The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud

The screens are bright with words. They could be emails, hastily scrawled on smart devices, or messages exchanged between friends or families. Millions of people flock to binge their favorite television programming, watch pornography, or play online games on this same river of the digital, all in the name of looking up the meaning of obscure words.

All of the complexity of the internet is contained within infinitely complex strings of bits. As they travel across time and space at the speed of light, the dense packets of information, instructions for characters or frames, which are thinner than human hairs, will unfold to create the digital veneer before you know it. The words you are reading can be seen as a point of entry into the ethereal realm called the Cloud.