Projects/Sustainability/Museum: Difference between revisions

Since the 2024 collapse of the online ad industry, websites have now entered into “Generation Just Enough”, prioritizing only necessary content delivered in the most sustainable way, respecting user’s choices and limiting the number of daily adverts served.

== Relentless, 2020==

In 2019, the artist and researcher [https://www.janavirgin.com/AMZ/ Joana Moll] bought Bezos’ autobiography The Life, Lessons & Rules for Success: The Journey, The Teachable Moments & 10 Rules for Success Cultivated from the Life & Wisdom of Jeff Bezos on Amazon. To carry out this online order, she was taken through 12 different interfaces and had to load 1,307 scripts and documents, resulting in 87.33 MB of information and approximately 30wh of energy. On display are 20 volumes representing 8,724 A4 pages worth of code required to order that one book through Amazon’s website. This code reflects the accumulation of legacy code through developers adding more code at different moments of time, and the online surveillance tracking and ad economy that dominated the energy intensive online experience of 2010-2030’s.

== Spam, Spam, Spam! 2020 ==

To get an idea of the size of this problem, back in 2019 the relic social media platform [https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/23/18637596/facebook-fake-accounts-transparency-mark-zuckerberg-report Facebook removed 2.2 billion fake accounts] in the first quarter of this year. Each active profile is estimated to account for [https://www.quora.com/How-much-electrical-energy-does-Facebook-and-all-its-users-consume-each-day 281 grams of CO2,] the same carbon footprint as a [https://www.ecowatch.com/coffees-invisible-carbon-footprint-1882175408.html medium latte.] Multiplied by 2.2 billion, these fake accounts add up to a lot of medium lattes!

== Forever Life, 2020 ==

To give some perspective, the hit music video for the now classic song “Despacito” had five billion views on YouTube. To generate this kind of energy it would either take [https://www.ft.com/content/779c1102-2d2b-11e8-97ec-4bd3494d5f14 850,000 barrels of oil] or 93 wind turbines running for an entire year.

==Barry and Alexa, 2020==

This framed picture of Paglen’s work features selections from the ImageNet dataset for object recognition. AI needed vast amounts of data in order to understand our world. In 2020 China had a massive system of data collection, which allowed the country to build and own the largest datasets used to train AI in the world. GTCOM, one of the leading AI companies at the time, was claimed to have harvested between 2 to 3 petabytes of data annually. Back in 2025, AI workload [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614005/ai-computing-cloud-computing-microchips/ accounted for a tenth of the world’s electricity usage.] Training AI was generally quite energy intensive, for example, [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613630/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/ training several popular and large AI models] produced the same CO2 as 34 passengers flying between Sydney and London. In the wake of the Econet Agreement, the field of Tiny AI emerged, where computer scientists competed to use the smallest training datasets possible along with the reemergence of principles contained with analog computing from 1960s.

==Mining Rig, 2020==

The average internet user of 2020 was served 1,700 banner adverts per month. At the time there were estimated to be 4.48 billion people active on the internet which means that [https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/ 4.48 billion people] were receiving 7.4 trillion banner ads each month. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195925517303505 A study conducted in 2016] evaluated that the carbon footprint of online advertising in total constituted 10% of the total emissions of the internet. That was a lot of energy for something that has a [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195925517303505 success rate] of one purchase per million ad impressions.

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