Clean up the cloud

First I deleted a travel blog I kept during an epic bicycle trip from Sweden down to Turkey and back. Then I deleted most of my pictures in the Picasa files on the net. Then I closed down two domains and their web sites, and cancelled two more cloud services. And deleted a lot of files in the two services I still use.  If I knew how I could delete my old facebook entries I would do that as well. I see no value whatsoever that they are kept more than a few weeks. Who looks at them anyway.

Why? Why do I do this. It is not primarily because I am afraid by NSA or other big brothers - well I am afraid of them but I think they will find out that I don't like them in any case. It is also not that I am afraid of getting used to "free services" which sooner or later will come at a price - which they clearly will.

There are two other reasons.
First. DON'T LITTER. We know we shouldn't spread all our rubbish in the place we live and we shouldn't throw it on the street, so why do we think it is fine to do it on the internet?
Second and most important DON'T WASTE. Even if many of these services are for free in the sense that you and I don't have to pay for them, they consume a lot of resources, and I mean A LOT

The Facebook server halls now built in Sweden will consume the same amount of energy as 16,000 private homes. In addition the halls need backup diesel generators; in case of a blackout, construction designs call for each building to have 14 backup diesel generators with a total output of 40 MW.  Read more on Facebook receives massive support for Swedish data centre

It is very hard to calculate the real energy use for the whole IT sector and the growing cloud, figures vary from a couple of percent up to ten. What is indisputable is that it is a sector with almost explosive growth and that its share of energy use is also growing very rapidly.

This might require some large-scale societal response. But as always we also have individual responsibility. Some chose to opt out altogether, others thinks that the internet is the best that happened the world since sliced bread. I tread the middle way of mild skepticism.
The least you and I can do is to empty the trash can
And we can sort out all those old photos and lousy videos on YouTube (I forgot them!). I am sure that half of the stuff in the cloud could be deleted NOW and we could close down a dozen coal powered plants in a blink.

The internet isn't really bringing us together...

Excellent analysis by Ramesh Srinivasan, in the Washington Post

"We’ve long heard that the Internet was supposed to unite people of different cultural and political persuasions. Yet, despite the explosion of online voices, social-media users rarely access opinions that differ from their own, and many social-media sites — with their bifurcated like/dislike, join/don’t join ethos — only perpetuate the sound-bite culture of older media.Not only are our Facebook friends similar to us (we usually connect through mutual friends and shared interests), but researcher Ethan Zuckerman has shown that the sites we visit reaffirm our political and cultural preconceptions. This homogenization reaches the very machinery of social media — its algorithms — which tailor search results or Facebook feeds according to what the systems “think” users will find most interesting."

I would venture that TV and Radio probably did a lot more to bring us together than the internet. This because of the more limited number of voices in those media. It is simply more unifying that everybody sees the same TV show and listen to the same radio. This was also a reason for why totalitarian ideologies as fascism and soviet style communism were keen users of radio and movies.  

In a way it is a similar experience that I found from moving from a city, to the country side and back again. In the city you can easily congregate with your own mind-fellows and age-fellows, even the same old gang you went to school with. Even if you live in an environment with a lot of information and opinions around you don't often confront these other opinions. When you live in the country side you interact with the few people that are there, regardless of age, interest or political or religious orientation. Perhaps this is exaggerated a bit, but that is what you do to make a tendency clear.

Facebook receives massive support for Swedish data centre

For the cost of 3 million SEK per work place has Luleå and the Swedish government convinced Facebook to build giant server halls in this Northern Swedish location (more in Swedish).

Server halls

Facebook says that reasons for establishment are good infrastructure, that they can use hydro power for the servers and that the low temperatures makes cooling cheaper as they can use outdoor air mostly.The halls will consume the same amount of energy as 16,000 private homes. While Sweden indeed has a lot of hydro power, it has also one of the most nuclear energy intense energy systems in the world. Expansion of hydroelectricity is very limited, so it is clearly an illusion that Facebook will use electricity from hydro power. The additional energy will come from other sources. In addition the halls need backup diesel generators; in case of a blackout, construction designs call for each building to have 14 backup diesel generators with a total output of 40 MW.

 "Facebook said it had looked at more than 100 sites in Europe, including 40 in Sweden. Lulea, a small town of 74,000 inhabitants, has Europe's cheapest electricity prices because of its abundant hydroelectric power resources. " writes The Guardian.

The combination of government welfare to Facebook and cheap energy clearly closed the deal...

Clearing land for a new Facebook server hall

The perception that new information technology is environmental friendly and will lead to a reduction in resource use is to a large extent a myth.

According to this report 623 TWh of electricity is used to drive the servers and the internet globally. That is an awful lot of electricity, just to give you an idea:
- The USA produced some 800 TWh from ALL its nuclear plants and the total electricity consumption of ther USA is just above 4,000 TWh. (EIA).
- The total electricity production in the UK was 382 TWh year 2004 (Wikipedia)
- The total energy consumption of Sweden was 398 TWh 2006 and the electricity consumption was 130 TWh (Energiindikatorer 2008).

From the post Green Internet - a pie in the sky 

Data centres to house the explosion of virtual information currently consume 1.5-2%of all global electricity; this is growing at a rate of 12%a year. (How dirty is your data? Greenpeace)