current predicament: our solutions and our problems
originate from the same short-sighted, greed-driven, competitive, and
market-driven agendas that caused this global deadly pandemic in the
first place.

In 2020, we are generating 50 million tons worldwide of electronic
waste, with an annual growth of 5%.^[^14]^ This means that we produce
e-waste at three times the rate that humans reproduce. Much e-waste is
toxic and severely impacts land, water, plants, animals, and humans.
This damage is permanent. At the other end of the supply chain, fields
of wheat and corn have become lakes of toxic sludge to accommodate the
rare earth mining industry.^[^15]^ From Mongolia to China to the Congo,
people labour in dangerous conditions, mining through the ore-laden mud
to find rare minerals to power our devices. Elsewhere, people work
endless shifts to assemble computers, phones, tablets. It should be no
surprise then that the internet that connects this all is toxic too,
evidenced by both the work of content moderators who filter the
internet, and the shady tactics used by Big Tech to evade taxes to get
filthy rich off the backs of this global human-powered machine. As Ron
Deibert put it recently in his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, "If we continue
on this path of unbridled consumption and planned obsolescence, we are
doomed."^[^16]^

So we can either become extinct from the repercussions of our centuries
old destructive neoliberal colonial institutions, as the planet pushes
back with more pandemics, storms, and violence, or we can get together
and admit to our failures as colonisers. These failures tap into
something profound, deeply broken, about what settlers have historically
valued and continue to enact. We are living largely in the dark
fantasies of ghosts -- and these old, settler ideas haunt and break us.
We can imagine better. We can make other decisions. We can tune our
emotions to move from awareness to anxiety to action. We return public
lands to Indigenous peoples. We defund police and dismantle white
supremacy. We transform ourselves, and our communication systems will
follow.

[^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)
    [*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/)
    [*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)

[^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/)
    [*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/)

[^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)

[^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/)

[^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)

[^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)

[^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)

[^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)
    and
    [*https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423*](https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423)

[^9]: [*https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/*](https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/)

[^10]: [*https://www.ecosia.org/*](https://www.ecosia.org/)

[^11]: [*https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/*](https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/)

[^12]: [*http://www.green-algorithms.org/*](http://www.green-algorithms.org/)

[^13]: [*https://landback.org/manifesto/*](https://landback.org/manifesto/)

[^14]: [*https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189*](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189)

[^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)

[^16]: [*https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert*](https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert)