World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern Gerry McGovern

Ben's career spans IT to telecoms and the evolving media landscape. With a foundation in IT at Logica for a decade, he transitioned to being the CTO of a pioneering music start-up at the peak of the internet revolution. His journey continued at Orange for almost another decade, where he played a pivotal role in the convergence of telecoms with the internet and spearheaded numerous media-focused initiatives.
 
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Web design has rarely taken the environment into account. Over the last decade, web pages have become ten times bigger, and up to 80% of the weight of a particular webpage can be waste—content and code that is not required for the page to function. Do web designers and developers simply not care? Vitaly Friedman believes that they do care but that they need better education about accessibility, usability and sustainability.

Vitaly Friedman is one of the nicest and most brilliant people I know. Born in Minsk, Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany, and co-founded Smashing Magazine back in 2006, a leading online magazine for designers and developers. His curiosity drove him from interface design to front-end to performance optimization to accessibility and back to user experience over all the years.

Manuel Vexler is the Executive Director at the Actionable Knowledge Foundational Institute (AKFI) and a Cornell Instructor and facilitator. He has a wealth of experience in leading and facilitating discussions on sustainability and digital transformation. Manuel believes that 5G doesn’t have a clear benefit and is rather a reflection of our growth-obsessed economies.
www.akfi.org

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a postdoctoral researcher in the Fixing Futures research training group at Goethe University. As a graduate of MIT's History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society program, his dissertation project, "Cloud Ecologies", is an ethnography of data centers and their environmental impacts in the United States, Puerto Rico, Iceland, and Singapore. 
There is a global freshwater crisis and this crisis is being accelerated by data centers’ incredible thirst for water. Steven talks to Gerry about the environmental impact data centers are having on fresh water supply, particularly in water-stressed areas, and how it is likely to get worse because AI is particularly water intense 
Some selected quotes from Steven:
 Some scholars are estimating that anything from 5% to 10% of data center water comes from alternative water sources, like grey water, sea water. But the vast majority is drinking water. And there are a few reasons for this. One is the biohazard. As water is being warmed and flowing through these data centers, microorganisms flourish in these conditions. That is one reason why data centers turn to drinking water because that water has already to some degree been treated, so there is less of s risk of these microbial blooms happening. For the same microbial reason, the water can’t be endlessly recycled. It has to be dumped or returned to the sewers because even with reverse-osmosis filters and other techniques, these microbes will flourish.
 Some water, when it evaporates can leave behind really corrosive particulates of various kinds. 
 The data centers will come if you offer them the right incentives around land, water and electricity, even is these incentives are fundamentally unsustainable, if they’re irresponsible, if they’re suicidal or self-destructive. 
If you have access to cheap fresh water, deserts are a great place for data centers because they are so dry—and computers hate moisture and high humidity. That’s why there are so many data centers in Arizona “It’s almost like the goldrush. It’s a water-rush. All these companies are clustering to get this cheap water. But it’s doomed.” As the suicidal spiral by data centers and industrial farming circles the drains in even more frenzied swirls, “We see how communities are struggling to pay their water bills while data centers and other industries are getting water at a much cheaper rate. There are farmers who are directly competing with data centers to grow food. Indigenous communities are also having difficulties accessing water. The draining of the Colorado river is affecting the migration patterns of salmon and other fish, which are really important to the lifecycles. 
These data centers will not last. I think that’s another important point for people to realize. These data centers are ephemeral. They know that they will eventually have to disband. This is the kind of perversity of data centers coming into many communities with these promises of economic growth. There is certainly a lot of jobs that are created to construct the data center. But once a data center has actually been constructed, it’s only a handful of people who actually run a facility. So, in some cases, just a dozen people, or two dozen people, run a facility that is consuming as much electricity as a small city. A data center life is between five and twenty years. This is not a permanent industry. It is extractive, like mines. 

World Wide Waste (Gerry's latest book)

Pietro Jarre has a doctorate in geotechnical engineering. He’s a specialist in geotechnical and environmental issues on waste rock deposits, mining infrastructures, landfills and brownfields. Since 2015, his focus is on the environmental and social impact of digital technologies. He’s founder of Sloweb association, something I’d highly recommend checking out at slowweb.org. Pietro starts our chat by recounting his early years in mining, leading up to the Los Frailes tailings dam disaster.
Link:
http://slowweb.org

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Perk Pomeyie is a Ghanaian environmental activist from Accra, who is currently the National Coordinator of the Ghana Youth Environmental Movement-a leading youth-led environment and climate advocacy and campaign group in Ghana. I started by asking Perk to tell me more about how the youth movement works.
https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

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