Projects/Sustainability
Environmental Sustainability
We’re in a climate crisis. We know that the internet contributes significantly to the world’s global carbon emissions. But we also believe in the internet’s potential.
So how can we reduce emissions and advance a more sustainable internet? What else could the open internet do for the planet? We invite technologists, designers, political minds, activists and citizens who care about the internet and our planet to imagine alternatives and develop potential ideas for the future together.
On our journey to environmental sustainability, we’ve started by weaving different pieces of exploration into a larger picture. We’re adopting a time lens (more on each below):
- The past: Visit our Museum of the Fossilized Internet.
- The present: That’s us, thinking about what to do and why.
- The future: Contribute to the wiki of 1000 ideas and help develop future scenarios.
All of these are designed to spark conversation, generate bold, actionable ideas, and initiate collaborations towards a more sustainable internet -- and all of these are open to sharing and contributing. We’ve started exploring by using art because environmental sustainability is complex and entangled. Art, on these terms, doesn’t just open up creative understanding, it also allows us to paint a more holistic picture without prioritizing which issue to tackle first.
Individual and collective action need to go together: everyone can do their part and we need systemic change. We’re not looking to vilify people or behaviours, instead we’re inviting everyone to join our journey in figuring out how to do better, and what that even means.
The Museum of Fossilized Internet
"To explore something so big, we first made it very small." — Gabi Ivens, creative lead and miniature maker
Welcome to the Museum of the Fossilized Internet.
This museum was founded in 2050 to commemorate two decades of a fossil-free internet and to invite museum's visitors to experience what the coal and oil-powered internet of 2020 was like. Gasp at the horrors of surveillance capitalism. Nod knowingly at the plague of spam. Be baffled at the size of AI training data and lament the binge culture of video streaming.
Future scenarios
After conducting a series of workshops to gather 1000 ideas for a sustainable internet, we identified some of the more ambitious suggestions and redrafted them as high-level future scenarios. These scenarios were picked to inspire fresh thinking around what is possible and desirable. While they began from a "tech sector" perspective, we quickly realised that positive visions require us to expand the scope to socio-political and economic concerns as well.
Through discussion and reflection, we hope these scenarios may expose where there is consensus as well as disagreement among participants, while also narrowing down the slate of scenarios to those that generate the most ideas, potential shared goals and actions.
It’s a thought experiment and we’re going bold (crazy?) on purpose. Help us imagine a different world, so we can decide which one we actually want to work towards.
In a next step, we aim to develop these headlines into stories in an effort to identify opportunities, shortfalls, and requirements.
1000 Ideas
There are thousands of things we can do to advance a more sustainable internet. Below you’ll find a list of the ones we gathered through brainstorming, workshops, and feedback. We've used a "double diamond" approach, i.e. we went as wide and broad as possible, generating ideas regardless of feasibility or likelihood. You can keep adding to them and help us link out to projects and research that may bring them to life. We then narrowed these down to a few top ones (below) that have sparked most feedback and engagement so far.
It's a process and we'll keep going wide to narrow it back down again, until a clearer path to action emerges.
About
- Who's behind this project:
- Cathleen Berger, Michelle Thorne, and the Mozilla environment working group.
- Creative lead and miniature maker (museum): Gabi Ivens.
- Research support and museum copy: Joana Moll.
- Local study group: Chris Adams, see also CAT Skills.
- Coming soon: How to make your own “Museum of the Fossilized Internet” exhibition. Templates and tutorials we used. More resources and how to get involved.