 at the Emergent Earth Tent, I'm hugely grateful to Claudia and to Igor and to MCH for providing this platform for talking about the impact of internet and technology and hackers to the environmental sustainability and our earth. The overarching topic for my talk today is communities. So how can we join up in our efforts to contribute to the solution of our problem without being too doomsaying and pessimistic. And the most concrete thing that I want to talk about is a conference that I attended called Computing Within Limits. Oh yeah also I'm going to be lisping because I got bitten by a wasp yesterday in my tongue so it's it's it's I'm lucky that I can speak at all. So the the conference itself was an academic interdisciplinary event that actually has been happening since 2015 and this was the eighth edition also because they were disrupted by by the pandemic and I haven't been there in person ever but I've been following them closely since 2018. So this year it was a virtual event and the connection between that conference and the hackers community is that they have been talking about the topics that we have been also covering here at MCH but also there is a third community that I want to talk about which is the RIPE community because I work for the RIPE NCC as a community builder and the RIPE community also has a big overlap with both the hackers community and the academic researchers. So I'm going to come to this like from kind of three angles and since we don't have here slides or anything all the links you can find at RIPE labs which is labs.tripe.net. I have published the article there going through some of the papers that have been presented at the conference but we also have a section about sustainability and the other articles for example about how is the the flooding that consequence of the both climate change and sea level rise going to impact the data centers. So how can the data center industry prepare for the future of the two centigrade higher average global temperatures. So computing within limits yeah it's a nice conference let me just read about the conference from their own words. So as an interdisciplinary group of researchers practitioners and scholars seeking to reshape the computing research agenda grounded by an awareness that contemporary computing research is intertwined with ecological limits in general and climate and climate justice related limits in particular. 2022 submissions moved us closer towards computing system that support diverse human and non-human life forms within thriving biospheres. So that sounded wonderful like before it started and then there were great great great papers presented and also the format was super weird. They have published all the papers in advance so then the presentations were limited to ten minutes which is very short for academics and so they so there were like three three papers presented at every session so that would be like half an hour and then there was one hour discussion session in breakout groups called reverse panel. So the authors would publish some questions like what did they want audience to comment on and then the participants would have discussions between themselves and write their feedback in the collaboratively edited documents unfortunately Google docs but still so everything was published public and transparent and open and the participation was also for free so it was really nice group exercise in like really interdisciplinary you had people from social sciences, the computer science, the artificial intelligence, the activists, the artists so it was really really nice. So some of the papers that I found interesting for example strategies for degrowth computing so that's combining this concept economic concept alternative economic concept of degrowth with the research into the new development of hardware and software and how can we actually do that by sticking to the physical limits by extending the life of computers increasing the intensity of use and what what else did they say hardware repurposing software design for the lowered power requirements and so on so that actually ties up with your talk and the discussion that we had yesterday and it also like all so many talks there have mentioned something called Javons paradox which is about the how the increase in efficiency actually only leads to the increase of demand so it doesn't like the increase in efficiency which is supposed to then keep the expenditure lower doesn't happen because the more things you provide like they often give example of highways because it's just more tangible for people to kind of understand what's happening like the more highways you build it's not going to lead to less congestion or the traffic is just going to produce more traffic because people will just start using cars more and they'll be like more cars produced and people will want to move further away and more frequent and so on so the same is with the with the internet efficiency so here we are unpredictable weather patterns everybody's helping to rescue the papers and clothes from the rain I'm your reporter now if you're watching this on stream or even on the recording thank you for saving all the papers okay we go on so the next work was about calculating the carbon footprint of streaming media now this is a super controversial topic because the researchers don't agree on how can you calculate the energy expenditure of the streaming media and so the authors propose the holistic end-to-end model that balances the high level and highly detailed approach and so shit everything is getting wet so they have published that watching one hour of Netflix consumes about one kilowatt of energy which is equivalent to a passenger vehicle driving about two kilometers so now you know when you're binging on Netflix what does it mean I'm sure this conclusion will be disputed in the next versions of the of the computing within limits conference but their slides were amazing because so their paper paper is really worth downloading and looking into especially if you're interested in this because they have compared the previous research like over the many years many people are trying to calculate this and they all disagree with each other and so actually there is an upcoming conference called ACM SIGCOM in Amsterdam at the end of August and we have organized a workshop there called Building Greener Internet so one of the papers submitted to that is called 13 propositions for something like that like saving the world with green tech or whatever but that is already pre-published so it's amazing by posing all kinds of questions related to this topic so yeah I'm sure it's going to dispute this paper so the next one also very dear to my heart conceptualizing resource aware higher education digital infrastructure which is basically criticizing the fact that all the universities have outsourced their infrastructure like operating their mail servers and the document sharing or everything to unnamed huge providers of the cloud services which I don't want to promote here like let's say big five and the authors are suggesting alternative strategies for self-hosting which is kind of returned to how self hosting and and yeah super weird that we went away from that so I will read it because it's really beautiful a first quantification of a potential return to self-hosting emphasizing its effect in energy reduction and avoiding e-waste then policy actions are needed that could enable higher education institution to retake control over their digital infrastructure by building local services so this kind of ties to so many different aspects of like avoiding centralization and so on so this this mode of operation reduces waste and has the added benefit of increased resiliency to scenarios of resource scarcity and collapse of external infrastructure the architecture of a low impact data centers made upcycled hardware and resource aware software there is a significant space to reduce digital infrastructure overall resource footprint so they are proving that it's actually it's like the opposite of this claim that if you put everything in a huge data center that is more energy efficient they're saying it's not it's actually better to maintain these services locally not only for the energy efficiency but also for the resilience for the climate catastrophes like flooding and fires and we could see that like there were outages recently of the huge data centers because of the heat wave and also because of just nothing related to climate but like human mistakes like the the Canadian monopoly telco went down for several hours and it took down all the services around Canada because they all had their eggs in the same basket so emergency services were down of course mobile phones and they couldn't even publish like warning to their users that they are down because they were down and there was no alternative so yeah this this like what I just said happened after the conference so it just really proves the point that the resilience is in decentralization then there was an interesting more like a social scientist artistic paper called the richness of designing for eco social change so they they were suggesting to reframe limits to abundance of the resources that are naturally not limited like human connections human creativity and care and so this is really like intersectional feminist approach to the concepts of limits in computing so they they called it like this a fusion of care infused ecological and social sensibilities to create existential change that would impact lifestyle and political choices and technologies turning to potentially abundant human resources of imagination reflection and solidarity their example was of a hologram a feminist economies healthcare art project situated online illustrating this potential so they have been suggesting this project at so many places where events that there was a conference in Amsterdam called money labs they were suggesting this as alternative economic project they're actually presented to the hope conference when it was online in 2020 and now here at the computing within limits so I want to connect this to the like the mental health crisis that also came like to focus during the pandemic and their approach is super simple so they illustrated with like a tetra whatever pyramid or something in Greek where you have like four points one is you and three is other three of your friends and you form a certain hologram kind of a hologram and you each one of your friends has like responsibility for one aspect of your well-being and they don't have to be experts they're just your regular normal people friends and so one of them is focused on your physical man well-being the other one on your mental well-being and a third one on your social economical well-being and you meet periodically and you have a discussion about you so they go like how are you doing and then they and then they say oh yeah last last month or over last six months I see that this is happening and then you covered those three aspects and then you have a discussion like what would be good for you and that's it so it can be done in person it can be done online it can be once a week or once a month or once a year depending on what your needs are and that way you don't depend on the health providers which are also depleted and on the classical economy like you really just do this together as a community and then you expand so it's not like once then you do that for other constellations or for people groups so that's what they call hologram okay next one oh yeah I have a question have you read or seen any of those computing within limits conferences papers before just cloudy so it's super cool go check it out the link is on this behind this link it's called computing within limits together like computing within limits no if you just go to labs the trap net it's like one of the first articles if you scroll down it's called computing within limits 2022 event rap yeah so all of their papers available line I won't talk about more of them anymore I just wanted to mention these other opportunities for like combining this with other communities so as I said I'm from the ripe community and working for the ripe NCC and we have many events where you could take part and also working groups where this is relevant the ripe community functions as like a voluntary participation of mostly network operators but also other people who are interested in the global internet governance on mostly very technical level but we have been seeing over the time that the internet is not for techies and by techies only anymore so we are including more and more people in in our own community and we are of course overlapping with many different communities so if you have interest in this you can take part in different ways like in for example Internet of Things working group or something that we call cooperation working group where we cover more soft topics and like legal political social topics because normally we would only talk about BGP routing DNS IPv6 security even security is like top layers like and content is completely out of the question but actually it's not so it's kind of creeping in with with the censorship with the shutdowns and so on so these topics of sustainability have also been covered but it's really not enough focus on them so I want to invite you to take part and you can do that online we have mailing lists we are also all over different social media but we don't have like a specific channel where I can invite you to there is Telegram there's Twitter there is Facebook and Discord and stuff like that and then we have a meeting in October in Belgrade like it's a large conference there is a call for presentations open normally you would have to pay the conference fee to participate even if your speaker just like here but we also have a lot of programs that help people who cannot afford to pay several hundred euros for like three 400 euros for a week of a conference so we have academic cooperation program where the academic gets sponsored to come and take part and we also have a fellowship program where anybody can apply and then we choose who do we want to to bring there so those are the ways that you can take part in the RIPE community and then there is CCC coming up in December where we will probably meet again and they had included a lot of these topics either in the regular program when they called the conference resource exhaustion some years ago or they have a parallel like a separate conference called bits and trees in German which I will not try to pronounce Boime bits and Boime and that's happening at the beginning of October in Berlin maybe I'll have a talk I applied I didn't hear yet if it will be accepted but there will be parts of this community also there so for me the events like these regular points where we can meet up and synchronize what we are working on and for the rest there is the mailing list that I'm on together with Claudia and Igor and many other people that we kind of started in 2013 after the home conference where I for the first time got exposed to these topics and it's called uncivilization and so you can you can find the link also like deep deep deep down because following this link because it's not work related but I will write it down here anyway so it's unsafe.nl it's a personal project the website is maintained by my partner and it just leads to a wiki where there's a lot of links and and also the mailing list and squirrels so my obsession with squirrels also started by that time because I was thinking like if this what we're doing to the to the planet leads to the collapse of human society fair enough we brought it onto ourselves but what's not okay is that we bring the squirrels with us so we really I invite you to consider the squirrels when making your political and technical decisions and more concretely you can take a squirrel candy now just an illustration that was at the CCC camp also where the squirrel actually was working against the technology like revenge of the squirrels yeah okay so yeah now we have time for like discussion and your contribution are we stopping with this streaming or we continue with this I'm not saying until two o'clock that's too much yes yes thank you what do you say as a streamer because I participate at one conference there but it was not for me it was not clear what for instance you said that it was only people from academics but it was not really clear what was the you know the goal of something it was really very everywhere you you involved some organizing the limits of computing conference so I'm not involved in organizing it but they do know a lot of people who are and the the program committee is really mostly academics from a lot of different universities and it goes around it's hosted by different universities and so they try to make it as multidisciplinary as possible but still it's very how can I say like it's hard for the people who are not academics to even suggest the paper because you have to write it in that format like so even if they are artists and activists like like this project of hologram they have to kind of pair up with somebody who knows how to submit that kind of format of paper which which is okay ish like you have to work in in different groups like in a group that has multiple kind of skill sets but it does make it difficult to to join so this is one of the problems that I see across many communities they so focused on their own jargon and that there is so much translation needed between different approaches like this is academic approach and so if I would invite them to the right meeting they would be like well why should I talk to the network operators how can I talk to the network operators and the other way around if somebody from the network operators would want to submit the work here it's just so difficult to translate our way of speaking to so that's why we try to organize a join meet a workshop at the next academic conference this SIGCOM and then you have to pay a ticket like for one day workshop it's a lot of money for people who are not really getting anything out of it the same for the right meeting like when we invite speakers from outside of our community there is so many obstacles there well the same for MCH like some people found it very expensive so there is economic aspect of why this crossover is not happening so there is economic blockages the jargon and yeah yes yeah so that's why it's important to have these crossovers and to tell people like but you could take part there and the very important factor that is now making things much easier is that we are moving online so that's both like you you don't have to be there physically you don't have to travel you don't have to pay you can just use zoom for the limits for MCH for ripe like for everything like if you can't afford to go there physically either because you don't have money you don't have time you have small kids that you have to take care of you you can still participate so this is great on the other hand it's it's great to some extent because what is the cost of doing the double conference doing it in person and actually streaming everything we don't know what the cost is we think it's actually not too bad but but we don't know because partially because it's hard to calculate and partially because we don't want to know because then would do we have to cut it out like do we not meet in person or do we not stream it and yeah it's it's really hard but I think I think people would be more comfortable if you know for sure what the cost is of your action that you could act on on your cost so that's this kind of things what I expected also from the limits of computing and you know I didn't know anything about it and I wanted the conference that was a conference and I was like puzzles and and because I really expected something very practical in this way it is practical that they do have a paper published on like you know one hour of streaming doesn't matter if it's Netflix or this costs like driving a car for two kilometers so some people would but then is it individual or not like does it take hundred people does it does the cost decrease if just one person is watching the stream or there's thousand people watching the stream is it still thousand times two kilometers or is it divided by thousand people and what is the cost of storing it so that other thousand people can see it five years from now in the data center which has to then run 24 seven so that maybe on an off-chain somebody is going to want to watch this video and if I have to say like don't store this because I don't want to kill the squirrels because somebody might want to watch me on a video five years from now does it matter like does it like does it is it going to switch off the the data center for five minutes so that my video won't be stored there it's it and it's not about personal cost I think it's really about the systemic yeah but to to to access at a personal level when you do something you want to know you know what's the what's what's my you know ecologic footprint here in this action and would really help on a lot of things also to to to allow people to make decisions I think that it is part of denial that that that we enjoy I personally also enjoy because and somebody else in some other presentation said recently like one of the oh it was elvin one of the answers is like but we need more measurements no we don't we know it's too much we don't know how much how much too much it is but it's definitely too much and and and then the then the follow-up action would be but let's not do it but I don't want to say that because I enjoy too much it's also like I was reading a paper about like the mechanisms emotional mechanisms towards for emotions towards climate change one of the most used to mechanism seems to be so well I don't know if I say well that you minimize your cost but the thing is like everything you know you you're leaving it's it's it's too much so we have to make like a more informed choice but with less parallel paralysis because this causes paralysis but if you if you can choose you know no only more you know you don't have to read very very well as specific as possible but you you know it leaves you some emotional space to make good decisions yeah okay I'd like to pass the mic to other people yes I really I would like to have the name of the paper that you mentioned about that self-hosting is more efficient because I have been told that yeah no people should go to the cloud and it's also more green and I've been teaching people that because people explain it to me like yeah you share the resources and I thought that sounds nice but so I was also wondering maybe if you could elaborate a little bit more now or someone else if they have more information about it so this specific paper is called conceptualizing resource aware higher education digital infrastructure it's a very long title but you can find it back through through this link and or just computing within limits the main author is L and jelly so you can look it up that way and of course it is controversial like that they probably had their own favorite outcome and they did the research towards that on the other hand it's not only about economic like energy efficiency but it's there are other elements in like why the self-hosting is better than outsourcing everything to the cloud so they probably took those things into account and and what I like about it is the ethical aspects which is avoiding the consolidation towards few actors avoiding the loss of autonomy and not delegating your sustainability choices to a third party so that's that's worth something too even if the energy efficiency aspects are questionable but I think they also mentioned because they are academics they mentioned other papers within their paper so then you can look like look it up cross-reference and like choose your own bits to confirm your own decisions because yeah that is the beauty and and the tragedy of all this like academic research like there is so much knowledge and so much information that proves anything and then we still have to choose anybody else no I want to finish on a nice note let me see how oh yeah no well let me talk about some more interesting ones so there was something about solar protocol exploring energy-centered design and then an interesting one called smart enough or too smart about smart cities so like that's very IOT yeah within the IOT topics and but of course they brought it up with the intersectionality to a different aspect which is saying how all these smart devices actually replace or aiming to replace the emotional labor so they call that social reproduction so how does this technological solution actually impact the areas in our life that that do not have to be governed by the internet of things or things at all so and then they also mentioned the concept of digital circuits circuits of dispossession so what does it take away from us leaving the decision-making to algorithms and things so yeah I'm having goosebumps it's really like science fiction material but then in reality oh yeah and a very very cool project or paper about that I thought would fit in the MCH so well it was called omni food exploring the possibilities of a consumer system with obi ubiquitous access to data about the food we eat so making choices based on the artificial intelligence machine learning things and stuff about what you eat by so they did it in Sweden and they they had several methods of getting to that goal which is intercepting the data between your hand held scanner and the computer that like produces your bill like how much you have to pay for for the things you bought by also printing the ecological footprint information about every item with color coding and like looking it up in the databases which are open and just saying like well this avocado traveled from Brazil to Sweden or this meat has been grown locally so it is meat so that's like really bad but at least it didn't travel from whatever like Holland and so that that's one way and then the other way was when you order things online and then it like shows you you know what you're going to buy and stuff and then it also shows you like this is the ecological footprint yeah impact yeah where I live that is ecological supermarkets that's labeling the foods on the real price of the foods you buy which is very cool yeah so so there is there is work to be done in this area but it is also a lot of I'm sorry else I'll swear in Dutch me renoken because it's like you don't really have to know how expensive that meat is it's just too expensive like on the planet like so the same like what I'm saying like with the technology like we say we need more measurements but actually we know the answer but we just don't like it you know it's also kind of I think it's a kind of shaming people also but it works you know I don't know everything that works it's I really welcome you know if you buy something they say well okay you buying feel ashamed to buy something that's gonna destroy everything you like no yeah like Tesla okay let me let me read some of these slides because it's actually hard but just to end on a like more tech related so how to do the degrowth computing extend the useful lives of computers reuse instead of recycling reuse as energy storage like information batteries and make out Tarkic systems whatever that means you can you can look up like the details there then use computers more extensively so share the unused time broadly define computers so like consider all the things that actually have computing power in them but we don't really think of them as computers but they actually are and then use all the other tips for that and create the low-powered standardized smaller footprint devices and then the third was the growth design so consider these degrowth in the software engineering use the flexible computing with the view of intermittent energy so if you have the like renewable energy sources they do not give consistent energy so design for that in the design stage and then use the open design and the right to repair and the use the degrowth for the hardware engineering so not don't wait until you actually have a hardware that can do certain things and then try tweaking software for it but use the engineering of hardware with the degrowth in mind from the beginning but a lot of these are kind of contradictory because that would mean designing new hardware but the first one was reuse the existing hardware so they have to be considered in the balance of what what is available and what your goal is so this is where I want to end and thank you very much for participation and thanks thanks a lot for your insights and we have also wiki it's emergent.earth so you can I'm going to to add all the information that what all what happened here but you'll of course it's a wiki you can also you know contribute to the wiki thank you