“… research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy…”
I would love to see that number on a graph next to the energy consumption of training the next bullshit AI chatbot.
And the ad industry, considering half of all consumer internet traffic is ads.
I’m sure its small - “AI” is an unnecessary waste of resources when we can ill afford it. That said we have actual quantifiable targets (that are so tough because we’ve left it so late) for energy and emissions so it might still be the case that this also needs to change.
Sadly, ine of the things I hear quite a lot from people is the assumption that digital means it has no impact at all and they act accordingly to that assumption but when you add it up it is having a sizeable impact.
This is so stupid. It doesn’t cost electricity to keep data in storage. That’s why people can put data on hard drives and safely disconnect them without losing that data. RAM uses a few watts, but it’s negligible.
The real climate dangers are the fossil fuel industries, and the gigantic AI processing centers, and the giant bitcoin miners spinning up ancient coal plants, and the billionaires taking joyrides to space, and the warmongers…
There’s so many more problematic sources of climate change, I have to wonder if this was funded by the fossil fuel industry as a disinformation “study,” or worse, a preliminary effort to cull undesirable information under the auspices of “preventing climate change.”
Excuse me. Can you please limit your posts to one paragraph each? Your valid points are killing the planet.
This is a consistent misunderstanding problem I wish people understood.
Manufacturing things creates emissions. It costs energy and materials. Something could have absolutely no emissions in usage and still be problematic when done on growing scales because the manufacture costs energy emissions and resources. Hard drives wear out and die and need replacing. Researchers know how to account for this its a life cycle assessment calculation they aren’t perfect but this is robust work.
IT is up to 4% of global emissions and the sector is growing. People consistently act as if there is no footprint to digital media and there is. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389921001884
Yes the headline is a little silly but we actually do need think strategically about the sector and that starts by actually realising it has an impact and asking ourselves what are the priorities that we went to save whilst we decarbonise the industry that supports it.
There’s no wiggle room left - no sector or set of behaviours that can afford to be given slack. We are in the biggest race of our life’s and the stake are incomprehensibly huge.
I agree, but the key point of the story isn’t IT in general as a growing problematic sector, it’s specifically storage. IT is a broad category that can include a lot of different technological modalities (ICT according to that study you linked), but whinging about memes stored somewhere forgotten is pretty low on the list of practical concerns.
Yes I agree that the headline and article is silly to reference memes and undermines the study as a whole which seems more sound.
I know loads of people of take hundred of photos a day and then pay a cloud hoster (or use a “free” service) to store it indefinitely and never look back at it again.
Cloud storage isn’t straight forwardly just hard storage because its kept in data centers such that it can be downloaded at any point.
Cloud storage is replacing any sense of needing a digital archivist processes for people and businesses because it much cheaper and easier to store it just in case the data is needed again rather than actually strategetically thinking about what data is important to keep and what isn’t.
Shipping companies burning bunker oil is a much more significant problem
Not even pretending to hide the blame shifting. This is so egregious. Just like the “carbon footprint” shenanigans, happening in real time
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Wait until you hear about social networks
Web-based or carbon-based?
So basically my memes are changing the world? Cool.
End the petrodollar and sever ties with authoritarian petrostates. End fracking and offshore drilling… Or else I will make a meme about it.
If data isn’t being accessed, it isn’t using much power. So it just minisculy hurts the company storage costs
Why the fuck are they posting this bullshit? The cost of an email include the cost of the device you use to send or read the email, which is 70% of the cost. Then it’s 15% (energy wise) to transport the email. The cost of storing the email is 0.5%.
With that in mind, think about how much it costs to watch 1h on YouTube or Netflix…
Some explanations in French (sry):
I mean, if it is forgotten, then it just takes hard drive space (plus extra if the drive is fragmented)…do you mean the fraction of energy used by the hard drive just by being on? Does it add up to anything comparable to actually spending processing cycles?
We used to have libraries to store media history and shitposting controversies like the Dreyfus affair…
