Sustainable Tech Needs to Be More Than a Marketing Ploy

It's Earth Day, and we're meant to think deeply about the planet that sustains us. And in this age of accelerating technological innovation, which brings with it a constant demand (or unnecessary push) for new products—more than anything to sustain domestic and global economies—to think of the planet on Earth Day is to reckon with the costs that technology exacts on the ecosystem.

Recently, San Francisco's anti-tech movement, notably through the anonymous Counterforce group, has written intelligently on this issue. Which got me wondering what other environmental activists had to say about technology and sustainability.

First, this doesn't require a descent into Luddism; it demands an understanding that sustainability shouldn't become another marketing ploy—something designed to convince college-educated liberals to buy a product. It's an idea with far-reaching implications for the global economy. A system that, by its nature, must create new products and grow market share or suffer the shock of global recession or depression.

Back in 1998, in the midst of the Dot-Com boom, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) explored the space between technology and sustainability. Noting that humans have always made use of tools in an attempt to invent our way out of trouble, WWF emphasized that we've become far too confident in our abilities, and a bit misguided in our technological prowess.

"From the wheel and the stone axe to the internal combustion engine and the computer, technology has been crucial to the evolution of human society, increasing the capacity for action and intervention in terrestrial processes and helping to solve many problems of health, shelter, and the general conditions of life," WFF wrote. "But as our reliance on technology has increased, so the ambivalence of its effects has become more apparent. For machines and technological processes can damage and destroy the life of our world even as in some respects they save and enhance it."

"If we are to put our faith in technology to overcome the range of environmental dangers that beset us, then at least let us avoid the sort of carelessness in the use of tools that led to so much of the degradation of our environment in the first place," the group wrote.

While technological innovation reaches back thousands of years into human history, it was only with the Industrial Revolution that new technologies, alongside banking and investment, took a central role in economic development and the creation of wealth. Technology is in many ways the story of America and its capitalist system. And it continues to be so with smartphones, tablets, computers, and the Internet of Things being hoisted upon consumers by Silicon Valley companies.

On the day that the Counterforce staged its a demonstration outside of Kevin Rose's home, protesting his role as ventures partner at Google, the activists published an essay describing the motivations behind their anti-tech movement:

Tech entrepreneurship is not a harmless or benevolent force. The industry is built directly on the exploitation of millions of faceless people in the global south who are driven off their land and forced to do the dangerous and thankless work of extracting (at great ecological cost) the precious metals and other raw materials that enable the tech world to exist. Once the technology has been shoved down our throats through merciless advertising campaigns, mandatory cell phone upgrades, and jobs requiring instant connectivity of smartphones, we find ourselves tied to their world.

Again, this isn't meant to provoke neo-Luddism, but to illustrate that unfettered global capitalism—where revenue, market growth, and investment return reign supreme—was made possible in part by humanity's technological ingenuity, which now only accelerates the rate of invention and innovation. Both, paradoxically, place extraordinary burdens on the planet's capacity.

Community organizer and cofounder of the Common Ground Collective Scott Crow told me he agrees that this paradox is problematic. "I see capitalism and technology as interrelated, and don't know if they can exist without each other," he said. "But, also, 'sustainability' to me means so much more than the natural environment. It's all of our environments' homes and open spaces, both mental and online. In that sense, tech is also unsustainable and alienating."

For Crow, and many other activists, that revolutionary promise of the web back in the '90s, that it would benefit the global good, has closed. "Largely it's about commerce," he added. "So, when activists use it for 'good' it's such a small piece of the picture." Crow said that there is a constant cost-benefit analysis with technology, especially in the realm of social media and surveillance.

"They say tech is the last wild frontier, but like everything, it's about capital," he said. "They will grow it until it explodes, implodes, or is rendered useless. I only think about tech largely in relation to larger civilization, which is not sustainable at all. And shit like wind energy and solar panels may or may not be helpful in the long run. I have panels on my house, but it seems like pissing on a forest fire."

Back in 2011, Green Peace published a report titled "How Dirty is Your Data: A Look at the Energy Choices That Power Cloud Computing." The introduction states:

This societal shift to moving 1s and 0s instead of atoms and mass has the potential to significantly reduce our footprint on the planet and achieve a more sustainable model for housing the soon-to-be 7 billion neighbours we share it with. However, since the ‘cloud’ allows our digital consumption to be largely invisible, arriving magically with the tap of the ‘refresh’ button in our inboxes or onto our smartphones and tablets for immediate access, we may fail to recognise that the information we receive actually devours more and more electricity as our digital lives grow.

The report noted that data houses account for 3 percent of the United States' electricity consumption, a figure that is growing at an annual rate of 12 percent. Electronic devices account for 15 percent of home electricity usage, and that figure is set to triple by 2030. "And yet, despite the IT sector’s stated commitment to transparency and openness, it remains secretive about its energy use and carbon footprint at a time when the world is facing the potential for catastrophic climate change," Greenpeace noted, adding that clean energy could help "replace existing hazardous and dirty fuels and meet the rapidly growing global demand for energy."

Citing this report is not meant to lay blame squarely at the tech sector's door, but to note the reality of how much it consumes. All electronic devices require energy, as do the facilities that power the internet. That energy comes from several sources, but mostly fossil fuels. Oil is also vital to the plastics industry, which creates the housing for everything from smartphones and laptops to air conditioners and cars.

"I would argue that the problem is not technology itself, understood as a category, but rather the incentives and underlying logic that drive our current economy," said a participant in CrimethInc., a largely anonymous anarchist network. "The indigenous peoples who lived on this continent when Europeans arrived lived in a tremendously complex relationship with the natural world (see the book 1491 for a pop source on this)—the difference was that their technologies were actually sustainable."

For anarchists, the state and private property system prevents true sustainability. "Only anarchists have a realistic plan for how to avoid global environmental collapse," added the participant, a viewpoint shared by the Counterforce, which is leveling its gaze at Silicon Valley. And that plan, of course, is the scaling back of certain technologies, and collapse of the the state-capitalist system. Given how embedded those twins of modern civilization are in the human imagination, it would take a considerable effort to dismantle them, if it could be done at all.

"'Scaling back' technology implies that technological progress is unidimensional, when in fact there are countless different directions for technological development (many of which have been abandoned—think of the pneumatic subway line under New York City)," added the CrimethInc participant. "The challenge is to create a situation in which different incentives reward different kinds of development. If we view the creative tendencies and powers of human beings as something to be curbed by morality (or, worse, state control), we’re setting ourselves up for failure. Rather, we need to change the forces driving development in its currently unsustainable direction."

They emphasized that these forces are produced by capitalism—a system which rewards profit at all costs, while coercing workers to do things they otherwise would never do (high-risk mining, destructive development, wasteful production, etc.) in order to survive.

There's an argument to be made that the reach of technology has to be changed in some way, while humanity's energy systems also should be made more efficient. Depending on the activist, it's a matter of degree. With the world population growing, this takes on a greater urgency. But can it be done in a world where spreading technology around the world is a means to grow a company's portfolio, or bottom line? And consumers line up around the block to purchase the latest gadgets? It would take a revolution in thinking to even try to answer that question—otherwise the planet might just do it for us.