2020-08-19 - On Recycling, Sustainability, and Other Things ----------------------------------------------------------- I recently read various posts[0][1] by others on gopher about sustainability and reusing old computers (amongst other things) before running to buy new stuff. This reminded me that I've long wanted to write up my own thoughts on the matter. Introduction ------------ I use a laptop from 2008 that was thrown away by others as my main computer. More specifically, it's a Lenovo 3000 N200 with an Intel Celeron 550 2.00 GHz and 2 GB of RAM. I wish I could use an older computer, but society forces me to use something at least this new in order to communicate with the ugly "modern" web. Most people think I'm somewhat crazy for using such "old" equipment, but few stop to consider what they are saying. In essence, they want me to throw away a perfectly functioning machine that would have been considered a supercomputer mere decades ago, in order to buy a new device that has no truly new features other than flashier animations and the ability to display even more obscenely bloated websites. I have more than 20 laptops lying around at home, most of them still perfectly usable. All of them would have been thrown away if I hadn't saved them. Since I'm one of the only people I know who actually uses such computers, they will probably land in the trash eventually as well because I simply can't use 20 laptops at once. How has our society been allowed to drift so far that it allows this blatant waste right in front of our eyes? How can others not feel a great sadness when such wealth is thrown out without second thought? There is something deeply wrong with a society that allows this. In the following sections, I will elaborate on some of the specific issues with this thinking, first the non-environmental and then the environmental ones. The Great Illusion ------------------ One pernicious belief I often encounter, although it is usually somewhat hidden, is the belief that everyone in this world has access to the newest technology. Of course, nobody states this outright since everyone knows that there is the mythical "third world", in which the conditions are much worse than in the "first world", but most people give away their real views in the way they act. They ridicule old technology without realizing that many use such technology not because of moral reasons like me but because they cannot obtain anything more expensive. There are many people to whom even the laptop I use would be a luxury. Ridiculing such computers is an insult to those who cannot afford anything else and is emblematic of our spoiled society that always requires more, newer things, rather than being satisfied with what it has. I greatly respect Jorge Arellano Cid, the developer of the Dillo web browser, because he set out to "democratize information access" by allowing even those with fewer means to enjoy the benefits of the web, as explained in this snippet from an interview[2] he once gave: > What would be the main use for Dillo? > > Information access! > Dillo could open the doors of a new Internet experience to tens of > millions of people in the world. > It is important to know that the entry barriers to Internet are > _artificial_. They were created and sustained with a view to make > better business profits. Sadly, much information is now locked behind great walls of JavaScript and other abominations, causing many to lose this access they once had, or could have had. Those who are responsible for this are living in an illusion, refusing to acknowledge the harm they inflict on others with their misguided attempts to improve things. Do these people not understand how much can be achieved with even the most modest machines by modern standards? A computer opens up an entire world of information and creativity never before seen by mankind. A computer allows one to express creativity in ways never imagined before. With the help of computers ridiculed as trash by our society, someone with no wealth can access the vast troves of knowledge in the world and learn skills they never could have learned otherwise. They can even play around with the computer itself and learn to program it, unleashing a power too great to describe without experiencing it. But no, let's prevent all this. Let's stop the masses from experiencing enlightenment. Let's erect artificial barriers to knowledge and creativity in order to add more flashy buttons and worthless animations to websites and the other useless programs created by people who subscribe to this sort of thinking. That is clearly the way forward. The Environment and Recycling ----------------------------- So far, I've only talked about the non-environmental impacts of our wasteful culture, but there are very real effects on the environment as well. I don't want to repeat the countless articles and documentaries that have covered the harm our obsession with new technology has caused, especially in poorer countries. Most people know about these problems, at least to some extent, but they seem to believe that recycling and proper waste disposal can fix them. Alas, this is not so. According to iFixit, significant amounts of material, including many valuable rare earth metals, cannot be recovered through recycling[3][4]. Electronics cannot be truly recycled. Period. I don't think many people fully understand what this means. Eventually, all our resources will be used up, and then there won't be any fun games left to play. Before that happens, though, we will probably have destroyed the world in other ways already anyways. What really bothers me as well is when some people dare to claim that it's better to use newer devices because they are more power-efficient. Anyone claiming this is either malicious or entirely delusional. The majority of energy a laptop uses is consumed during the manufacturing process, not during actual use[5]. The recycling that can be done requires a lot of energy as well, further adding to the waste. When you top that off with the fact that it's *impossible* to properly recycle most devices, it is clearly ludicrous to argue for newer devices on the basis of power efficiency. This should be apparent to most people, but I think it is important for them to realize the gravity of the situation. If we keep going on like this, there *will* be a collapse at some point, and we will not be prepared for it. Hardware and Software --------------------- What makes this whole issue so difficult to solve is that sanity is being attacked on both the hardware and software side. On the one hand, software is becoming larger and more bloated constantly, but on the other hand, computers are also being produced with less and less quality in mind. Most of my slightly older laptops have replaceable CPUs, RAM, and generally are easier to open, compared to the abominations that call themselves "modern". In our quest to make everything smaller and more portable, we have lost sight of the much more important goal of sustainability. When these modern machines break, nothing can be done other than throwing everything away. It's almost as if the hardware and software industries are working together. Hardware is produced in such a fashion that it will stop working after just a few years, and those machines that do continue to work are made obsolete by the relentless bloating of software. See [6] and [7] for two articles on these two sides of the coin. I've already mentioned the web, which is one the greatest causes of bloat nowadays (see e.g. "The Website Obesity Crisis"[8]). Desktop software, however, is not exempt from this. Setting aside Electron apps, which I cannot call desktop software with a straight face, even normal programs like LibreOffice are turning into absolute nightmares. LibreOffice used to be a relatively nice word processor, but I am now astounded everytime I open it because of how heavyweight it's gotten. I don't use LibreOffice anymore unless I need to open documents created by others, but it used to be the clear recommendation when someone needed a word processor. Now, it barely runs on most of my computers and even crashes frequently on the much more modern computers of my relatives. Why do the developers of software always feel the desire to add features until the program collapses under its own weight? In this case, I would assume it had a lot to do with copying everything that Microsoft Word did without considering what is really needed for a word processor. The sad part is that LibreOffice now cannot be used anymore on many perfectly functioning computers even by the masses of people who only need the features that were already available years ago. See [9] for a good article on the subject, which is still very accurate despite its age. This may not be malicious, the developers probably *think* they're doing good (although I can't say that for sure when I look at developers for corporations like M$, whose most useful product has been Comic Sans), but they lack the critical thinking that would lead them to reconsider their actions. In the end, this just supports my belief that the computer industry consists of a bunch of children playing with flashing toys without regard for the consequences. Sacrifice --------- Now the question many may be asking is "what can be done to solve these problems?" This is where the industry really makes me mad. Wherever you go, there are advertisements for various "green" products that will save the planet (marketing-speak for "we don't care about the planet at all because we're a soulless corporation, but we want to trick people into buying our product"). This is simply a cover-up. Society is living in a utopian dream that proclaims we will solve all our problems with technology. I see this thinking everywhere, including university - there especially, everyone is hyped about every new technology that comes out, and everyone seems to think developing technology will lead to the ultimate solution. This is typical of our lazy society - technology will solve all our problems, so we don't have to do anything. But this cannot work. In order to actually change anything, society has to be changed. Society must leave these utopian thoughts behind and step back to reconsider whether throwing more technology at problems caused by technology will solve these problems. The most important thing is that this will not work without sacrifices. Maybe people will have to keep using older computers and perhaps older monitors that aren't 4k (I've never even used any monitor with such a high resolution, so I don't know what the problem is). Maybe people will have to replace their fancy, animated GUI widgets with simpler versions that reserve the processing power for more useful tasks. So what? Would you prefer to destroy the planet just so you can satisfy your hunger for shiny technology? Using these older devices is barely a sacrifice (at least if you run software on them that was created by people with functioning brains), but people will have to realize that they need to change something *themselves* if they want to have any real impact. Conclusion ---------- Before ending this post, I want to make it clear that I don't oppose research into new technology, especially at universities. I just think that we still need to vastly reduce our consumption in order to have any chance at saving the planet. The greenest computers are the ones that have already been produced (excluding *very* old ones for which the power consumption really does overshadow the other environmental impacts), so we should focus our energy on making those work longer. I hope you haven't forgotton the section "The Great Illusion" after I wrote about the environmental impacts for so long. The issues I talked about there are just as important as the environmental ones and often seem to be overlooked because most people simply have no idea what the rest of the world really looks like. Note that this post is mainly about computers, but my thoughts on having to make sacrifices apply just as much to many other areas of life, for instance having to trade the convenience of plastic for slightly impractical but more sustainable alternatives. Maybe I'll write a post on that someday, but computers are my main focus. Lastly, these are just a bunch of thoughts I've written up, so they may not be entirely coherent in all places. Let me know if you have any feedback or differing opinions. - lumidify [0] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/discussions-toward-radically-sustainable-computing.txt [1] gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2019-01-17_recycling_and_reusing.txt [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220512043530/https://www.dillo.org/interview.html [3] https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/E-waste [4] https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Recycling [5] https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Manufacturing [6] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/lithium-blues.txt [7] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/rusty/Post06-against-complexity [8] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm [9] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf