Inspired by Low Tech Magazine, when I decided I needed a website to share degrowth projects, I took a deep dive into what the internet actually is. While I had some inkling that the internet was a problematic contributor to carbon emissions, I didn’t realise just how deep the issue goes, and how, once again, a culture of capitalist growth is the underlying problem. Most surprisingly, almost every problem I encountered paralleled those I study in architecture. While I will try to constrain the scope of this article, I will use this introduction to the designfordegrowth.org website as an introduction into the problematics of contemporary internet culture. More importantly I see this website as a speculation on the possibilities of a better internet. This article will first outline some of the issues with the current internet paradigm, then outline how this website was created.

Asynchronic

Because computer code is biased away from continuous time, so too are the programs built on it, and the human behaviours those programs encourage. Everything that we do in the digital realm both benefits and suffers from its occurrence outside time. —Douglas Rushkoff.¹

This quote by Rushkoff, a media theorist, is no more evident than contemporary internet, which remains always available throughout time and space: on a computer, a phone, a tablet, a television, our fridge, and from anyplace in the world. Culturally we expect 100% up time for all our connected devices, and all our data—from documents and photos to music and video streaming.² All this made possible by the ‘cloud’, which as poet Peter Porter wrote on real clouds, “prefer a shifting Jamesian syntax”.³ Yet unlike real clouds, the virtual cloud is seemingly indifferent to the passing of time, seasons, or day and night.

Lewis Mumford has famously asserted that “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”⁴ As Mumford explains:

The regular striking of the bells brought a new regularity into the life of the workman and the merchant. The bells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence. Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions. —Lewis Mumford.⁴

While at first it may seem that the asynchronous nature of computers takes us away from the regularity of divisible time, the opposite is true. The computer, and by extension the internet, dissolves our relationship with the natural world completely. Art critique Jonathan Crary, in his essay on the internet, explains:

The internet complex has become inseparable from the immense, incalculable scope of 24/7 capitalism and its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, transport, and construction, on a global scale. —Joathan Crary.⁵

The internet has made it possible for our time to be completely dedicated to capitalism: we are expected to, and expect to, work and consume during all waking hours. This is illustrated profoundly by ethnographer Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, whose five year study in data centres demonstrated the lengths taken to maintain 100% uptime, at the cost of staggering energy consumption and human stress. As Monserrate discovers, the demand for 100% uptime means that overbuilding redundancy into the system is energetically costly. While over specified primary cooling is one of the biggest energy uses of data centres, ensuring overheating doesn’t shutdown a server, each system also has multiple levels of backup: portable AC units, backup diesel generators, backup servers, data backups, and more. All of this with its own power and embodied energy cost.²

Meanwhile, in an attempt to breakaway from this culture of 24/7 capitalism, Kris De Decker’s solar powered website Low Tech Magazine allows downtime when the webserver’s battery is drained. In this manner his website somewhat reconnects with seasonality and daylight hours through a 50W Photo Voltaic panel. Utilising this diurnal cycle is in line with the degrowth concept which asks how much is enough? Do we actually need 24/7 access to all of the internet? Would we in fact be better without full time access?

Power Usage and Embodied Energy

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fibre optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. —Steven Gonzalez Monserrate.⁶

Like Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Blur, ‘the Cloud’ can seem like an immersive but unreachable, floating entity made of ‘white-noise. Yet, underneath, if we dig a little, there is a very material scaffolding of infrastructure making it all happen. The internet, which appears as a step towards a dematerialised economy, is, without a doubt, a material beast that consumes vast quantities of resources. In fact, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is expected to account for 20% of global electricity demand by 2030⁷, with data centres alone already consuming approximately 2% of global electricity.⁸ While cloud computing is getting more efficient, as with most innovation, the Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect, means gains in efficiency lead to reduced cost, greater uptake, and more overall consumption.⁹

Moreover, the rapid uptake of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will significantly increase the energy consumption of ICT. In his recent report, data scientist Alex de Vries has shown that, if Google were to process their 9 billion daily searches with AI similar to ChatGPT, they would need up to 500,000 servers with an annual electricity consumption of 29.2 TWh. In this worst case scenario, which assumes full-scale adoption, Google’s AI alone would use more electricity than Ireland. While this may seem impossible, NVIDIA, which is on a fast track to becoming the worlds highest valued company, will be supplying 1.5 million AI server units this year, which could utilise up to 85–134 TWh annually, without including cooling demand.¹⁰ As with ICT in general, while we can expect increases in energy efficiency, the rebound effect means that we can expect energy consumption to stay stable, or increase. This is the nature of a growth economy.¹¹

Moreover, creeping standards and shifting baselines, which form a fundamental part of the rebound effect, mean efficiency gains are often outweighed by greater uptake. This phenomenon is summarised by social scientist Elizabeth Shove:

Calculations of efficiency are always founded on some specification of equivalent service and it is through this that they perpetuate and stabilise contemporary, but often recently established, ideas, for instance about the meaning of comfort… Methods of defining and improving efficiency help hold these meanings in place, and in so doing they become part of the dynamic they deny. —Elizabeth Shove ¹²

To state this plainly with an example, while the 5G network is more efficient than 4G, faster speeds and increased data allowance mean greater overall consumption and more widespread use, and thus, an increase in overall energy use.¹³ Moreover, while video streaming is shifting to small and efficient devices such as phones and tablets, and away from large energy intensive televisions, the ease of connection and perpetual availability of internet via the 5G network has led to a huge increase in consumption.¹⁴ Once again this is the rebound effect at work. Moreover, this is capitalism at work—the constant extraction of natural capital, competitively accumulated, intensified, commodified, and reinvested into the marketplace via a surplus. Innovation in a capitalist market place doesn’t lead to greater overall efficiency, just intensified production and consumption.

This is no more evident than within ICT devices themselves. While so far we’ve discussed energy consumption, the embodied energy of devices is of far greater significance—a point often obfuscated by manufactures—most likely due to designed obsolescence and turnover being an important part of business models. For instance, one lifecycle analysis from 2017 of Apple iPhone’s clearly showed that every model’s environmental impact was significantly skewed towards manufacturing rather than use.¹⁵ This is also true of laptops, as one recent analysis of a Framework laptop has shown.¹⁶

While finding literature on embodied energy and lifecycle assessments of ICT devices is difficult, it is clear that the manufacturing phase, and in particular the electronic components and semiconductors, is hugely problematic from an environmental standpoint. Now, extrapolating these trends to the ‘cloud’, and the rapidly expanding capacity of CPU and GPU processing for AI, we start to see just how big the impact may really be. The constant need for more processing power undeniably means any efficiency gains are lost.

Static vs Dynamic

From a website point of view, the shifting baseline of what constitutes good content pushes the requirement for processing power and storage ever higher. From high resolution video to high resolution images, the content we consume is constantly pushing the limits of data storage and processing power. Without a doubt we are living in the ‘Society of the Spectacle’, which, “understood in its totality, is simultaneously the result and the project of the existing mode of production”.¹⁷ As with Debord’s assertion in the 1970’s, the internet has become the full embodiment of this society. The processing demands of the cloud aren’t simply there to feed us content, but to extract data and close the loop on the production consumption cycle. Enter the dynamic website.

A dynamic website (Figure 2) is as the name suggests, dynamic, and is by far the most popular style of website. What a dynamic website does is procure content for every page and for every viewer—each webpage is built by the host server every time you visit. What this allows for is first, to extract user data and customise content for each viewer. Practically, this is how targeted advertising is managed. More subtly, however, it is how your attention is held. For instance, streaming services, such as Netflix, Disney+, or Spotify, use dynamic websites to deliver specific content to you and keeping you ‘binging’, and ultimately, subscribed. While this seems useful, the real purpose is addiction and consumption.

From an energy standpoint, a dynamic website is disastrous. Each time you visit a page the webserver queries the database and builds the page by combining the user data, page content, and dynamic content such as advertisements. Therefore, every time you visit a page the webserver needs to ramp up energy use to process data, while simultaneously creating additional heatload to be managed. Currently, the majority of websites are dynamic, and the average website produces 1.76g of CO2 per view.¹⁸ From an energy standpoint, simple is better. One way to keep a website simple is to use a static website (Figure 3), which is generated offline and uploaded to a webserver as a static html page. This means a page is only processed when a change is made by the website administrator and uploaded to the server.

Moreover, keeping content simple is the best way to keep a site low energy, particularly when it comes to images and video content. Website sizes are exponentially growing, generally because of image file sizes and dynamic advertising material.¹⁹ To keep a website low energy it is essential to prioritise text, a relatively efficient data format, over images; compress images to the smallest file size possible, or use SVG format; limit and minify cascading style sheets (CSS); utilise DNS caching; use system fonts instead of specifying them; forgoing website analytics and advertising; and using a green or self hosted webserver.²⁰

Program or be Programmed

Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the software, or risk becoming the software. —Douglas Rushkoff.²¹

As with Rushkoff’s assertion, taking the web into our own hands, and out of the tech billionaire’s, gives back some semblance of control—or at the very least, some comprehension. While I’m under no illusion that a single website can have any impact, this website is more of a contribution towards an internet of degrowth—a case study of what the internet could be. The internet, however, is just one example—in a future article I will write about architectural software, visualisation and documentation standards, and business overheads. If nothing else, this project has equipped me with a greater understanding of the internet, how much I’ve taken it for granted, and what’s at stake with how we use it.

The logic of capitalism will always lead to the reproduction and growth of capital, meaning that, no matter how much efficiency is gained, or what sustainability goals are set out, corporate wealth accumulation will be the priority. The shifting baseline of standards on our ICT devices, such as video resolution (SD, HD, 4k, 8k, Super Resolution…), is another round of devices to be purchased, data plans to be upgraded, networks to be rebuilt. In reality, however, it is simply a way to generate more wealth and super compensate for efficiency gains without actually having a meaningful impact on our quality of life. Or, as Crary argues, it may even have a detrimental impact.⁵

So finally, how has all this influenced the designfordegrowth.org site? First off, I would argue that I am, or am attempting to be a neo-luddite. That is to say, unlike the popular but incorrect definition of a Luddite, I am reasonably competent with technology, but at the same time a sceptic. Social scientist Jathan Sadowski writes that being a luddite today is to “treat technology as a political and economic phenomenon that deserves to be critically scrutinised and democratically governed, rather than a grab bag of neat apps and gadgets”.²² So, while I acknowledge the inescapable role technology plays in our lives everyday, I don’t want to simply take it for granted. Moreover, I don’t want to let it ‘program’ my life.

Given this, from the start, I set out to build a materially present website, self-hosted and managed by me. Sitting at my desk, the incessant blinking of the Network Interface Controller (NIC) on the wall beside me is a reminder that the website is a physical entity consuming power. If the sun is not out, I am paying an energy bill. If it overheats, it will shutdown and be my problem.

While the process of creating a webserver was not as complicated as I first imagined, it did take some tenacity due to my low knowledge base. Moreover, most tutorials over complicate the process in an attempt to incorporate every unnecessary standard available. The website is hosted on a 1.5GHz quad core Raspberry Pi Model 4B with 2GB ram using a Micro SD card for storage–essentially a smartphone without a screen or camera. Moreover, the server is running Pi-lite, which has no graphical user interface (GUI) using a command line only, and is thus extremely resource efficient. An alternative to the Pi would be a refurbished secondhand computer to reduce embodied energy. I chose a Pi for it’s low power use and accessibility.

As the target of this site is primarily local, there is no reason to run the web server throughout the night. Because our home has a grid connected solar system without batteries, the only way to make this site somewhat solar powered is to simply turn off the server during the night. This of course isn’t entirely practical for all users, so some overlap with nighttime hours will occur. The website is statically generated, has no analytics, limiting CSS, no logos, and uses a font family rather than a specific font.

While the main purpose of this site is to share projects that relate to degrowth, a secondary purpose is to experiment with architectural representation and aesthetics. As degrowth scholar Samuel Alexander has written on, aesthetic adoption of degrowth is a fundamental problem to be worked on, more so than the technical side.²³ Architecture, for its part, has its own set of neoliberal aesthetics and standards—a true embodiment of Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’. As discussed earlier, reducing file size is paramount to reducing carbon emissions from a website, therefore, experimenting with representation standards will be vital to creating a useful but low power server.

Resources and Equipment

Finally, for those of you who want to try something like this, or want to hack the site and tell me why I’m wrong, here are some specifics:

Hardware

• 1.5GHz quad core Raspberry Pi 4 model B, 2GB ram, a PiJuice HAT as an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), and a 32Gb micro SD card (way over capacity but I already had it).
• Existing ASUS consumer grade router with port forwarding turned on.
• A fixed IP address via a business internet account.

Software

• NGINX webserver, generally using the same settings as Low Tech Magazine, found here .
• HUGO static website generator.
• A modified version of the smol HUGO theme (if the site changes much from this theme I will upload it to Github).

Other useful references

• Deploying a simple static website using Nginx and Hugo
• Low Tech Magazine articles: How to Build a Low-tech Website? and Rebuilding a Solar Powered Website.