Our dirty love affair with technology

It is time to recognise that the digital economy is a large-scale contributor to ecological damage.

Global expenditure on electronics reached a trillion dollars in 2012 - a 5 per cent increase on 2011 despite the deep recession. The United States alone can be credited, if that's the word, for more than a quarter of this growth, most of it via the demand for mobile devices - laptops, tablets, and smart phones. This love affair with high-tech goods shows no signs of cooling, and the very big problem is that as the market heats up so does the environment.¹

Over ten billion of these large and small computers use electricity, which means that 15 per cent of the world's residential energy is now dedicated to domestic digital technology. When you add to this the power required to make and distribute these toys, consumption from digital living translates into carbon emissions that rival those of aviation. According to the International Energy Agency, if usage continues to grow at this rate, the residential electricity needed to power digital culture will rise to 30 per cent of global demand by 2022, and 45 per cent by 2030.²

Furthermore, we now increasingly rely on data centres or server farms for 'cloud computing'. That metaphor - of a natural, ephemeral, beneficent weather phenomenon - belies the dirty reality of coal-fired energy that feeds most data centres around the world. Greenpeace estimates that if the computing cloud were a country, it would be the world's fifth-largest energy consumer.³

Older readers will recall telephone exchanges as places that stood out physically in the landscape, even though their interiors were mysterious. And Los Angeles, for example, remains marked by awesome and uninviting buildings that are run by the Department of Water and Power - keeping alive memories of Polanski's Chinatown. Though today's warehouse-sized computer systems are located in data centres that are more private than their venerable socialistic predecessors, they are of comparable dimensions; the demand for power and cooling from these server farms doubled between 2000 and 2005, and grew about 56 per cent between 2005 and 2010 - a period when industrial energy use was otherwise flat.

A further massive environmental and social problem arises from the ways in which the technology is produced (compounded by the frequency with which we replace devices). Clearly, our digital habits come at a price far greater than the bills we pay

Consider the notorious case (even the Daily Telegraph piled in) of Foxconn, one of Apple's key suppliers.⁴ With over a million employees across China, Foxconn is responsible for almost half the world's electronics manufacturing, but its treatment of employees has been widely condemned, particularly its use of a military-style discipline characterised by verbal and physical abuse (many line supervisors are ex-army officers from Taiwan). These conditions have contributed to suicides at some plants, and all-out rebellion and worker violence at others. The response from the company? It is assembling thousands of robots to take over from humans, even as Apple basks in dubious claims that it is taking better care of workers.⁵ And the legion of loyal Macsters (we're members) is not alone in benefitting from this exploitation.

Yet the broader problem isn't Apple or its suppliers. What matters more is the opaque global supply chain that allows scoundrels to abuse and poison electronics workers around the world, harm our environment and permit a complacent ignorance on the part of consumers.

This customer complicity is animated by the high-tech industry's insistence that what is good for it is good for us. Why else would it design fast fashions and short lifespans for digital devices? The industry loves the word 'upgrade', a term that induces a frenzy for marginally innovative hardware and software, based on built-in obsolescence, agile marketing and a lust for newness. As new gadgets grow ever more rapidly old, vast amounts of electronic waste enter municipal waste systems each year - between 20 and 50 million tons worldwide. Wealthy high-tech nations...