Openings into the Ecology of Information Technology:
Impacts of Information Technology Breifing
Paper
Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis
Framing
Key Relations
LEVEL ONE: THE IMMEDIATE MATERIAL IMPACTS OF IT
Chips Energy
LEVEL TWO: THE RELATIONAL IMPACTS OF IT
Production
Physiologies
LEVEL THREE THE IMMATERIAL IMPACTS OF
IT Designing
Semio-cultures
From Analysis to Action
To help give the reader an immediate sense of what this paper is about we will start by working over its title.
'Opening into' evokes the beginning of an inquiry. Some assumptions about what information technology (IT) is can be made, however, it does need to be pointed out that it is not fixed but in a constant state of unfolding into new forms of hardware, software, products and user relations. Just consider IT now as compared with how it would have been defined two decades ago. That IT has an ecology is maybe more of a problem to grasp. One could say, and certainly cybernetics does, that every ecology has an information structure, that it is an information system. What is to be said here goes further. The claim is that IT constitutes ecologies (for they are constantly emergent) and that it has ecological impacts.
This exercise of 'making visible' is not without some urgency, for unless the ways that IT is implicated in extending conditions of unsustainability are checked, it will simply go on to further inscribe the unsustainable more deeply into environmental, economic and cultural structures. IT is balanced between worsening problems or redressing them. For the latter to happen, its nature, variable forms, uses and economy (that is, its ecologies) all need to be far better understood, modified and redirected. Whether it is possible to do this is a question we will pose and leave open.
We will now progress through a series of impact domains and explain how ecological impacts can be seen within them and, where possible, explicate how they knit together. It is crucial to understand that while this narrative account will isolate impacts in order to describe them, their actual phenomenal condition is always one of inter-connection, inter-relation and continual accumulation.
It should be added that the current trend to avoid confronting problems and to exclusively foreground 'good news solution stories' is refused. Put at its simplest, unless problems are directly confronted, adequately analysed and then engaged there can actually be no solution. How can a solution claim to be a solution unless the problem it resolves is fully explicated? The identification of problems is not the problem, unless this is all that happens. Critical analysis is actually a structural prerequisite for affirmative action. It follows that we will open with analysis and end with proposals for 'positive' action.
Framing Key Relations
What is said here draws an important distinction between (i) the operational
creation and nature of IT and (ii) its application.
Clearly there are fine dividing lines between IT as a technology, the technological conditions of its use, and, how it may be used. While these divisions bleed into each other, there are two domains of judgement of impacts that beg consideration. First there is what happens when a technology is created and operated in its situated contexts - this is what we will be concerned about here. Second is the consequences of the application of IT as an agency able to be used for positive or negative ends - how IT is used is not our primary our concern (although there are clearly questions of the determinism of its applications that will be touched on in passing). What this text mostly invites its readers to reflect upon is: what is exactly determined by what IT is, what is designed by its nature, by its fundamental character?
What is not to be presented here is a larger and higher order of design complexity (of the already complex) which confronts overall ethical questions of the direction of a technology and industry. These questions would ask, for example, is there actually any developmental direction able to applied to the IT industry (by whom or what), in contrast to a continuing process of capital accumulation by the proliferation and 'evolution' of the technology? Equally, one could ask - 'does anyone actually have any grasp of what is actually being designed (that is, brought into being) by IT? - this beyond banal industry and media statements like 'creating the means for better global communication' (such utterances make no distinction between, for instance: means, context and understanding; or the fact that the history of technology indicates that communication technologies have served, rather than obstructed, technologies of mass destruction; or that IT is implicated in extending the hegemony of the English language, and with it both a reduction of cultural diversity and new forms of counter-hegemonic resistances which fuel potential forms of post-colonial conflict).
IT is articulated to and dependent upon other industries, while being generative of numerous identifiable (and perhaps still concealed) material and cultural effects and affects. In this respect it cannot be regarded as having an (t)ec(hn)ology in itself. This means that we have to move from assuming that there is a recognised ecology or technology of information to understanding that what is really operative is an assemblage made up of a rhetorical figure and a complexity of connected relations of industries, environments, economies, cultures, bodies, meanings and values - all of which effectively constitute the material agency of a discursive formation. This suggests that the history of (the) technology is not, and is never, merely technical - i.e., the transformation of matter or actions simply by the application of technique. IT is, de facto, a cultural technology in which the technological and the cultural have become one thing for which there is no adequate name in common currency (eg., if we use the term 'cultural technology' we cannot assume shared meaning).
With these qualifications, what we now have in place to explore is series of emergent forces. Specifically, as indicated, the aim is to show links between seemingly unconnected unsustainable impacts and how they become more significant as they interact. Before doing this there is there is one more qualification to make, which is to make a distinction between sustainment and the unsustainable.
Obviously there are impacts that are unambiguously harmful to the environments and ecologies of (our) biophysical dependence - pollutants that damage air and water, economic practices which diminish biodiversity, landuse practices which destroy fertility and so on. Less evident are the impacts of actions that undermine or destroy the ability of society as a whole to act in order to secure the conditions upon which its future depends. Crudely, there has been a shift away from social models based on the realisation of collective needs towards those that appeal to the realisation self interests. This, as the prime driver of economic development, works to negate the ability to recognise common interests. Yet individual advancement cannot occur unless common social conditions exist to enable and support this progression. There is no real separation between the sustainment of the social order and of the conditions upon which the stability of that order depends. It thus generally follows that there no merit in making actual demarcations between giving value to what has to be sustained individually, socially or materially. This is what acts of sustainment aim to do.
Sustainment is the result of whatever is necessary at any given place or time to counter the negations of the unsustainable. It essentially comprises of a collective giving value and acting. It cannot be reduced to a formulaic set of actions as it has to be conjuncturally responsive - in other words an act of sustainment is determined by taking considered, circumstantially appropriate action rather than applying a stock 'solution'. Moreover, the act of sustainment taken is always one of addressing temporal consequence, it always produces change that, anthropocentrically, 'gives time'. This expression of sustainment registers the highest order of species self interest, it fuses a recognition that 'we' cannot be response-able without being sustain-able, 'we' cannot secure the conditions upon which we depend without securing the condition upon which 'that-which-is-not-us' depends. No matter what we have come to believe, 'we' are not individuated entities but relational beings who have become eternally alienated from this condition - in this sense human centredness is being with an absolute blindness to the fact of our connectedness to both material and immaterial ecologies.
To bring this very general kind of thinking to IT, implies that its ecology exists in relation other ecologies. This means that that the more obvious, unsustainable impacts of its manufacture and operation invite an exploration of far more complexity. Such an exploration will expose the wider reach of its designed and designing impact relations, as they layer on each other. To do this, we will move in a far more considered way through three inter-connected levels of impact: the material, the relational and the immaterial.
Level 1: The Immediate Material Impacts of
IT
The unsustainable is most frequently understood exclusively in terms of
material impacts. While we do not subscribe to this view and wish to put
forward a more complex understanding of unsustainability, in the case
of IT, to foreground its material impacts is nevertheless to expose something
significant.
The most obvious point to make here is that while IT is constantly projected as 'new economy', as 'immaterial' and 'knowledge based', it is still deeply implicated in 'the material'. Moreover, the backgrounding of its materiality constitutes as much a part of the problem of the unsustainable as the actual material impacts. This not least because confronting IT's materials impacts gives them a profile which is totally counter to the 'political economy of the image' of the industry (which is to say that the created image of IT as an 'immaterial' industry is a significant driver of its own development).
The material nature of IT is not simple. Life cycle assessments of IT products typically yield vast component and materials inventories that track back along multiple paths of assembly, manufacture, processing and materials extraction, and forward to the impacts of distribution, use and end-of-life. IT products and services draw heavily not just on component industries, like chip production, which in turn rests on the high energy demands of silicon manufacture, but also on many other materials based industries - like plastics, steel, non-ferrous alloys, glass and chemicals - which themselves have received a considerable amount of basic impacts analysis.1
The material impacts of the IT industry do not arise only from production but also from the waste created at the end-of-life of hardware. The greater the volume of products manufactured, purchased and used, the faster the speed of technology updates (and thus redundancy), the more electronic waste is generated. This non-biodegradable waste is often toxic with significant levels of heavy metals, and in some instances it is radioactive. While a few responsible companies in a few countries are putting a 'take-back' capability in place (which requires products to be returned to the manufacturer to be disassembled for materials recovery, reuse, recycling or safe disposal) they are the exception. Electronic waste is now a visible presence on the street at waste collection time, it's seen in skips, it's going into land-fill in increasing quantities.2
Chips
Semi-conductor production is one of the better documented examples of
the material impacts of IT.
Microchip manufacture uses various heavy metals and employs many hazardous materials like acids, cyanide compounds, solvents, silicon tetrachloride, arsine gas and other carcinogens. Clinically clean materials, working environments and vast amounts of water add up to a high environmental price.3 To produce just one 150mm silicon wafer from which a Pentium chip is cut generates by-products that include 10 kilos of sodium hydroxide, 12,780 litres of waste water and 2.8 kilos of hazardous waste.4
The history of silicon valley is apposite here. It evidences a repeated pattern of industrialised nations allowing an industry to do a great deal of environmental damage, and then forcing it to clean up (with varying degrees of success) - in this case, during the mid 1970s and 1980s. Greater State intervention by the US EPA resulted in clean-up enforcement and regulation, with Silicon Valley now hosting 30 'Superfund' clean-up sites, more than any other US region of the same size.5 Also during the mide 1970s and 1980s the US chip industry was being exposed to significant competition from Japan. The result of the fusion of these environmental, legal and economic pressures was that a great deal of US micochip production went off-shore, particularly to the deregulated economies of South East Asia. Here the impacts worsened, in large part because of slacker environmental and workforce regulation. There are accounts of major eye damage done to young women soldering chips under magnification with acid fluxes that gave of gases. The lure of earning what were (in the local economies) high disposal incomes, allowing the women to buy fashionable cloths and make up (mostly from company owned stores), ensured there was always labour to replace those sacked because of failing eyesight.6
While many of the processes of early chip production have been cleaned up, the massive expansion of the industry offsets this, generating compound impacts. As Siegel and Markoff pointed out in 1985, the rise and development of an 'information society' relies at its 'core' on the chemical technology of the industrial era and 'the manufacture of chips, printed circuit boards, magnetic media and other high-tech products uses some of the most dangerous materials known to humanity.'7 Now over a decade and a half after these words were written, these materials are in the waste stream.
Positively, knowledge about the problems of chip production did constitute a 'community of concern' around the industry. This concern has not, however, reduced the IT industry's appetite for chips, or the contradiction of an industry that trades off an image of the clean, the immaterial and knowledge, while repressing recognition of the material impacts associated with what it produces. What is deployed to offset the often contradictory issues highlighted by the 'community of concern' are the incremental improvements delivered by the introduction of 'cleaner production' and 'eco-efficiency'. But these methods frequently only deliver small environmental gains. Moreover, while 'best practice' economies can often show a reduction of impacts, as measured at the level of 'product units,' this seemingly positive picture is negated by the consequences of a phenomenol increase in volume of production - worldwide, semiconductor sales are forecast to rise by 56% over the next three years.8 Also, as a result of the global proliferation of chip production, and associated industries, a good deal of what is manufactured does not take place within the remit of 'best practice'. Equally, 'best practice' is itself is not necessarily an accurate marker of the sustainable. In fact, it frequently sustains that which may well be fundamentally unsustainable (for example, 'environmental best practice' can be found in arms manufacture, non-renewable energy generation and synthetic materials industries). We can also observe that the forms of auditing that are associated with 'best practice' do not always reflect actual material conditions - new forms of 'creative accounting' constantly arrive!
Energy
Another major impact of the IT industry is its unquenchable thirst for
energy.
The is related particularly to the huge growth of its sectors. For example, the US Federal Reserve Board reports that production of communications equipment in the USA is growing by around 13% per annum; computer equipment and peripherals averages a growth rate of 2.5% per month (with a 44% increase for the first nine months of 2000 compared to same period for 1999. Electronic components production has increased 50% over the last 12 months.9
This rate of expansion and technological proliferation is such that the increased efficiency of equipment via technological improvements (such as 'Energy Star' rated computers, which power down when not in use) have not got anywhere near offsetting the impacts of energy generated mainly from non-renewable greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Besides ever more workers using ever more computers for ever longer periods, and ever more machines being plugged in and drawing energy in standby mode at both work and home, there is another emergent situation of growing concern. This is the fact that the increasing amount of data generated by IT is driving the expansion of off-site data storage capacity (this despite the trend of computing power doubling approximately every eighteen months, according to the prediction of 'Moore's law').10 Here is a very explicit 'futuring' compound effect to observe. Energy hungry 'server farms' (which, per square metre, can require ten times more energy than an electronically supported office) are likely to 'organically' grow as the IT industry matures and lives on.11 The ability to compress and cull data is clearly not developing at the same rate as its creation.
We have noted that the energy used to manufacture IT products and the energy taken up in their use are both having increasing impacts. This somewhat obvious observation now needs fleshing out.
Energy can be regarded as located and accumlative over the life of a product, distinguishing between 'embodied energy' (all the energy inputs that go into a product's manufacture from the extraction of raw materials to it arriving in the hands of its user) and operational energy (energy consumed during its operational life). Energy involved in transportation at all stages of the product's life as well as energy used at 'end of life' to dispose, reuse or recycle it, also form part of the total energy budget. There are now established methods for measuring the total life-cycle energy costs of products and services. In fact, the quantification of energy and greenhouse gas emissions on a product/unit basis is the most widely used measure for calculating environmental impacts in the growing field of 'Life Cycle Assessment'.12
As the IT industry expands so to does the volume of greenhouse gas created by the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity. IT is literally a factor driving the construction of more coal or oil fired power stations - to cope with the combination of increased energy loads, energy peaks and future energy demands. An associated trend, where increased energy supply is not assured, is for larger organisations to become generators of their own energy, so as to remove themselves from the growing 'risks' of grid supply, especially power cuts and surges. Three developments link back to this phenomena: the rapid and ongoing expansion of computers and electronic communication technologies as part of the environment of everyday life; the increased demand for energy that comes from digitalisation (especially of TV and its destined fusing with computer technologies); and the already noted proliferation of server farms.
What is now emerging, in contrast to 'old economy' concentrations of high energy users, is a growing global network of energy hungry industries whose appetite is not indexed to the supply of raw materials or the productive output of waged workers striving to increase their income - in this context we do not find actual immaterial forces. Rather it is an economy of unrestrained expenditure that creates a low volume of recuperative returns - here, in effect, is a still emergent economy of negation, an economy of deepening unsustainability, of 'defuturing'.
IT is linked to climate change at a micro as well as a macro level. More electronic machines used in offices not only means greater energy load to power them, but also more heat generated, thus increasing the demands on air conditioning systems. Of course the already mentioned 'server farms'- machine intensive data storage facilities - create even more heat and a need for special servicing. Even in an 'average' office, heat-generating, IT-driven machines influence air movement in the building and the overall building temperature which in turn affects the thermal comfort of workers. With standardised operative temperatures for commercial buildings (usually around the low 20soC), the load on the mechanical services for cooling the building and changing the air is increased (increasing energy used and so greenhouse emissions). However, office workers often find the problems of air movement and quality more significant than slight increases of temperature. Emissions of pollutants like ozone and volatile organic compounds from printers and photocopiers,13 and now as recent studies have shown, triphenyl phosphate from the plastic casing of computers14 combine with other substances such as dust and bacteria, to degrade indoor air quality.
While it could be argued that it is not core IT products, but the peripherals like printers, photocopiers, scanners, etc, that are mainly responsible for these kinds of impacts, this would be to deny the important relational connections. Laser and inkjet printers, fax machines, scanners and much other now totally commonplace office equipment exist only by virtue of the software that drives them. Its profileration in turn has created further impacts, most notably the arrival of the extrodinarily wasteful, disposable toner cartridge/print engine, now taking up much landfill space and, of course, much increased use and disposal of printing paper.15
Even from a brief outline, what we can see is that: (i) artificial environments - of managed information, technologies, energy systems and synthetic materials - are becoming completely closed, exclusive and utterly de-naturalised systems; and (ii) while there are quantifiable material impacts on, for example, climate and the physical bodies of a workforce, there are also immaterial impacts on the conditions of minds and cultures. The two forms of impact do of course touch each other. We will see this shortly in, for instance, the way the acquisition of new workplace habits have designing consequences in environments of the artificial that go well beyond the environment of work.
Continue on to the second
half of this IIT Briefing Paper
Endnotes for Part One
1 Particularly in the extensive literature
of (environmental) Life Cycle Assessment: see note 12 below. Back
to Body Text
2 While there are some organisations that deal with it, extended producer responsibility still remains under-developed as an industrial and commercial practice. For further discussion see John Gertsakis and Chris Ryan, Return to Sender and Electronic Waste Shortcircuited Melbourne: Centre for Design at RMIT, 1998 and 1997. Back to Body Text
3 See for example Lenny Seigel Lenny and John Markoff The High Cost of High Tech: the Dark Side of the Chip New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Back to Body Text
4 Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalisation Sierra Club Books, 1997. Back to Body Text
5 Ibid. Back to Body Text
6 These conditions were being reported from the late 1970s - see Rachael Grossman 'Women's place in the integrated circuit: Changing role of SE Asian women' SE Asian Chronical Research IX No 5-6, 1978, and A. Sivanandan 'Imperialism and Disorganic Development in the Silicon Age' Race and Class XXI No 2, 1979. Back to Body Text
7 Op cit., Seigel and Markoff The High Cost of High Tech: the Dark Side of the Chip pp 8. Back to Body Text
8 Report by the Semiconductor Industry Association cited in Australian Financial Review, 3 November 2000, p. 66. This industry group has raised its growth forecasts since the June estimate of 31%, citing surging demand for communications including networks for internet to wireless products like cell phones and handheld computers. Back to Body Text
9 Figures based on Federal Reserve Boards's monthly industrial production survey, compiled by Cahners Business Information and published as 'Industrial Production Analysis and Forecast', Electronic Business 18 October 2000, www.eb.mag.com. Back to Body Text
10 Seth Lloyd of MIT recently published a paper in Nature theoretically testing the limit of this theory, in which shrinking size of information storage units — down to sub-atomic scale — and increasing speed of processing result in an object so compressed and so voltatile that it results in either a thermo-nuclear explosion or dissolving into a black hole of its own making. See New York Times essay by George Johnson, 'When the chips are down', reprinted Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum 28 October 2000, p.4-5. Back to Body Text
11 See Tino Perinotto 'High-tech hunger jolts power supplies' The Australian Financial Review 19 September, 2000, p. 29. Back to Body Text
12 Life Cycle Assessment, as a practice which seeks to empirically measure the environmental impacts of industrial production grew out of fields as diverse as resource economics and toxicology. The practice now has an international network of organisations and International Standards associated with its practice (within the ISO 14000 Environmental Management series, for example ISO 14040 and 14041). Back to Body Text
13 S.K. Brown 'Pollutant Emission Properties of Photocopiers and Laser Printers', Indoor Air 99 8th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate, Edinburgh, 3-13 Aug 1999 and S.K. Brown, 'Assessment of Pollutant Emissions from Dry-Process Photocopiers, Indoor Air 9: 259-267 (ISSN 0905-6947), Denmark 1999. Standardised procedures for measuring emissions from photocopiers and printers are still under development, there are also not yet any agreed emission guidelines. In an office environment VOCs and other pollutants are also be emitted from carpets, ceiling tiles, workstations, wall paint and partitions as well as from equipment. Back to Body Text
14 The The Guardian has recently reported Swedish scientific reserach on this topic - see reproduction of article in Sydney Morning Herald October 2, 2000, p. 4. Back to Body Text
15 Paper manufacturers boast about the non-arrival of 'the paperless office' predicted in IT's early days, citing 'the rapid uptake of new printing technologies' and 'exponentially increasing volumes of information' as growth drivers of paper consumption. See 'PaperlinX' at www.reflex.com.au. For further discussion of the relation between office equipment, waste and other environmental impacts: see a report undertaken by the EcoDesign Foundation for the Inner Sydney Waste Board Office Products: A Guide to Sustainable Purchasing and Use Sydney, 2000. Back to Body Text