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<h1 class="css-twhgrd">To decarbonize we must
decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution</h1>
<p>Wed 18 Sep 2019 06.30 BST</p>
<div class="css-1v1wi0p">
<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-fgeroe">Ben
Tarnoff</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">theguardian.com</div>
<div class="css-zskk6u">7 min</div>
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<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fi.guim.co.uk%2Fimg%2Fmedia%2Fb7c2b87218ff0a7f5f11016e2d868d1c150083fc%2F0_38_3900_2340%2Fmaster%2F3900.jpg%3Fwidth%3D300%26quality%3D85%26auto%3Dformat%26fit%3Dmax%26s%3Dcef83874a454b67815ff71df006e1a2e"
alt="The data server hall at Facebook’s
storage center near in Lulea, Sweden.
Data centers currently consume 200
terawatt hours per year – roughly the
same amount as South Africa.
Photograph: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via
Getty Images"> <figcaption>The data
server hall at Facebook’s storage center
near in Lulea, Sweden. Data centers
currently consume 200 terawatt hours per
year – roughly the same amount as South
Africa.
Photograph: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via
Getty Images</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
<div>
<p><span><span>O</span></span>ur built
environment is becoming one big computer.
“Smartness” is coming to saturate our
stores, workplaces, homes, cities. As we
go about our daily lives, data is made,
stored, analyzed and used to make
algorithmic inferences about us that in
turn structure our experience of the
world. Computation encircles us as a
layer, dense and interconnected. If our
parents and our grandparents lived <em>with</em>
computers, we live <em>inside</em> them.</p>
<p>A growing chorus of activists,
journalists and scholars are calling
attention to the dangers of digital
enclosure. Employers are <a
href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-ways-your-boss-is-spying-on-you-11563528604">using</a>
algorithmic tools to surveil and control
workers. Cops are <a
href="https://stoplapdspying.org/resources/architecture/">using</a>
algorithmic tools to surveil and control
communities of color. And there is no
shortage of dystopian possibilities on the
horizon: landlords evicting tenants with
“smart locks”, health insurers charging
higher premiums because your Fitbit says
you don’t exercise enough.</p>
<p>Digitization doesn’t just pose a risk to
people, however. It also poses a risk to
the planet. July was the hottest month on
record. Large chunks of the Arctic are
melting. In India, more than half a
billion people face water shortages.
Putting computation everywhere directly
contributes to this crisis. Digitization
is a climate disaster: if corporations and
governments succeed in making vastly more
of our world into data, there will be less
of a world left for us to live in.</p>
<p>To understand the relationship between
data and climate, the best place to start
is machine learning (ML). Billions of
dollars are being spent on researching,
developing, and deploying ML because major
breakthroughs in the past decade have made
it a powerful tool for pattern
recognition, whether analyzing faces or
predicting consumer preferences. ML
“learns” by training on large quantities
of data. Computers are stupid: babies know
what a face is within the first few months
of being alive. For a computer to know
what a face is, it must learn by looking
at millions of pictures of faces.</p>
<p>This is a demanding process. It takes
place inside the data centers we call the
cloud, and much of the electricity that
powers the cloud is generated by burning
fossil fuels. As a result, ML has a large
carbon footprint. In a recent <a
href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243.pdf">paper</a>
that made waves in the ML community, a
team at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, found that training a model for
natural-language processing – the field
that helps “virtual assistants” like Alexa
understand what you’re saying – can emit
as much as 626,155lb of carbon dioxide.
That’s about the same amount <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/jul/19/carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year">produced</a>
by flying roundtrip between New York and
Beijing 125 times.</p>
<p>Training models isn’t the only way ML
contributes to the cooking of our planet.
It has also stimulated a hunger for data
that is probably the single biggest driver
of the digitization of everything.
Corporations and governments now have an
incentive to acquire as much data as
possible, because that data, with the help
of ML, might yield valuable patterns. It
might tell them who to fire, who to
arrest, when to perform maintenance on a
machine or how to promote a new product.</p>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_2">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fi.guim.co.uk%2Fimg%2Fmedia%2Fc438344138315871faa44fe46288a3e7f4872077%2F0_126_5472_3283%2Fmaster%2F5472.jpg%3Fwidth%3D300%26quality%3D85%26auto%3Dformat%26fit%3Dmax%26s%3D7548ef595ae677826b28578ead0ee484"
alt="‘Digitization doesn’t just pose a
risk to people. It also poses a risk
to the planet. In India, more than
half a billion people face water
shortages.’ Photograph: R
Parthibhan/AP"> <figcaption>‘Digitization
doesn’t just pose a risk to people. It
also poses a risk to the planet. In
India, more than half a billion people
face water shortages.’ Photograph: R
Parthibhan/AP</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
<p>One of the best ways to make more data is
to put small connected computers
everywhere: Cisco predicts there will be
28.5bn networked devices by 2022. Aside
from the energy required to manufacture
and maintain those devices, the data they
produce will live in the carbon-intensive
cloud. Data centers currently consume 200
terawatt hours per year – roughly the same
amount as South Africa. Anders Andrae, a
widely cited researcher at Huawei, tells
me that number is likely to grow 4-5 times
by 2030. This would put the cloud on par
with Japan, the fourth-biggest energy
consumer on the planet.</p>
<p>What can be done to curb the carbon costs
of data? Greenpeace has long pushed cloud
providers to switch to renewable energy
sources and improve efficiency. These
efforts have seen some success: the use of
renewables by data centers has <a
href="http://www.clickclean.org/downloads/ClickClean2016%20HiRes.pdf">grown</a>
substantially. Meanwhile, efficiency gains
from better techniques and bigger
economies of scale have <a
href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaec9c">moderated</a>
the cloud’s power consumption in recent
years. When it comes to ML, a group of
researchers are <a
href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.10597.pdf">calling</a>
for a more energy-conscious approach,
which they call “Green AI”. These are
encouraging trends, and tech workers
themselves are likely to play a key role
in advancing them: Amazon employees have
been <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/22/amazon-workers-climate-crisis-board-jeff-bezos">organizing</a>
for a climate plan since late last year,
and they recently <a
href="https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/amazon-employees-are-joining-the-global-climate-walkout-9-20-9bfa4cbb1ce3">announced</a>
a global walkout for 20 September. Among
their demands is for the company to commit
to zero emissions by 2030 and to stop
selling cloud services to fossil fuel
companies.</p>
<p>But it’s clear that confronting the
climate crisis will require something more
radical than just making data greener.
That’s why we should put another tactic on
the table: making less data. We should
reject the assumption that our built
environment <em>must</em> become one big
computer. We should erect barriers against
the spread of “smartness” into all of the
spaces of our lives.</p>
<p>To decarbonize, we need to decomputerize.</p>
<p>This proposal will no doubt be met with
charges of Luddism. Good: Luddism is a
label to embrace. The Luddites were heroic
figures and acute technological thinkers.
They smashed textile machinery in
19th-century England because they had the
capacity to perceive technology “in the
present tense”, in the <a
href="https://books.google.com/books?id=csndAGqJlk0C">words</a>
of the historian David F Noble. They
didn’t wait patiently for the glorious
future promised by the gospel of progress.
They saw what certain machines were doing
to them in the present tense – endangering
their livelihoods – and dismantled them.</p>
<p>We are often sold a similar bill of
goods: big tech companies talk incessantly
about how “AI” and digitization will bring
a better future. In the present tense,
however, putting computers everywhere is
bad for most people. It enables
advertisers, employers and cops to
exercise more control over us – in
addition to helping heat the planet.</p>
<p>Fortunately, there are latter-day
Luddites working to stem the tide.
Community groups like the <a
href="https://stoplapdspying.org/">Stop
LAPD Spying Coalition</a> are organizing
to shut down algorithmic policing
programs. A growing campaign to ban the
government use of facial recognition
software has won important victories in <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html">San
Francisco</a> and <a
href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/06/27/somerville-city-council-passes-facial-recognition-ban/SfaqQ7mG3DGulXonBHSCYK/story.html">Somerville</a>,
Massachusetts, while workers at Amazon are
<a
href="https://gizmodo.com/amazon-workers-demand-jeff-bezos-cancel-face-recognitio-1827037509">calling</a>
for the company to stop selling such
software to law enforcement. And in the
streets of Hong Kong, protesters are
developing techniques for evading the
algorithmic gaze, using lasers to confuse
facial recognition cameras and <a
href="https://twitter.com/Jordan_Sather_/status/1165327628825284610">cutting</a>
down “smart” lamp-posts equipped with
monitoring devices.</p>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_3">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fi.guim.co.uk%2Fimg%2Fmedia%2Ff84c6ea8fbd3f984274cf30086871b58f68e6e26%2F0_263_5568_3341%2Fmaster%2F5568.jpg%3Fwidth%3D300%26quality%3D85%26auto%3Dformat%26fit%3Dmax%26s%3Df9e321ab096d5e52f06ef3dc4a6ac4e9"
alt="Teenagers and students take part
in a climate protest outside the White
House in Washington on 13 September
2019. Photograph: Nicholas
Kamm/AFP/Getty Images"> <figcaption>Teenagers
and students take part in a climate
protest outside the White House in
Washington on 13 September 2019.
Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty
Images</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
<p>These are just a few possible sources of
inspiration for a broader movement for
decomputerization, one that pursues social
and ecological goals simultaneously. The
premise of the Green New Deal is that we
can make society greener and more
equitable at the same time – that we can
democratize as we decarbonize. We should
apply the same logic to our digital
sphere. Preventing a local police
department from constructing an ML-powered
panopticon is a matter of algorithmic,
social <em>and</em> climate justice. As
they used to say in the 1960s: one
struggle, many fronts.</p>
<p>For such a struggle to be successful,
however, resistance is not enough. We also
need a vision of the future we want.
Again, the history of the Luddites can be
helpful. In 1812, a group of Yorkshire
Luddites sent a factory owner a letter
promising continued action until “the
House of Commons passes an Act to put down
all Machinery hurtful to Commonality”.
Following their example, we might derive a
simple Luddite principle for democratizing
technology: we should destroy machinery
hurtful to the common good and build
machinery helpful to it.</p>
<p>What does this mean in practice? It’s
hard to think of anything more hurtful to
our common life than heating large
portions of the planet beyond habitable
levels. Privacy advocates have long called
for companies to restrict their collection
of data to the minimum necessary to
perform a service – a principle now
enshrined in the GDPR, the EU’s omnibus
data regulation. A 21st-century Luddism
should embrace this principle but go
further. What matters is not only how much
data a service collects, but what imprint
that service leaves upon the world – and
thus whether it should be performed at
all.</p>
<p>Decomputerization doesn’t mean <em>no</em>
computers. It means that not <em>all</em>
spheres of life should be rendered into
data and computed upon. Ubiquitous
“smartness” largely serves to enrich and
empower the few at the expense of the
many, while inflicting ecological harm
that will threaten the survival and
flourishing of billions of people.</p>
<p>Precisely which computational activities
should be preserved in a less computerized
world is a matter for those billions of
people themselves to decide. The question
of whether a particular machine hurts or
helps the common good can only be answered
by the commons itself. It can only be
answered collectively, through the
experiment and argument of democracy.</p>
<p>The zero-carbon commonwealth of the
future must empower people to decide not
just <em>how</em> technologies are built
and implemented, but <em>whether</em>
they’re built and implemented. Progress is
an abstraction that has done a lot of
damage over the centuries. Luddism urges
us to consider: progress towards what and
progress for whom? Sometimes a technology
shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the best thing
to do with a machine is to break it.</p>
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