A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which 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’.
Some telling numbers:
- If digital technology were a country, it would be the third-highest consumer of electricity behind China and the United States.
- An email with a large attachment consumes as much energy as a lightbulb left on for one hour.
- Every year, streaming technology generates as much greenhouse gas as Spain — close to 1 per cent of global emissions.
- One Google search uses as much electricity as a lightbulb left on for up to two minutes.
- All of humanity produces five exabytes of data per day, equivalent to what we consumed from the very beginnings of the internet to 2003 — an amount that would fill 10 million Blu-ray discs which, piled up, would be as high as the Eiffel Tower.
At a time of the deployment of 5G, connected cars, and artificial intelligence,
The Dark Cloud— the result of an investigation carried out over two years on four continents — reveals the anatomy of a technology that is virtual only in name. Under the guise of limiting the impact of humans on the planet, it is already asserting itself as one of the major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Guillaume Pitron, born in 1980, is a French award-winning journalist and documentary-maker for France’s leading television channels. His work focuses on commodities and on the economic, political, and environmental issues associated with their use.
The Rare Metals War, his first book, sold 80,000 copies in France and has been translated into ten languages. Guillaume Pitron holds a master’s degree in international law from the University of Georgetown (Washington, DC), and is a TEDx speaker. More information at www.en-guillaumepitron.com.
Industry Reviews
‘Guillaume Pitron recalls the origins of digital technology and explains how this new communication tool has catastrophic consequences on our environment … What happens when you send an email? What is the geography of clicks? What ecological and geopolitical challenges do they bring without our knowledge? This is the subject of The Dark Cloud … For two years, the journalist followed, on four continents, the route of our emails, our likes, and our vacation photos.’
Margherita Nasi, Le Monde
‘Today has two battlegrounds - carbon and silicon. In The Dark Cloud, journalist Guillaume Pitron explains the distinction between these two battlegrounds is a carefully crafted illusion. Our screens are not portals to an infinity beyond the material. Far from lacking a footprint, technology actually has an immense cost in resources, energy and environmental destruction … Pitron is a master of articulating the material cost of the “immaterial” … It’s only through works such as Dark Cloud… that laboriously map the immense, insatiable machine that we realise it’s one minute to midnight on the doomsday clock, and we’re all asleep. Well, here is your wake-up call.’
Jason Steger, The Sydney Morning Herald
‘In The Dark Cloud, Guillaume Pitron exposes the supposed immateriality of the internet as one of the more pernicious of tech bro delusions. … rather than saving us from the destructive tendencies of capitalism, the digital realm intensifies them, with the tech companies committed to exponential, unplanned growth irrespective of the environmental consequences …[The Dark Cloud] demonstrates convincingly that we can’t flee from our messed-up analogue world into some digital alternative. Our problems are material – and they require material solutions.’
Jeff Sparrow, The Saturday Paper
