Digital Global Warming

Some relevant articles:

https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/23/commentary/digital-global-warming.html

https://www.noemamag.com/reducing-the-waste-from-our-digital-lives/

Digital Global Warming

Sekhar Sarukkai and Sundar Sarukkai

The 50th Earth Day has just passed but it was special in that it occurred in the midst of the Corona pandemic. While this pandemic has to be urgently dealt with, the world is already immersed in a more long-standing crisis of global warming. It is interesting to see many commentators who have explicitly tied these two together in a larger narrative of how unthought exploitation of nature has major consequences for human communities. However, there is another lurking crisis waiting to happen in a replay of the earlier climate crisis. This crisis is catalysed by our addiction and immersion into the digital world, a phenomenon which we see as being quite similar to global warming. We refer to this phenomenon as Digital Global Warming.

This term reflects a state of living in an uncontrolled smog of digital waste, digital data and exhaust generated by technologies of today. Just as the byproducts of industrialized societies, like the exhaust from cars, contributed to global climate warming, the byproducts of using billions of digital devices and applications are ushering us into the era of digital global warming.

The cause and effect of the invisible digital byproduct that accompanies every digital transaction can be understood through the framework of waste. There are many types of byproducts ranging from human sewage, automobile exhaust and invisible chemicals that have seeped into the air and earth that constitute waste. Human civilization could well be a chronology of how we produce, and then manage, waste. But waste is not merely dirty or something to be discarded; it ultimately defines the character of our societies. For instance, the existence of physical waste produces ideas of cultural waste that make societies reject communities within themselves. From early attempts at managing human sewage, to managing air and water pollution today, the degree of social progress is defined by the response to waste. Although hidden and invisible, waste can affect us globally in terrible ways: it causes medical epidemics, poisons the air and makes water undrinkable, and contributes to physical and mental disorders. One can even argue that naturally occuring coronavirus strains are the result of poor handling of waste in wet markets (as in COVID19) and other human-animal interaction points (such as in H1N1 & swine flu).

Culture of Waste And Wasteful Cultures

One’s waste is another’s fortune as the mafia in Italy or Mumbai can testify. By controlling the entire waste cycle and dumps, the Cammaro mafia in Naples makes an annual turnover of more than 6B$ (this is estimated at 2B$ for Mumbai). Waste itself leads to new cultural forms that could be called as cultures of waste.

In addition to carelessly strewn digital waste across the visible web, the accumulation and feeding of digital discards into data dumpsters (that we call “dampsters”) forms the underbelly of the Internet accessible via the dark web. By some estimates, this dark web content not indexed by search engines such as Google, but accessible to the public, is estimated to be 4 times larger than the visible web - literally forming the largest virtual landfill imaginable. Websites like Pastebin, and thousands of dark web dampsters in this vast dark side of the web creates an environment for the digital mafia to control and trade on sensitive digital information such as financial records, pornography, stolen credentials, credit cards, private information of individuals such as sexual or political orientation, digital DNA signatures, and plenty of other artifacts that can be monetized or misused. This dampster is populated by cyberattacks that breach data from the visible (or deep) web, or from the collection of callously strewn litter and data dumped by hackers and malware into dampsters. Unlike the physical world where garbage is removed from one location to another, in the digital world data is not moved but repeatedly copied, traded or resold, and stored indefinitely outside normal jurisdictional controls. Hence, once someone taps into your digital discard there is no stopping its exponential proliferation.

Unlike the cultures of waste - which are special cultural ways of dealing with waste - certain cultures create excess waste as a product of their ways of living. Many rich countries are prime examples of cultures that promote excessive waste. As an example, the US produces more than 250 million tons of garbage a year, which works out to greater than 1,500 pounds of garbage per year per person. Excess digital waste, on the other hand, is a global problem - leaving behind or hoarding digital data is cheap (and many times free for the individual) and encourages a wasteful culture. A measure of the amount, and growth, of digital footprint per-capita (much like carbon footprint) is a good indicator of digital waste produced by each country.

Social media sites lead the way in encouraging a wasteful culture since it suits their business model. Built upon practices that foster addiction which hook users into an endless stream of music, video, and games, it results in keeping individuals within their platform that delivers these services to their users while continuously capturing exhaust from their activities to influence user behavior which in turn fuels their businesses, and the non-strategic and un-monetizable discards fed to the highest bidder.

Digital Global Warming and the Personal

Not all waste that leads to digital global warming can be traced back to uncontrolled exhaust alone. The digital world is full of litter voluntarily strewn around by users without regard to the cost of the waste created and deposited for eternity. A recent example is contact tracing applications developed by various governments and technology companies to identify people who may have been exposed to individuals with Covid19. They are critical in addressing the pandemic but simultaneously expose the perils of sharing personal data that if left open can be used for unintended purposes by third parties. This accumulated stream of data is a gold mine for Artificial Intelligence technologies that could be used to train new models without our consent to uncover secrets hidden in our data. As an example, researchers at MIT in 2019 used public Youtube videos to train a neural network model that correlates vocal features to facial features in these public videos. When the system is fed a new sound sample, it can predict how the person speaking is likely to look like. Needless to say, several YouTubers in the database were not pleased with their unexpected starring role in the demo videos.

Technology, through personalized digital applications, has become so indispensable to our digital-first daily lives that many already find it impossible to navigate their daily existence without it. With the ubiquitous presence of sensors and technologies that can cheaply store and analyze oceans of data residue in the Cloud, even our physical actions are accounted digitally. For example, Facebook has been collecting “off Facebook activities” which are activities an individual has performed anywhere outside of Facebook. This allows Facebook to create a profile of every single individual - whether or not they have a Facebook account.

Even bio markers, long considered the holy grail of identifying what is uniquely personal about individuals, are now free radicals in the digital smog. The impact of the culture of digital waste has not left behind the realm of historically guarded mental states and our unvocalized thoughts either with the emerging big tech around “psychographic” profiles and the emotion analytics market. The cost that this unmitigated collection of digital intelligence can have on the larger society can be seen by analyzing trends such as social credit scores, deep fakes, and emerging embedded bio-sensor technologies. Today, this intermingled digital stream of personal data with varying degrees of sensitivity is handled much like how sewage was handled in early civilizations: with no effective sorting, channelling and disposal of the vast amounts of waste that accumulate to the detriment of the society.

Digital Global Warming and the Regional

July 8, 1943 marked an important day for the citizens of Los Angeles waking up to a circus like atmosphere when a surprise attack of a mysterious thick grey fog descended on LA streets. It left kids with teary eyes, a confused population, and confounded speechless politicians. There was rampant speculation on the cause with many believing that it was a chemical attack by the Japanese! It took another nine years and plenty of face mask sales and dead-end theories about the cause of this recurring ‘smog’ before this phenomenon was tied back to automobile exhaust by Caltech professor Arie Haagen-Smit in 1952. In hindsight this connection should have been obvious - afterall Los Angeles was the largest car market at that time.

Smog, while not anticipated, heralded the success of Ford’s mass production of automobiles more than 50 years after its founding. The very instrument that enabled people to conquer distance, to stay connected with friends and family, shop, travel and find new opportunities of earning a livelihood was also a silent killer that contributed to localized smog and, over time, global warming.

It took another 20 years for any serious regulations in the US to help mitigate a catastrophic health crisis in the making. While regulations have reduced smog in LA significantly over the last four decades, the impact of the exhaust from automobiles is in stark view even today in large cities in China, India and in many other countries around the world where regulation continues to take a back seat to economic progress and convenience.

What happened with cars earlier is now happening with the new devices and applications that have overrun the world. Just like the gasoline engine converts gasoline into physical motion, these digital technologies are the engines that convert the telemetry of our every move into economic gain. Not only are these devices more widely used than cars and vehicles (for example, the number of cell phones in use in the world is expected to cross 5 billion by this year) but they also create a flood of uncontrolled digital exhaust. There are over 2 billion laptops in use today, more than 400 million CCTV cameras watching our communities, 400 million iPads, 200 million voice activated devices like Alex and Google Home, 100s of millions of smart TVs, 50 million smart homes, and much more. Today, in aggregate, the number of digital devices in our lives significantly outnumbers the population of this Earth, not counting the multiple (at least ten on an average) applications per device.

Each one of these devices and applications generates a continuous stream of data that can be used for collective or aggregate analytics that can shape cultures and regions. We have seen this have a profound impact on social behavior such as in Xinjang province in western China, or in the vast surveillance camera network in Chicago, or use of digital DNA databases to tackle unsolved crimes. All of which is possible only with a collection of sensitive data easily accessible in the Cloud.

Digital Global Warming and the Global

Digital technology is ubiquitous and is available in the richest and poorest areas across the world. Thus, it is impossible today to merely talk of technology in the digitalized West and ignore the rest of the world. China and India are already two leading users of mobile technologies and are also the fastest growing economies of the world. There are major digital payment and other economic revolutions in Africa. By bringing in these societies into the consciousness of the technological world, we can map the global effects of the impending digital global warming.

With increased global use of digital services comes increased opportunity for cross-border intelligence gathering from dampsters. State sponsored espionage is not necessarily motivated by financial gains but by the need to glean persistent strategic advantage. In May 2019, a German researcher, Adrian Zenz, doggedly dove into multiple dampsters to find construction RFPs, geo-spatial maps, and other data in obscure corners of the Chinese internet that revealed a security buildup in China’s remote Xinjiang region pointing to mass detention and policing of Turkic muslims. This is just one example of the vast treasure trove of discarded data that third parties can mine from these dampsters.

A combination of these data dumps in conjunction with advances in AI has proven to be a deadly concoction for cross-border offense. In the 2016 US election, exhaust from Facebook users that took the form of a user’s profile, a user’s friend network, and other inferred metadata about a user’s preference (by some accounts Facebook has more than 29000 data points for each user) and interests was leveraged by Russia to create a divide among the US population. A similar story repeated itself in countries around the world and is expected to be the new norm in democratic elections going forward.

Additionally, countries have become increasingly aware of the sensitivities of allowing their citizens to share their data with foreign companies. For example, US intelligence issued a warning to citizens of the US about the use of TikTok, a popular social app hosted and developed in part by the Chinese government due to evidence of spying. India took it a step further and banned the TikTok app temporarily. Social media apps are not the only means for regimes to seed surveillance technology across the globe. CCTV manufacturers from China, for example, have flooded Latin American countries at (or below) cost as a way to gain a feed of surveillance data that can be controlled and processed across jurisdictional boundaries from China.

So is there no escape from this eventuality? We shouldn’t expect this kind of self-imposed restrictions on import of digital data anytime soon since there is only a nascent emergence of understanding among nations of what constitutes personal digital ownership rights, and what constitutes appropriate digital waste. This is complicated in a scenario where nations may want access to another nation’s digital exhaust as they may view it as an untapped intelligence asset. Over the last few years, the cost of storing digital exhaust indefinitely has reduced dramatically with cheap storage, while simultaneously data mining technologies using AI and machine learning have improved significantly. This combination of cheap storage and maturing data mining technologies makes it more likely for many willing consumers of this digital waste to extract strategic advantage over competition, both domestic and foreign. In 2019, 187 countries agreed to add plastic into the Basel convention, a treaty that regulated movement of hazardous material from one country to another. Perhaps it is not too premature to add digital exhaust as well.

One could argue that digital capitalism is a different form of capitalism in that waste is an intrinsic economic product of great value. Digital waste itself becomes a prime product for this form of capitalism. And uncontrolled growth of this invisible digital waste is the next step to digital global warming.