Page 115 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

102 V. MOSCO

Internet is from the sensors embedded in the billions of connected devices
and from the communication systems that link people and things through
cellular and other wireless networks. A world of ubiquitous, always-on
connected devices is enough to make energy executives salivate, especially
the lobbying arm of the coal industry which views the Next Internet as an
opportunity to build on what a study for the US National Academy of
Sciences calls “the renaissance of coal” (Steckel et al. 2015). As a report
sponsored by the coal industry concluded, “The inherent nature of the
mobile Internet, a key feature of the emergent Cloud architecture, requires
far more energy than do wired networks…. Trends now promise faster, not
slower, growth in ICT energy use” (Mills 2013). When the environmental
impacts of Next Internet systems are considered alongside their massive
stimulation of consumption, the implications for climate change are
staggering.
Privacy and security concerns rise exponentially in the Next Internet
because greater connectivity increases opportunities for technical break-
downs and criminal hacking. Indeed one tech journalist referred to the
Internet of Things as “the greatest mass surveillance infrastructure ever”
(Powles 2015). By the standards anticipated in a digital world where the
Internet of Things is fully developed, today’s Internet is far from creating a
connected world. About 40% of the world’s population now uses the
Internet at least once a year, and, as one might expect, access is concen-
trated in the developed world and in urban centres (Gagliordi 2015). With
only 1% connectivity among objects, we are far from the vision of ubiq-
uitous computing. But even at this relatively low level, technical problems
and criminal hacking plague the system. On one day alone in 2015, the
entire US fleet of United Airlines planes was grounded, the New York
Stock Exchange shut down for several hours and the Wall Street Journal’s
computers simply stopped operating. All of these were explained as the
result of technical ‘glitches’. Just as this calamity hit the news stream, the
US government reported that hackers had stolen the personnel records of
22.1 million federal employees, contractors, and their families and friends
who provided information for background checks. The haul also included
over one million sets of fingerprints (Nakashima 2015). In the largest
reported hack of all, in December 2016, Yahoo reported that hackers had
made off with the records of one billion people in 2013 and were selling
the data on the Dark Web, the corner of the Internet inhabited by crim-
inals, spies and those seeking stolen or illegal goods (Goel and Perlroth
2016).