The recent launch of the online magazine “Branch” has opened up the topic of sustainable digital technology to a wider audience. This first issue also provides a better understanding of the position of specific tech actors regarding digital sustainability. However, what about other perspectives? Sustainable digital technology is a complex subject that will require international cooperation, but the French community publish in French and rarely translate its reports and papers, as do Germans. This article tries to provide an understanding of the French perspective on digital sustainability and its recent progress.
Disclaimer: I do not represent the French sustainable digital community, I am just trying to synthesize the action of many individuals and collectives in French.This contribution is a rework and an updated version of an article published in November 2020 on my personal website.
The word “forest” was displayed everywhere, together with sanitised stands and uniformly pruned plants, geometrically positioned while slowly wilting under an office light. These were attempts to represent “nature” at the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) at IFEMA – Feria de Madrid – which happened in December 2019 in a huge shed that looked like a technology fair. And tech was definitely there too, in different layers.
Among the so-called innovations to “combat climate change” there were hyperbolic ideas such as giant mirrors to reflect solar rays or some kind of vacuum cleaner to be positioned in space to aspirate carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere – all under the buzzword “geoengineering”.
Cities are the platforms to save the planet, and a data commons is the best tool they have.
Cities are high on tech these days, and they are also rich in greenwashing rhetoric. Korea just invested $20 billion in a Smart City Ecosystem, and we’re seeing a wave of “green” smart-city projects like Nairobi’s Athi River City and Konza Technopolis, Prospera Tech City in Honduras, and the $500 billion Saudi-funded The Line project between Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. All claim a smooth blend of tech and environmentally-friendly architecture, available for those who can afford it. Cities all over the world are racing to compete with each other on smartness and sustainability. However, with greater investment in smart-cities tech we need increased scrutiny into the incredible amount of public money invested in programs and to question the ownership of the data that is and will be generated by city-dwellers for years to come.
Digitalisation’s material and immaterial costs should be better accounted for. Modular product design, repairability, transparent supply chains and the use of public and free-source code play a decisive role in making hardware and software sustainable. This article outlines the basic approaches for the design of sustainable hardware and software and illustrates the political options. The article was initially published in Special Issue Vol. 36/O1 of the journal OekologischesWirtschaften (Ecological Economy) and edited slightly for this magazine.
Still from Memo Atken’s Uncanny-Valley. With permission from the author.
This article is for the adventurous artist who wants to create and sell CryptoArtworks (or NFTs) on the blockchain using sustainable platforms. It is not a comprehensive guide, and the information is likely to go out of date very quickly, since the field is moving so rapidly.
The CryptoArt NFT Market (i.e. selling digital art on the blockchain) is worth at least $600M—and this excludes some of the largest marketplaces like opensea.io. This figure is also quite heavily skewed of course, with the top artists earning the most.
Selling work on a blockchain can be a technically challenging task. For this reason, many platforms and websites have emerged aiming to make this process as seamless and easy as possible for artists. Unfortunately, many of these websites are based on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, which is very inefficient and ecologically costly by design. For example, selling just a single-edition artwork on Ethereum has a carbon footprint starting at around 100 KgCO2—equivalent to a 1 hour flight—and depending on the platform, the emissions can reach those of a long-haul flight. Selling an edition of 100 works has a carbon footprint of over 10 tonnes CO2, which is more than the per capita annual footprint of someone in the EU—including all emissions from industry and trade.
Selling an edition of 100 works has a carbon footprint of over 10 tonnes CO2, which is more than the per capita annual footprint of someone in the EU—including all emissions from industry and trade.
But there are more sustainable routes emerging. As the CryptoArt NFT market is exploding in a gold-rush style free-for-all, there is a lack of clear information on the ecological impact of different approaches to NFTs. The purpose of this guide is to help CryptoArtists who are interested in exploring more sustainable alternatives. Currently, the more sustainable platforms do not have the volume of their unsustainable counterparts, the Ethereum-based platforms. For this reason, collectors and sales are likely to be significantly lower on the more sustainable alternatives. However, hopefully as more artists navigate this topic, this can encourage platforms, developers, investors and collectors to develop more ecologically friendly and transparent platforms.
We are also hoping the platforms themselves will be more transparent on the matter.
We are also hoping the platforms themselves will be more transparent on the matter and that we can eventually retire this document. However, at the time of writing, not a single platform has publicly acknowledged the issue on their website. When they do, the relevant links will be included below.
Glossary
To better understand the issues, we would like to introduce these concepts in an incredibly brief manner.
Blockchain: A decentralized database. The technicalities of this are not relevant for our discussion. What is important to know, however, is that there are many different blockchains (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Algorand, Polkadot etc), and usually, each blockchain has its own (crypto)currency.
Cryptocurrency: Magic internet money. Bitcoin (BTC) is the most well known cryptocurrency and the oldest. Ethereum (ETH) is another well known cryptocurrency (and the basis for most current CryptoArt platforms). There are thousands of other cryptocurrencies. Typically small volume cryptocurrencies are collectively known as altcoins.
CryptoArt: Art registered on the blockchain. I.e. Media is associated with an NFT. See also: What is cryptoart?
NFT: Non-Fungible Token. A unique token (i.e. long number or string) that is associated with some media (e.g. image, video, poem, whatever) or any unique asset, such as a house, property etc which has its ID or file registered specifically to one block on the blockchain. Detailed description.
Smart Contract: A fancy way of saying “a program that lives and runs on the blockchain”. Smart contracts are what create and keep track of NFTs, ASAs, Dapps etc. Some of these types of contracts can be legally binding.
Minting an NFT: The act of ‘creating’ an NFT, i.e. registering the token on the blockchain, and associating it with your media (e.g. file).
NFT Platform / Marketplace: A website which allows people to buy & sell NFTs. Think ebay or Amazon, except it uses a blockchain in the background.
Gas fee: A fee one must pay, usually paid by the seller such as the artist, to be able to publish or mint on Ethereum. Think of it as an ebay listing fee. This fee doesn’t go to the platform, but to Ethereum to compensate for the computing energy required to process and validate transactions. Currently Ethereum gas fees are very high and fluctuate (e.g. >$100-$1000) with network congestion. Some days and times are dramatically less or more due to current on-chain demand. There are some existing and work-in-progress solutions discussed in the next section.
Wallet: A blockchain analog for a bank account on the blockchain, which contains your cryptocurrency. Different cryptocurrencies often require different wallets. Without going into too much detail, usually this is a piece of software, hardware, or browser extension which gives you a private seed—typically a bunch of random words, like “red fox banana submarine tutu”. This is like your password for the wallet, which you should keep safe and never share with anyone! It also gives a corresponding ‘hashed’ version (e.g. 17ah2k25djhsa7974) which is your public facing wallet address, which is like an IBAN, so it’s what you share with others to get paid or trade.
Consensus Algorithm: The algorithm that underlies the blockchain. Details of this are irrelevant for this guide, except to say that Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the consensus algorithm that is hundreds of times more inefficient than the other ones (deliberately so) and unfortunately, it is also the one which is the most common today.
What’s needed for ecofriendly CrytoArt
The following would be great to see from CryptoArt and NFT platforms regarding sustainability:
A statement of values
A commitment to transparency, communication and guidance for CryptoArtists
A roadmap with specific actions, e.g. alternate chains, side chains, lazy minting, layer 2 scaling which are currently in the process of supporting. Including bounties to “proof of stake” chains and wallets to create a solution to “proof of work”, etc. Roadmaps should be more than “we hope ETH2 will resolve the issue when it’s released in a year or two.”
A donation of proceeds to carbon credits or to subsidize the ecological footprint and their direct environmental impact
Ways to make it better
If still using Ethereum, here are some of the ways to improve the carbon footprint of NFTs:
Lazy minting: This is not necessarily dramatically better, around 2x, or maybe 3x less carbon footprint. This is done by not creating an NFT until its first purchase.
Sidechains: NFTs are minted on non-Ethereum PoS sidechains but can be moved onto Ethereum later. If they are not moved, they can be hundreds times more efficient.
Bridges: Are specifically for making one blockchain ecosystem compatible with another blockchain. This can also be referred to as interoperability and allows chains to interact which otherwise cannot. The advantage of this is you can go from ETH to another less impactful chain without loosing the data minted.
Various Layer 2 (L2) scaling optimizations: Can be up to 100x more efficient.
Instead of Ethereum, one can also use other blockchains. This can be up to hundreds of times better for the environment in terms of carbon footprint. Some of these chains include Algorand, Tezos, Polkadot, Hedera Hashgraph, and other proof-of-stake networks.
NFT Platforms & Marketplaces
These are the websites that you would use to upload, ‘mint’ and sell your works. For sake of simplicity, we can say that from an ecological perspective, Ethereum which uses proof of work, is the worst (unless sidechains or L2 scaling is implemented).
Platforms using different blockchains (e.g. using PoS, PoA etc) will generally be hundreds times more efficient. For those wishing to not incur the immense footprints of Ethereum, look for—and support—alternatives. Sales may be lower for now (see the Risks section at the end). This document doesn’t aim to give advice, instead it is a first step in collecting this information in one place.
Hopefully if there is enough demand for sustainable and transparent platforms, this can encourage developers, investors and collectors to invest in and develop these more ecologically friendly alternatives and grow the market. And hopefully the community can provide more feedback in the issues.
Risks
Cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile, and their values can dramatically fall or rise. For example, if you sell a NFT for 1 ETH, which is currently worth ~$1600, the value of ETH could later drop to a few hundred dollars in a few months or even in a few weeks (alternatively, it could rise to two or three thousand $$ too).
This becomes potentially even more risky (or potentially more rewarding) with cryptocurrencies that have a much smaller market cap (e.g. NEAR, XTZ, AVAX etc), which could die and drop to zero (or go to the moon) in a few weeks.
Please act responsibly. Seek financial advice if need be, preferably not from YouTube, TikTok, Elon Musk or Chamath Palihapitiya.
The smaller blockchains are likely to have fewer collectors. So expect smaller sales on these platforms; although, as more people start to use these blockchains for NFTs the prices will likely rise with demand.
About the authors
This article is an excerpt from the Github repo, A Guide to Ecofriendly CryptoArt (NFTs). It is a collective effort from many people including: Memo Akten, Primavera De Filippi, Joanie Lemercier, Addie Wagenknecht, Mat Dryhurst, Sutu_eats_flies, everybody in the Clean-NFTs discord and many more. The authors keep the information up to date via pull-requests and issues.
Each ring of the diagram represents a server in the network. Sunlight levels are shown in yellow. The colored bars represent which server has been the active server in the network over the past 72 hours.
Solar Protocol is a network of solar-powered servers that collectively host a web platform. The platform is then served from wherever there is the most sunshine in the network. Volunteer stewards host and care for the solar servers from different locations around the world, and the project’s energy responsive website makes visible which server is currently active, what its local weather is like, its energy status, and who maintains it. This project is by Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson and Benedetta Piantella, and below is an excerpt from their website.
Solar Protocol is a web platform hosted across a network of solar-powered servers set up in different locations around the world. A solar-powered server is a computer that is powered by a solar panel and a small battery. Each server can only offer intermittent connectivity that is dependent on available sunshine, the length of day and local weather conditions. When connected as a network, the servers coordinate to serve a website from whichever of them is enjoying the most sunshine at the time.
With servers located in different time zones, seasons and weather systems, the network directs internet traffic to wherever the sun is shining. When your browser makes a request to see this website, it is sent to whichever server in the network is generating the most energy. For example, right now you are seeing the version of this website that is hosted on Hells Gate server located in Queens ’til I die where it is 10:00 AM and the weather is light rain.
The Solar Protocol network explores the sun’s interaction with Earth as a form of logic that shapes the daily behaviors, seasonal activities and the decision making of almost all life forms. Solar Protocol honors this natural logic, exploring it as a form of intelligence that is used to automate decisions in a digital network.
A screenshot from the Solar Protocol website
How does it work?
A solar panel recharges a battery that provides energy for a small computer set up at each project location around the world. As the sun rises and sets, each server becomes active or inactive as its solar panel goes into sunlight or darkness. Traffic is redirected between servers depending on where there is the most light.
Solar Protocol uses everyday internet technologies like the Domain Network Service (DNS) protocol, a decentralized system that associates a URL address to the IP address of a server. In short, DNS is the system that dictates the path between client and server. For large-scale, high volume web services that use multiple servers hosted in different locations, the DNS protocol typically directs network traffic to whichever server gives the quickest response time. For example, when making a Google search, your request would be sent to whichever Google server responds the quickest which is usually the server that is the closest geographically. This prioritizes speed over all other factors that determine how a network operates, a characteristic that is prevalent in much digital culture.
The position of sun relative to earth produces the routing logic of the network.
But it doesn’t have to work this way. Instead, the Solar Protocol network is built with a different logic based on the sun, automatically directing traffic to whichever server is generating the most solar energy at the time of the request. Decisions about where to move computational activity in the network are made according to where there is the most naturally available energy, rather than according to what would produce the quickest results for the user. In other words, in Solar Protocol, the distribution of sunshine (and therefore energy) across the planet determines the path from client to server.
Why does the appearance of this website change from time to time?
Right now this website is being delivered to you from the Hells Gate server located in Queens ’til I die. This website may look different depending on which server is displaying this website. That’s because the people stewarding each server can choose to customize their local version of this website. These variations in design and content are visible when their server is the active server.
The appearance of this website is also energy responsive. Our software changes the styling and resolution of the media on this website according to how much energy is stored in the battery of the active server. This means it may look different at different times of the day or depending on the seasons of the year. If the battery level at the active server is low, this website is displayed in low resolution mode, without images. This reduces the size of the page and therefore the energy required to send it to people who are looking at it on the internet. If more stored energy is available, the site will appear at a higher resolution with heavier media such as images and graphics.
Occasionally the website may go down if there is insufficient energy stored at all of the servers. As our network grows and we set up more servers in more time zones and climates, this should happen less and less (and if you’re interested in setting one up, read more here). It’s always sunny somewhere!
Illustration from Astronomy by Jean Rambosson, 1875.
Towards a Natural Intelligence
The Solar Protocol network reconfigures internet protocols using a kind of natural rather than artificial intelligence. The network routes internet traffic according to the logic of the sun, where page requests are sent to whichever server is enjoying the most sunlight at the time. We are working with people around the world who have built and installed servers that host this site alongside their own web content. When their server becomes the active node of the network, their online materials (if any) will soon become visible on this site.
If intelligence is the capacity to synthesize knowledge as logic and apply that logic to make decisions, then the Solar Protocol platform relies on an intelligence that emerges from earthly dynamics: specifically that of the sun’s interaction with the Earth. Our lives have always been directed by a range of natural logics that emerge from the intermittent dynamics of our shared environment. Weather, seasons, tides and atmospheric conditions all dictate our behavior, enabling and constraining our movements, food production and cultures. Solar Protocol uses these logics to automate decisions about how the network operates and what content is shown at different times of the day. How can we learn or relearn to design with natural intelligence?
The present day imagination for the internet has been enabled by an energy regime that relies on lethal fossil fuels. And the result? An online culture that valorizes speed, self expression through ever larger media and data-driven intelligence that is requiring more and more energy. Machine learning for example, requires enormous datasets typically collected through private efforts in online digital surveillance that collect every click, keypress, view and page scroll you might make. This data is then used to train models used to automate decisions about what content to show you. These energy hungry technologies are only made possible by extractive energy systems and labor practices.
In response and by working within natural limitations, we have deliberately chosen not to use large assets nor energy-intensive tracking technologies on this website.1 A solar-powered web could reduce the opportunity for these kinds of surveillance and data-driven practices and the business models that go with them, something that is likely to have desirable political effects. As Timothy Mitchel points out in Carbon Democracy, different energy regimes create different political possibilities.2
Solar Protocol Hardware
Energy-centered Design
Solar-powered technologies catalyze a need for energy-centered design where the energetic dimension of cultural production is centered. On a solar-powered server, it is advantageous to minimize the amount of data being transmitted and it is therefore desirable to reduce the size of the media published. The intermittency of solar energy production also produces environmentally programmed downtime, where one’s server might sleep at night, or for the long evenings in the winter, demanding that you stop working and focus your attention elsewhere.
Energy-centered design is also about accountability. In building this website, we have attempted to do the computation work required to generate the visualizations on the server-side, rather than by using Javascript in the client’s browser. In other words, our servers do the heavy lifting as opposed to your computer. In this way, we are assured that these computational cycles are powered by solar rather than fossil fuels. This inverts a capitalist logic that incentivizes us to export costs to someone else somewhere else, a drive that has produced concurrent ecological crises.3 Instead, we call for new forms of cultural production that embody a politics of accountability.
Authors’ Notes
1. This approach was used by the Solar Powered Website published by Low Tech Magazine (2019) and we have taken much inspiration from this groundbreaking project.
2. See Timothy Mitchell’s book, Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil (2011), that discusses the political consequences of different energy systems.
3. Joana Moll’s Hidden Life of an Amazon User demonstrates this through the case study of buying Jeff Bezos’ book from the Amazon website. In this project she audits the eyewatering amount of computational work and energy expenditure that is outsourced to a user’s computer by the Amazon website (presumably in order to track their behaviors and show them ‘relevant’ ads).
They discussed everything in such absolutes. Dots and dashes. Rights and Lefts. An age of dark. An age of light. An age so bright it sucked up all the light like an almighty sinkhole. That’s what yesterday imagined of today. But here I am. I can see further than my nose, further than my finger tips. There’s light. I’m not in a hole. And this morning I laughed. A crow desecrated a sensor.
Sula thinks I’m obsessed with the past. I’m not. I just enjoy watching videos of yesterday’s streets. The buzz of the busy ones. The perfect shapes the light makes on the pristine ones. Mostly, I like to watch the way people moved back then – Time Square, Shibuya Crossing. All those bodies moving like suited starlings. Moving like rivers. There’s something soothing about the sterility and predictability. I once asked Sula to play city with me, cleared and carved a cross walk in the parking garden; instead, she suggested I elect tracking purple emperor butterflies for my weekly National Service. I mostly work with bryophytes and moss, they tell me how polluted the air is and whether our flighty friends will ever return to the region. Filling those spaces but in their wild and messy way.
Back in the day they called all of this the Poverty Draft, because folk hit harder – poor, Black, brown, citizens of nowhere – enlisted for the security of regular aid packets and medical insurance and promise of citizenry. But that was the in-between time, when we still had thousands of newly out of-work technologists. Now, everybody has to do their bit. ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ and all that. Some folk set up invisible markets to trade all our data sets. Maybe their long gone yesterday people were those sharp beaked suited starlings. Sula’s upgrading the weather sensor network, which is why she didn’t laugh when the crow shat on her ambient hygrometer.
Thursday 9 July
The parking garden flooded last night. It stormed. Not a mad one, but enough to sweep the dead maple tree across the old traffic light pole and down onto the worm farm. I forgot to set our industrial flood alarm.
It’s not my fault. But I can’t say this, of course. Sula is raging. Thinks we lost our harvest of turnips. I remind her that we grow them precisely because they’re resilient. She hates that word. The R word. Resilient. It was used a lot when we were kids.
She also hates the term: parking garden. I like these tethers to yesterday. The world around us is always changing, but we can still keep parts of that other time alive with language. She maintains that it was likely a garden before it was a parking lot and so, should just be called a garden. Her name means peace. There’s little peaceful about her these days.
I can trade oyster mushrooms for kit to repair everything. It’ll be fine.
I took the canoe out to check the water pesticide sensors that I mounted on the gothic lamp post beside the old library. The flood gave me an excuse to check the water turbidity measure and pesticide biosensor. I do this some times when the water hasn’t surged, when I need to see and feel something not green and wild and organic. The narrow street with the last arched stained glass window is my secret holy place. The scene itself is quite amusing – neat colourful buildings talking to neat colourful cars talking to neat happy people in a neat happy world.
The sensors didn’t really need to be installed here. Maybe this is my secret revolution too. The toxicity level was the same. Not catastrophic, not good. Sula would be a good name for the summer storms. Swirling Sulas.
Tuesday 11 August
Listened to Speakers Corner this evening. It’s everyone’s highlight of the week. A woman from one of the Southern Districts spoke about the way optimised traffic flow created pockets of pollution in zones that were deemed undesirable. Black, brown, working-class neighbourhoods. Another spoke about the resilience within these same communities – planting trees and gardens as acts of resistance.
Sula finds discussions about the perception of the past tedious. Also the future. She lives here she says and here has plenty enough to not only think about, but do. At this particular moment, she’s unspooling copper from one of those old smoothie makers. Last week someone spoke about the vast computational power needed to keep up with yesterday’s famous customer profiling systems. The things used to make people believe they needed smoothie makers. They spent more than half the show calculating how many New Doggerland Wind Farms would be needed just to power them. Sansemin could’ve made a better energy plan using less hot air. Perhaps talking about user profiling systems is still dangerous business. I asked Sula what type of user they have me profiled. She said, one that needs to come back down the earth and continue uploading my readings. It’s true here has plenty.
Maybe the sun may never shine as it does today, but I still like thinking about how it looked yesterday and what it’ll shine on many tomorrows from now.
I’m not sure what tomorrow will say about the future I imagine for them. So, maybe I’ll wish something for them instead.
Monday 23 November
Had an apple for the first time in a long while. A present from Chicken Man for helping him mill flour. Strange things have a way of arriving in his hands, but I’m more thankful for his generous heart.
Mom loved telling a story about her granny. A small woman with a heart and hands that understood the earth but were hard on people. She conjured out mango, guava, tangelo, pomegranate – things now long gone – but she was proudest of her chilies. And while she loved feeding people, she was known for meticulously removing the seeds from everything she shared.
She brought those chili seeds from her old world to a new world, and grandma took those seeds from that new world to a new new world. The earth wasn’t right when they got down to mom, so I’ve only known them as tiny gems living in a jar. Hopefully the earth will be right for them before I leave it. Wouldn’t that be something.
It’s curious how hearts contract and expand. How they can be generous and be miserly all at the same time. Last rainy season, Chicken Man’s own heart leapt out of his chest. Sula and I rushed him to Sansemin who took him to the big hospital. One of the few times I’ve been thankful for the speed of storm surges. He said they had him covered from the tip of his nose to his big toe, like the way we’re all measuring the Earth.
People used to think this kind of making or whatever was lowly work, too mundane for even a kernel of curiosity. They wanted everything but the knowing of how things worked. And maybe that’s how the planet got so sick; why yesterday could only ever conjure the deep darkness of apathy for us here today. It’s not that everything was irreparable. It’s that their hands didn’t know how to go about fixing. Making space for life – the necessary work, the mundane work. Now it’s treasure. For brokers like Sansemin, this is quite literal. But for Chicken Man, it’s the inheritance he got and the inheritance he’s leaving behind. All that time working on the offshore wind farms that powered the climate modelling systems turned into seeds and sown into me and Sula. How will I change this inheritance? Maybe it’ll be like those mushrooms that make you dream and see the magic in the small. There’s power in that too, you know.
About Superflux
Superflux creates worlds, stories, and tools that provoke and inspire us to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world. Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009, the Anglo-Indian studio’s early work brought speculative design approaches to new audiences. Over the years, the studio has gained critical acclaim for producing work that navigates the entangled wilderness of our technology, politics, culture, and environment to imagine new ways of seeing, being, and acting.
Images are of Superflux’s 2019 and 2019 installations Mitigation of Shock, and Mitigation of Shock, Singapore (respectively). Used with permission from Superflux.
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