imagining-a-solarpowered-internet-kris-de-decker-low–tech-magazine.md (3647B)
1 <https://walkerart.org/magazine/low-tech-magazine-kris-de-decker> 2 3 > The average internet/bandwidth speed in 2007 was approximately 3.5 4 > mbps. 5 > 6 > [...] 7 > 8 > Internet speeds today are five times faster, leading to increased 9 > bandwidth usage, which consequently increases energy consumption. 10 > 11 > [...] 12 > 13 > 14 > **So if you innovate and the result is some technology that increases 15 > energy use by a factor of 20, then maybe that innovation is not so 16 > innovative after all**, and that’s a big thing. What we call 17 > “innovation” these days usually results in something that uses more 18 > energy. There’s nothing wrong with innovation, but you can also 19 > innovate without constantly increasing the energy use, and I think 20 > that’s where we should be heading to, to take that into account 21 > also. 22 > 23 > [...] 24 > 25 > So that’s a bit of what we’re trying to show. It doesn’t mean that 26 > making it use less energy makes it become less attractive. You can 27 > do both things at the same time, but it needs a lot of thinking, 28 > and, yeah, innovation. 29 > 30 > [...] 31 > 32 > The only difference is that you innovate with the energy use in 33 > mind, and then you can go a very long way. It’s not constrained just 34 > to websites, it has to do with many other technologies as well. 35 > 36 > [...] 37 > 38 > people are confusing energy efficiency with lower energy use or 39 > energy savings. These are very different things. Something that’s 40 > extremely visible on the internet is that making everything more 41 > efficient (like a data center) doesn’t necessarily result in less 42 > energy use; it just results in more data traffic. 43 > 44 > [...] 45 > 46 > first thing that needs to happen is that people need to become aware 47 > of the fact that the internet uses energy. 48 > 49 > [...] 50 > 51 > That’s, I think, one of the greatest challenges of our time: how are 52 > we going to find an acceptable way to limit things? Things like the 53 > internet? 54 > 55 > [...] 56 > 57 > Wireless traffic through 3G uses 15 times more energy than WiFi, 58 > while 4G consumes 23 times more. 59 > 60 > [...] 61 > 62 > in some developing countries, internet networks are not always 63 > on. They are indeed intermittent, because they work with solar 64 > panels. Every internet node has a solar panel, and the data only 65 > gets from one node to another if there is sun. Your email might take 66 > three days to arrive, depending on the weather. So you can adapt 67 > basically anything to an intermittent energy supply. 68 > 69 > [...] 70 > 71 > It’s not fun to be on the internet anymore, at least not like it 72 > used to be, in the sense that these days, you open a website, you 73 > get a cookie warning, then you get some privacy thing that you have 74 > to click away, then you get the newsletter, then you get the ads in 75 > your face 76 > 77 > [...] 78 > 79 > If you want the solution, just look to the past and you will find 80 > it. And indeed, even if the history of web design is much shorter 81 > than all the other technologies, again, this grew old in the sense 82 > that you just look back 20 years, and you find a solution in the 83 > static website. Like with many other things, you can improve it 84 > because now we have the static site generators which makes the use 85 > of the static websites easier. We just have to go back to the basics 86 > of web design and see where we come from, and then it becomes clear 87 > pretty quickly that all these things we put on top of it are just 88 > not really necessary. 89 > 90 > [...] 91 > 92 > Also, it saves a lot of costs that would be associated with 93 > traffic. I would get in trouble if it were hosted through a company 94 > because we easily take 40,000 visitors a day on this little blog 95 > here in my living room. 96 > 97 > [...] 98 99 <https://www.humanpowerplant.be/>