Digital Negative Commons
Characteristics
Translated from [1].
Alexandre Monnin:
"Digital technologies are what José Halloy calls zombie technologies: technologies whose metabolism is fundamentally incompatible with what we have learned over recent decades about how the Earth system functions.
We can characterize them in several ways.
First, they rely on stocks of non-renewable materials — minerals, metals, and metalloids — that must be extracted from the Earth's subsurface. This is already difficult and is likely to become increasingly so. It is very difficult to determine precisely when extraction will become impossible, because exploration continually reveals new reserves. Reserves are depleted when we do not explore, while known reserves change with exploration and with the technical and economic conditions of extraction. But at some point, this process may become increasingly difficult. We should be relying more on renewable resources rather than finite stocks.
Second, these technologies have relatively short functional lifespans, despite requiring extraordinarily sophisticated technical processes to manufacture them. Producing semiconductor chips, for example, is an extremely high-tech activity. It has even become the subject of geopolitical conflict: the United States does not want the expertise of a Dutch company to be transferred to China. These devices are certainly not products of low technology.
Finally, these components are manufactured using gallium, germanium, indium, and many other metals from the periodic table that do not participate in the major biogeochemical cycles, such as the carbon cycle. They therefore persist as waste for years and years, especially because recycling remains very limited, particularly for metals dispersed throughout digital equipment.
We talk about recycling materials that are not entirely recyclable, or that require energy to recycle. This is a false circularity: circularity that is possible only by investing substantial amounts of energy. And when materials are used in a dispersed way, as metals are in digital devices, even more energy is needed. Otherwise, recycling simply does not work, and we do not do it.
Taking materials from beneath the Earth's surface, making them function for a very short period, and then returning them to the environment in a form that will persist for tens of thousands of years is the opposite of the cycle we ought to establish. It is the opposite of a cyclical metabolism. When this process is scaled up to an enormous level, it becomes problematic in every respect.
This is not viable at the civilizational scale of thousands of years — the timescale on which José Halloy tries to think, and one that is generally absent from our own thinking.
If our civilization becomes digital, while we know that we cannot realistically project the continued existence of digital technology over thousands of years, there is necessarily a contradiction somewhere."