Dark cloud : the hidden costs of the digital world
Title:
Dark cloud : the hidden costs of the digital world
Author:
Pitron, Guillaume, author.
ISBN:
9781957363011
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
290 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
General Note:
Translated from the French.
Contents:
Introduction -- Chapter one. The digital world's environmental benefits: fiction vs. fact -- Chapter two. Smartphones and the art of Zen -- Chapter three. The dark matter of a digital world -- Chapter four. Investigating a cloud -- Chapter five. An appalling waste of electricity -- Chapter six. Battle of the far north -- Chapter seven. Expansion of the digital universe -- Chapter eight. When robots out-pollute humans -- Chapter nine. Twenty thousand tentacles under the sea -- Chapter ten. The geopolitics of digital infrastructures -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgements -- Appendixes -- Notes.
Abstract:
"A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which addresses the pressing question of the carbon footprint it leaves behind. In a sort of news thriller, the author reveals not only how costly the virtual world is, but how damaging it is to the environment. A simple 'like' sent from our smartphones mobilises what will soon constitute the largest infrastructure built by man. This small notification, crossing the seven operating layers of the Internet, travels around the world, using submarine cables, telephone antennas, and data centres, going as far as the Arctic Circle. It turns out that the 'dematerialised' digital world, essential for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 per cent of the world's electricity and represents nearly 4 per cent of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions. We are struggling to understand these impacts, as they are obscured to us in the mirage of 'the cloud'"--Publisher's description.
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