Is the internet bad for the environment?
Transcript:
I guess, like all things it's really comes down to the question of what do you mean about the environment? Hello world. I'm Olu. This is about social justice and ethics and tech. And this channel is inspired by,earth day, which is today? 26th of March at eight 30. It's gone past now, but yeah, I thought I'd talk about environment for once.
Is the internet bad for the environment. And I'll argue that few things have like unerringly good impact on the environment. Trees. For example, if you plant them and leave them alone, they are obviously great carbon sinks. So they make oxygen and all this good stuff. If you cut them down and or use them things that are not good for the environment, quotation marks, then again, they aren't that great saying without algae in the sea like, produces most of earth's oxygen.?
But if it's like unbalanced algae, or it goes in the wrong way, so then it can kill loads of Marine life. Nothing's just like good for the environment on its own, I guess. if i'm being charitable though, there's three main arguments that mean that you know, that it's not likely uniquely bad for the environment.
The first one is that it's worse now. than Other equivalent things. The second is that the harm is mitigatable. So that means that you can avoid it. And the final one is that this way of the harming the environment, probably shouldn't exist at all. On the point that there are things that are less harmful. I'm not sure that's true.
Like, of course there's mass, there's mass media, like printing presses and. telephones and telegrams, but, um, you could argue the printing press has had bad effects on the printing press and telephone. How about effects on planet as well? Also depends on what you're doing on the internet. Like something like sending an SMS message.
Aurora SMS was, I always say is like, not going to be as harmful as sending like huge videos over the internet as I'm doing, but, um, yeah. There's like, or even big things like programs, but yeah, like there's different levels. Initialization, hasn't been a good process for the planet, but that doesn't mean that it's internet to mass media or internet to the internet itself.
And therefore all of it is bad. Like even initialization itself though, it's add many bad effects has had lots of good wants to, obviously this nationalization has been taught out of capitalism and centralization. So there's lots of things that we could uncouple by making tech smaller and. That's where I would split it up, make it smaller, streamline it, make things better for people by making tech less centralized someones that could have more medician because you know, not monopoly.
So because they control the entire market, they'd have to compete on other factors. So there would be people competing on the fact that they're more environmentally friendly, at least in that kind of market. The second point where we're the heart mitigatable is much more interesting to me. Like, should we always use as little resources as humanly possible?
That was my sentence, but yeah, you get why me? There's non-school from UBC. I'm going to link down in the description box and maybe up in the upstairs if I can get it to work. But, um, yeah, like, um, they, um, they compare the carbon outputs different. Internet thing, basically. So like an email or using a Kindle, but I caught using a paper book.
They can clean that make using the paper book as worse because it producing it. But I don't think that's quite a legalistic view because yes. Yeah. Because, because of the electricity that you use to palliate the next time you have to go and say to the, if you're using an Amazon Kindle, it's actually, you have to look into the, the company you're buying it from and the way that the practices that we use to make begin door.
Minerals, the stuff that goes into it and yeah, all the production kind of, not sure it's easy to walk out as they're making out, but CIT maybe only the main consideration that they care about. I guess almost all the question of, is it a paper book? Whatever. My dear friend Kendall is a good question in general, because it depends on so many factors.
Like, did you get second hand? Do you find it on the street? Did you, did you, I don't know. There's so many different questions, like hop when you think. And I, for example, and given him that in the article is that we could say , if we stopped sending thank you emails. And I think that's really funny because it's just illustrative of the kind of weird individualistic way we've sided tackling climate change, I think, and thinking about things, right?
Like, like as things, individual people doing the individual houses, rather than things that systems do and systems of graded system to people, of course, but still systems. I'm going to surprise everyone say we should just not send emails. Well, the, I don't think that stopping random activities is the best way to combat climate change, because if it's only a, self-control it stopping you from doing whatever climate misdeed, then it's not going to be sustainable, or it's not going to be the best way to do it because eventually you're to run down or somebody else will be doing so we shouldn't, we shouldn't focus on these individually.
I guess he wanted to press, when I think he's at your company or your co-op right. Your organization, that'd be one thing. And maybe that would make a change and we could save all the CO2 that's needed to for that change. But yeah, I definitely think that we need to think about these things on a systems level and to not make it.
So people feel like they have to cut themselves off the grid to continue fighting for them on it, which brings me to my final point. Should the internet exist at all? If it's harming, then if it's home. As I related to you throughout, I think it's weird to think in this way. And that humans like shouldn't exist because we had told me the lineup, like, I think there are many, many, many, many, many things we could do to make slightly better or to reorganize ourselves in a way that won't hold and hand as much or at all.
Well, that's always, that's always an illusion. Yeah. That's the whole point of this video, really. Like, there's always going to be like externalities and repercussions for things we do, but to make them sustainable and to make it so that. Making it making the hunt unlivable of others is another issue. I think there's always like a weapon like antinatalism, which is like, when you think we shouldn't give birth or eco fascism is the old term for this kind of line of thinking where we think that, oh, you know, humans should just not exist because we're just drawing upon it.
And I know it sucks. We have animals there and we should do it all again. Like how other species too. But I think that is. It's not as clear cut as just stopped doing everything that makes humans human. We have to think about ways to make our, our society standard and better. And like, maybe we will end up cutting out a lot of things, but it doesn't mean we should cut out all stops to put it another way.
If I cannot fight for humans, living enriching, defendable lives on this planet, then what's the point of fighting for things at all. What do you think? Do you mean internet destroying the planet or man, like share all that stuff. And let me know what you think. Belay. Thanks for watching goodbye world.