---
schema_version: "library-reader-v1"
source_type: "original_book"
title: "The Stack On Software and Sovereignty"
author: null
edition: null
publisher: null
year: null
isbn: "9780262029575"
library_document_id: "24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341"
source_sha256: "9ce65d410e7e1630d3751064df8dca7be548b331423b3bb82e47c29fb5ab6d96"
pdf_physical_page_count: 517
pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0
range_start: 100
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341?start=100&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=100&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=90&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=110&limit=10"
---
# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=100 | PRINTED_PAGE=84
Framing lines, separate or conjoined, subdivide the ground or link points together. A plurality of lines, both dividing and linking at once, might fold on itself in various ways and in these overlaps create irregular twisty grids, populated by air pockets of various sizes and identity, inside or outside, enclaves and exclaves. Lines are agents of geopolitical form and their various types (e.g., lines of flight, lines of intensification, lines of transformation and subdivision) curve into the frames that present geopolitics to itself: the border, fenestration, aperture, plan, section, elevation, orifice, capital city, special economic zone, demilitarized zone. 28 When the nomic line that partitions polities from one another is looped, it too becomes a frame, and as a form of geopolitical design, these arrange and present political geography. For contemporary governance, the simultaneous unwinding and reinforcement of modern jurisdiction, and its fragile pairing of geography and law in mutually validating representational systems, hopes to organize the world according to certain framings, and it defends its drawings with force. As a nomic technique, these generate and enforce jurisdictional conventions and exclude alternatives. 29 For example, however inspired or misguided the Mountbatten Plan may have been, the partition of India was a design decision, and the image and map of the region that would result was constituent of a specific design imaginary. 30 Scaling from one line to a whole system, the looping segmentations of the Westphalian model are bolstered into a geopolitical architecture, as are the sectional planes of our more vertical Stack. This compositional geopolitics has its own history filled with frames and topographies projected variously into the past and future as much as onto real living territory. Especially at the Interface layer, we will see that the violence of presentation and preemptive representation — projection as territory and territory as projection — is the engine of any Stack geopolitics, inherited or invented, at work now or to come later. Again, authority and its authorship can speak only to what it can see and sense, and in turn what it can measure, and so geopolitics and geoscopy are always bound up with one another. 31 The Stack works within given geographic limits and draws new geographies with those limits. While landscapes have direct physical agency (that is, “ geography, ” as in “ Montesquieu credits the rise of the West to geographical advantage, such as not having to govern wide flat expanses such as the Great Steppe ” ), 32 we are as interested in another connotation, per Grosz, one more like geo-graphy, as in “ earthwriting ” or “ earth-drawing. ” Specifically this geo-graphy is both a kind of writing of space and of expressing, communicating, politicizing compositional images of terrain as a precondition of the social and technical construction of spaces to be defended. For there to be any kind of abstract jurisdiction — secular, sacred, national, networked — there has to be a figure of space through which force can work at all. Schmitt ’ s concept of the nomos is one establishment of this, but geography more generally frames the referent over which any governing, compositional, projective frame seeks authority, and here Grosz ’ s animalian frame becomes a basis of geopolitical constitution. Geography , in this sense, is a specific kind of relationship between world and image , in that it is itself both an image of the world and a real rendering of physical landscape according to that representation. Its force and coherence are based in both the abstract image and the physical world as they refer to one another, and in the course of real politics, by their mutual conjoining into one defensible inscription. 33
84
Earth Layer
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=101 | PRINTED_PAGE=85
This process demonstrates that geography, geoscopy, and geopolitics are also related to the more ambitious and ambiguous operations of geoaesthetics. The composability of the Earth, as both figure and ground, mark and canvas, long precedes the global geometries of The Stack, but the latter inevitably still draws on many varied precedent gestures. Scores of ancient geoglyphs dot landscapes on all continents, carved into the skin of the planet or assembled with rocks put in lines for the viewing benefit of aerial audiences: deities, birds, skies, and whatever else might be observing from the top of the world. Landscape is given a face. 34 The advent and eventual predominance of formal agriculture permanently refixed that face ’ s expression, helped to geoengineer the Holocene climate, and with this terraforming also brought the archaic state and urban settlement. If viewed from the sky by the geoglyphs ’ audiences, agricultural megastriations might allow for a legible index of the accumulating distribution of different genres of biogovernance as distributed across the sphere; that is, different typologies of political form can be interpreted by differences in their physical landscapes viewed as geo-graphic drawings. In dialogue with the new externalized perspectives of the space age, this was not lost on art and design, and the very early years of planetary computation and global media (approximately 1964 to 1975) saw an explosion of land art, earthworks, and speculative megastructural architecture. For example, the Italian studios Archizoom and Superstudio made some of the most durable megastructural gestures from inside architectural discourse, while the American artist Robert Smithson left a body of work linking geoglyphic-scale sculpture with generative cinema 35 and cartographic semiotics with anarchist geography (his “ mapping dislocations ” ). 36 In these works, we see visual inscriptions into landscapes and images of those inscriptions blending into the same pottery, such that real drawing into the ground and the image of the drawing can swap places; the land becomes an image and the image becomes territorial, both of them equally infrastructural. This conduction between the two is by no means exclusive to institutional art and design and belongs to computation just as dearly. In 1968 Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders took the famous “ Earthrise ” photograph, which would become among the most iconic and influential portraits of the whole planet Earth, and as for any island utopia, the totality of the singular figure of the Earth against a black abyss, here seen from specific external position on the moon, would invite projects of total design. 37 This image map from the “ outside ” reframed the very figurability of territorial ground as such and suggested a single, absolute scale for Earthly culture and ecology and a single planetary “ inside. ” 38 That figure inspired as well the popular ecology movement by providing it a self-evident domain to conserve, commune, or administer.
Earth Layer
85
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=102 | PRINTED_PAGE=86
Today, that same apparently same self-evident image of totality also serves as a graphical user interface to personal mapping applications that are based on satellite observations of all locations within the image-territory. Google Earth, for example, is a meta-interface into an archaeological view of the virtual frozen present of a planet comprehensively available to vision, but also largely devoid of animal bodies. It frames an Earth mostly deserted by humans who have left behind empty cities. For Google Earth, both the image and the interface promise an absolute frame; a metaframe of frames and their collaborative geopolitical ambition is derived from that promise. By zooming in and out across relative scales, the global image becomes a total site condition, one for which infrastructure-as-monument is apparently the most appropriate measure of intervention at any given resolution. 39 However, the territorial politics of Google, as discussed in the Cloud chapter, resides less in what is seen than what is not seen, and in how the not-seen allows the seen to override other jurisdictional inscriptions and partitions.
86
Earth Layer
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=103 | PRINTED_PAGE=87
19. From Global Surface to Planetary Skin
The Stack ’ s visual geography amplifies economies of mutual simulation between land, image, and interface by redefining the surface of the Earth as a living and governable epidermis, and recomposing that skin as a bio-informational matrix enrolled into other hard and soft systems. As a landscaping machine, The Stack combs and twists settled areas into freshly churned ground, enumerating input and output points and rerendering them as glassy planes of pure logistics. It wraps the globe in wires, making it into a knotty, incomplete ball of glass and copper twine, and also activates the electromagnetic spectrum overhead as another drawing medium, making it visible and interactive, limning the sky with colorful blinking aeroglyphs. 40 The Stack walls off whole layers of that spectrum for private purposes by optimizing it through finer and finer atmospheric grids, turning location into geolocation and geolocation into application engineering. Its image of infrastructure and the infrastructure of the image flip-flop their respective works, repositioning geoscopy as geoaesthetics and geoaesthetics as geoeconomics. For example, the Earth layer also situates a network of telescopes “ looking out ” into space from many positions at once, so as create a composite “ false ” image of a portion of the universe. This technique, known as very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), creates a single discontiguous machine distributed among many countries, useful only if it is operated across multiple time zones at once. As a Stack geographic machine, Google Earth can be thought of as an inverse of VLBI, in that it looks inward instead of outward to create a composite “ false ” image of the distributed surface of the Earth by integrating the perspectives of multiple orbital satellite perspectives into one (interactive) visual totality. Standing for a global domain drawn in place, this mosaic draws Earth ’ s skin as an island to be measured and mastered. As it builds on the Apollo 8 image of figure and void, Google Earth amplifies it into a general-purpose application interface through which the User layer and Earth layer of The Stack seem to inform one another directly. 41 Here the geoaesthetics of Stack geo-graphy displays ecology as an archive to be indexed, cataloged, and sorted, and only then acted on (and as discussed in the Interface chapter, that archive is also made into an interface toward itself, provoking User-initiated feedback loops between icons and events).
Such Stack geographies both complicate and clarify the design of platform sovereignty, as much for what they make possible as for what they disrupt. Google ’ s mission statement, “ to organize the world ’ s information and to make it universally accessible and useful, ” changes meaning when the world itself is seen as being information, such that to organize all the information is to organize all the world. Furthermore, synthetic computation expands what is sensed, measured, calculated, communicated, stored, and worked on. That is, the ascendance of digital computing from a narrowly deployed, elite scientific-military instrument into a general-purpose planetary-scale consumer infrastructure shifting what states (and other systems of governance) can see, know, and affect, transforms it into an organ of organizational cognition. As sensing extends to all specific surfaces, no longer dumb but rather now affective, the net sum of spaces opened up or closed off by computation largely defines what it is that any governance platform now chooses to sense and not to sense in general. The information that is sensible to it is more often that not on the surfaces of the territory, intensifying governmental focus on them. Skin, after all, is the largest sensory organ of any animal body, composed of multiple dermal and epidermal layers holding organs together and mediating multiple layers of individual interiority and exteriority (the governance of skin will also figure prominently in the City chapter — in that case, urban skins and envelopes). 42
Earth Layer
87
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=104 | PRINTED_PAGE=88
The extrapolation of planetary surfaces as epidermis has been inextricably linked with the conceptualization of climatic measurement and prediction. Global climate and weather systems have long been a driving application for planetary instrumentation and the understanding of the globe as a “ vast machine. ” 43 The interdependence between the image of infrastructure and the infrastructure of the interfacial image is exemplified as the systems logic of a geographic, bio-informational, planetary-scale epidermal sensing and computation megastructure by — who else? — the Planetary Skin Institute. For this project, the living and breathing geoepidermis is surveyed through a proposed meta-instrumentation of the biosphere into a totally available archived present, open to interested intervention, collaborative management, and quantified governance. Originally launched cooperatively in 2009 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Cisco Systems, and now an independent nonprofit research and development platform, Planetary Skin sought to integrate data from many sources into a single, branded geoadministrative mechanism. An internal Cisco white paper describes Planetary Skin as “ an open network platform for real-time, highly distributed mass remote sensing, authentication, risk-profiling, certification and monitoring of carbon stocks and flows that generates trust and enables collaboration between actors in all three sectors (industry, government, academia). ” Its ultimate ambition is to provide an open and comprehensive multiconstituent platform for monitoring and governing planetary biological-ecological systems, with particular emphasis on water distribution and carbon quantification (ultimately to support pricing of these reserve currencies, we imagine). One early pilot project, Rainforest Skin, would measure the total quantity of carbon contained within the planet ’ s rain forests, perhaps the most immediately leverageable carbon governance opportunity and where carbon dioxide sinks are concentrated but threatened by land misuse. The project would combine data sets drawn from “ geo-referenced satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and multiple ground based sensor networks to estimate the forest ’ s carbon stock and flow dynamics, so as to allow for trading and risk management of this new commodity. ” 44 Stack-scale initiatives such as Planetary Skin (and there are many others) certainly qualify as frames in Grosz ’ s sense, as they frame the totality of Earth at once so as to identify and track strategic chemical subroutines, such as carbon flows, and to present these totalities back to the whole. This sort of speculative megacomputation is but one way that geoscopy, geography , and geopolitics blur and blend into amalgamated images, territories, and governmental techniques and is but one way that The Stack composes the Earth layer.
88
Earth Layer
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=105 | PRINTED_PAGE=89
The Planetary Skin Institute ’ s tagline, “ You can ’ t monitor what you can ’ t measure, ” is a good motto for the big data society, should it ever be clarified at some point in the process who is and isn ’ t “ you. ” As Planetary Skin describes its plans, “ you ” are likely drawn from among the usual stakeholders of technocrats, academics, nongovernmental organizations, consultants, and so on. 45 The likely effect of this initiative, however, were it or something like it ever fully realized, would not merely extend or consolidate the arrangement of zero-sum governance as we currently know it, but would inevitably introduce other compound subjects and objects, some human and some not, and elevate them from object to subject in uncertain ways. A benefit of these initiatives would not only be the quantification of a status quo, but ultimately to break ground for alternative norms and constitute (or at least support) another medium of governance over the biosystems that it ( “ we ” ) can measure and monitor. “ Planetary Skin, ” or some similar descendant platform might connect with existing governmental and nongovernmental biopolitical authorities, supporting, augmenting, superseding them and, through ecumenical platform interoperability, would ultimately become itself a governing authority. Through neutral simulation-visualization of ground-level patterns on which any large-scale carbon trading markets would depend, a platform like this could quantify the carbon stocks that might be traded or sequestered, as well as validate treaty verifications or violations. This would help turn matter into money by providing a kind of financial transparency — in this case, of financialized molecules. Like many other platform projects emblematic of the Stack ’ s incorporation of the Earth as a layer, it would convene political authority not by starting from scratch, but by remeasuring, reframing, and reinstrumentalizing some already existing geographic whole. They generate comprehensive quantifications of processes and patterns that, to the extent that they operate as intended, also take on the effective force of law within an expanded ecopolitical jurisdiction even if their claims are not ratified by states (Westphalian or post-Westphalian) to do so. Furthermore, as these metatechnologies of ecological observation have become necessary to even perceive the contours of ecological risk, they also enter directly into the programmatic center of planetary governance as such. This is not Internationalism, however. The force of platforms is different, for example, from the “ ecoglobalism ” feared by conspiratorial isolationists, all spittle-lipped over “ Agenda 21 ” (the conspiracy theory that has the United Nations introducing Green totalitarianism through the Trojan horse of bicycle lanes) in that there is, according to design at least, no central commanding body outside the architecture of the platform itself. 46 Such platforms, in principle, may even work, for better or worse, to undermine forms of political centralization, even those that they themselves do not or cannot calculate or articulate. That said, nothing is certain. A transference of sovereignty from the declared self-interest of whoever counts as a citizen into the calculation of carbon and energy also links one inhale and another exhale, even across continents, and in doing so guarantees at the very least indecipherable accounting paradoxes.
Earth Layer
89
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=106 | PRINTED_PAGE=90
Computation is training governance to see the world as it does and to be blind like it is. If, over time, something sees for the state, on behalf of the state and in place of the state, it does so by seeing as a state, or by seeing as something the state has not yet become but would become once it ’ s trained by these same new tools of perception and blindness. As the state involves new techniques into itself, those techniques also absorb, displace, and diminish the state by controlling access to unique jurisdictions that the state cannot otherwise possibly comprehend without their help. While it extends jurisdictionality, The Stack also confiscates and multiplies it. It doesn ’ t merely accelerate or open up governance as currently configured; it invents substitutions as alternate jurisdictions appear, linking cellular biology to computational geopolitics, some enduring for seconds, others perhaps for many centuries. Macroscopic platforms such as Planetary Skin frame Earth as a competitive archive sorted into a quantifiable past, an atemporal surficial now, and predictive virtualizations of its futures from which models and simulations, its preferred instruments of governance, can be derived. Through these, opacity and privacy are redefined by a spectacle of transparency, as the platform ’ s authority is based on the quantity and quality of its data and from the means to translate that stash into simulations of error-corrected pasts, presents, and futures. From Cisco, NASA, Google, and others, data are available for free or on a subscription basis and provided with an invitation to innovate vertical markets with their tools, because geoepidermal megastructures such as these realize their political value through the immediate and potential events they can sense and their economic value through the currencies they can verify for their Users, and so they are themselves dependent on enabling Users to actively engage platform interfaces and to act back on the materials they represent. Platforms are machines as well as maps (an “ engine, not a camera ” ). 47 They are media with which to compose things not just to measure them, and so the slogan “ You can ’ t monitor what you can ’ t measure ” may need to be revised to include the Foucauldian line, “ You can ’ t modify what you can ’ t monitor, ” or even, “ You can ’ t not modify whatever it is that you sense. ”
Today this and other geoscopic situations are provided to us by Stack infrastructures of orbiting satellites — artificial constellations — connected to terrestrial networks. Instrumenting the planet in this way has not only allowed for a more finely grained geography; it has also physically altered the very scale of the Earth ’ s gradient body, altering what it measures as the Holocene atmospheric membrane has been augmented by a crust of smart satellites and dumb garbage. The planet ’ s natural equatorial diameter is roughly 12,756 kilometers, and if one were to include the celestial atmospheric firmament, that would be nearer to 13,000 kilometers. However the ring of communications technologies, in geosynchronous orbit every twenty-four hours, linking points on Earth ’ s surface to one another and self-locating the whole sphere in its lonely void, forms another outer membrane extending the measurement to 36,000 kilometers. Are they not also part of Earth ’ s body? As a whole, satellite observation technology has vastly inflated the physical geometrics of the observed planet, but it has compressed the conceptual spaces of relative distance as well. As surely as The Stack generates new spaces, does it also ensure a certain erasure of other worlds ? This is, as noted, a common refrain for critiques of modernity, from both Right and Left, and Virilio has written scores of texts providing a negative apologetics of globalization and the subsumption of the continuity of the Earth into the omnivorous universalisms of cyberinfrastructure. For his eschatology, the “ world ” is a tragic casualty of its appearance in digital images of itself. 48 It cannot survive this manner of testimony. It is shrunken, eaten, defamed by its reduction to a plateau of digitalized time. Whereas difference and analogy are naturally functions of distance, in the instantaneousness of global information the landscape of distances has collapsed, and so for Virilio digital space is dark matter, one that instead of expanding and elongating real distances instead flattens the space of analogy into the simultaneity of network time. There are other, and better, judgments of these accelerations, displacements, elongations, migrations, vectors, lines, and links. Can they be drawn without replicating the terms of reduction that any truly living image would need to escape? Is this what is most starkly absent from Google Earth ’ s transformation of the map into the Interface? In that the diagrams and visualizations of the networked totality are also, to varying degrees, cosmograms (figures of the whole of the universe and Earthly situation), what intrinsic violence does the speed of interactivity do to the depth or depthlessness of the global space that it models? What can we do with these pictures of the data that the world secretes, and what do they want from us ultimately? These questions are themselves some of the productive accidents of the Earth layer of The Stack.
90
Earth Layer
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=107 | PRINTED_PAGE=91
The technologies we use to measure and monitor the Earth have increased the objective scale of the planet and have shown us real pictures of the cosmic abyss that might (should) crack open our little primate skulls, but in doing so have also collapsed the phenomenal scale of our sense of habitat. In its paired world-making and world-erasure projects, the Earth layer of The Stack will have introduced equal measures of numinous insight and atonal banality. 49 Our argument, however, is that like the turn away from geocentrism and toward heliocentrism (still very much an incomplete turn for the superstitious norms of humanist geopolitics), the platformization of the Earth layer will, in net sum, provide for greater “ worlds ” than it erases. That said, the design program ahead is full of twists and turns.
Earth Layer
91
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=108 | PRINTED_PAGE=92
20. Smart Grid: Ouroboros
As biological economies are dependent on energy economies, so biopolitics is dependent on the polities of energy. 50 Projects like Planetary Skin attempt to ensure one sort of compatibility between energy and biology by modeling their computational equivalence. Not only is carbon priced according to its negative costs, but the chemistry of life-forms that absorb carbon dioxide and ameliorate those costs is quantified and qualified as a valuable “ service. ” Rainforests, mangroves, and sea grasses eat the gaseous excrement of industrialization, and for this they and their legal custodians are perhaps due rent. Geophysics itself is thus made into a form of material labor, and its surpluses are enumerated, invested, exchanged, collateralized. But the Earth layer is not only where energy is monitored; it also the source and provisioner of the brute energy to run the other layers of The Stack; it is the bedrock stratum where energy economies produce the networkable electrons necessary to animate the machines above, fabricated in steel, cement, plastic, silicon, and flesh. Regardless of its source (solar, nuclear, compressed natural gas, wind, hydrothermal, coal) or the network architecture of its industrial generation and distribution (from massively centralized, like a nuclear fission power plant, to informal and decentralized, like an off-the-grid solar panel cluster), energy dictates the variability of human settlements and their ultimate risks, costs, and benefits. Our design interest therefore is not aligned with a notional sustainability conceived as conservative homeostasis, but with the force routes of a disequilibrium that reverberate through matter and transform the world in creative rhythms, slow and fast, including especially its plastics and fleshes.
The Cloud layer, just above the Earth layer in The Stack, makes epic, rapidly expanding energy demands (the total carbon footprint of the world ’ s data centers has already surpassed that of the airline industry and is presumed to triple by 2020), and so risk is not hard to find. Data centers are located to mitigate cost and uncertainty, away from likely natural disasters, in proximity of cheap or clean energy sources, diverse power grid interconnects, favorable land use zoning, and inexpensive intermediate bandwidth, for example. 51 Because there is no planetary computational economy that is not first a planetary energy economy, the limits to growth for The Stack are not only Moore ’ s law and Shannon ’ s law (accelerating the speed of processors and squeezing more information into existing channels) but also, and perhaps foremost, to secure the energy necessary to power those data centers, smart cities, homes, cars, roads, smart objects, and phones, as well as the real costs (or benefits) of doing so at the expense of other infrastructure, like new roads and buildings. 52 In principle, there is a potentially virtuous correlation at work for innovation across computation and energy sectors, and the gamble on that potential is another generative accident of the Earth layer. The continuing growth of The Stack and the computationally intensive transformation of energy sourcing and distribution infrastructures on which it depends likely cannot occur without one another. The architectures of new energy-information networks, including so-called smart grids, require pervasive computational systems to realize necessary gains in the timely, efficient, and equitable distribution of megawatts of energy across networks. For this, each point in the grid that might produce or consume energy, which is in principle pretty much anywhere and anyone, must not only be able to store or transmit that energy, but also to calculate and communicate its activities to platforms that steer the whole. All electrons must pass through the angelic regime of recording and optimization, but today such grids are slow to come online. 53 Their politics are filled with inertia and gamesmanship, and, moreover, the underlying physics is uncooperative; electrons do not work “ like bits ” no matter what your smart city consultants are saying. At the same time, The Stack itself depends on new energy grids to feed and undergird its growth. It requires a conjoined-twin energy-information network that can generate, calculate, and allocate those usable electrons point-to-point. Absent a radical relaxation of energy scarcity by renewable sources, the finely grained electron sorting between points of production and consumption must be realized at global scale or the growth of planetary-scale computation will hit physical energy limits and will stall. 54 A more scalable grid of electrons needs to be wrapped inside and around The Stack ’ s Earth layer. In short, planetary-scale computation needs smart grids to grow, and for smart grids to grow, they need more ubiquitous computation. The computational future of energy and the infrastructural program of computation form such a coil, one end feeding on the other like Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail.
92
Earth Layer
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=109 | PRINTED_PAGE=93
Whether or not the risks associated with the energy costs of Stack infrastructure will outpace the efficiencies provided by calculative technologies as they become pervasive across industrial sectors is unknown, and probably unknowable at the moment. Prognostications vary from measured good news to very bad news. According to a Greenpeace report on cloud computing and climate change, the electricity consumed by cloud computing globally will increase from 632 billion kilowatt-hours (0.6 terawatts) in 2007 to 1,963 billion kilowatt-hours (1.9 terawatts) by 2020, and the associated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions would reach 1.034 megatons (currently the world economy ’ s total energy appetite is roughly 15 terawatts). If imagined as an emergent nation-state, the Cloud would be today the fifth largest consumer of electricity, ahead of India, Germany, Canada, France, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. But even this doesn ’ t fully capture the climatic and ecological impact of planetary computation.
The extraction of mineral resources to manufacture and dispose of devices and hardware can be extremely destructive in its own right. For their part, data centers are estimated to represent only 20 percent of the information computing technologies (ICT)
Earth Layer
93
下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341.md?start=110&limit=10)