As I walked around the new neighborhood, I noticed that many homeowners who had a garage did not park their car inside. A garage is the heaven of almost everything. A junkyard with a homey feel. I remember I once introduced the English buzzword “carbage” to my Chinese young readers. Carbage, a blended word of “car” and “garbage,” shows a phenomenon that some car owners dump the junk in their cars to a degree that the driver’s seat is almost buried under the trash. Have you seen the scene in films and TVs when the junk spills out as soon as the rider opens a car door? That is carbage. This is consumerism that is not environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. It was more than twenty years ago when I first came across the word “carbage.” Now, we have “cloudage,” as I coin it. We store almost everything non-material in the cloud until the contents disappear in our fading memory.
According to IBM’s cloud learn lab, cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers, data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more. What this definition does not include is it will cost users money to store what it used to be free to store in our human brains or the local drives of a computer. If you find your photos taken with a cell phone are so big that they can be used for a magazine cover, that’s because the camera on the phone is preset for large pixel images. The default big size is a clever way, in my opinion, to stimulate cloud users to buy bigger cloud storage plans.
If internet data is as important to human life as fresh air is, why do the prices of mobile data in the US go up annually and biannually? Shouldn’t the more people use a product and service, the price of it goes down? Online data storage, if not managed well, will become like the upward trend of home values over time. It cost money to store digital assets. Can poor people afford it? The only way I try to make sense of it is the high price of US mobile data and phone bill could serve as a constant reminder of a use-less-save-more lifestyle. That’s what I mean by sustainable retreat.
From “carbage” to a potential of “cloudage,” our personal junkyard changes from a car to cyberspace. This progress happens in my lifetime as quickly as the Earth’s warming temperature disrupts my livelihood. When carbage was a buzzword, I was an editor for an English-Chinese bilingual magazine in China. Reading letters from readers was what I cherished at work. Tens of thousands of enthusiastic English learners across China wrote to the magazine with feedbacks and inquiries. These letters, I mean, real snail mails with stamps on them, are equivalent to today’s comments on the social media platforms. Some letters are several pages long and written with well-crafted language and drawings. I responded to them selectively. Today’s editorial life I imagine is probably to engage with viewers—not readers any more as print journalism dies and stream media rises—on social media platforms. Like cleaning carbage, I’m clearing my mind as I go down my memory lane.
If you haven’t lived in the age of writing letters, it’s hard for you to imagine how people valued and maintained respectful communication on the page. Letter writing stimulates both the writer and the recipients’ minds and hearts. You may ask your older friends, parents and grandparents about how those days of letter writing were like. Perhaps you might find it as fascinating as I read the computer-generated poetry. It’s not necessary that the state-of-the-art technology outweighs the old-fashioned alternative. Improve what we have with the Earth’s warming temperature in mind is, in my opinion, better than digitalizing almost every facet of our life without weighing in how the change impacts on the Earth’s health. Today, even the Salvation Amy, Goodwill and alike are finicky about the description of used goods. Many used goods, some of which are new but old-fashioned, have to end up in the landfills because they are not accepted by charities or it’s not convenient for the owners to reuse and recycle them.
Take letter writing as an example, if we compare the lifespan of biodegradable pens and paper to an up-to-date computer program that can create effective and coherent letter writing, which one do you think consumes less energy and cost less from design to disposal? Texting is comparable to mass production of restrained conversations. Mass production kills individuality. Like letter writing, many crafty activities have become obsolete partly because they are falsely compared with efficiency and convenience. Today’s e-communication increases speed and quantity. As for quality and effectiveness, I have my reservation.
Reduce and reuse is more pragmatic than spending blindly on digital in response to green washing. Older folks that I met both in the US and China have this in common: When they were young, they reused and repaired many everyday items such as shoes, jackets and umbrellas. Today, we hardly can see a repair shop for cameras and furniture. I’m often told that some home appliances are cheaper to replace than repair them. Mobile phone manufacturers do not keep parts of old models after a few years. If old models of your electronics cannot be repaired and reused, the manufacturer is green washing. Whether it’s letter writing or tweeting, self-expression and communication are as necessary to mankind as water and air.
We’ve heard a lot of technocrats saying exponential technologies create many new jobs. Yes. They do. And no. These jobs might create more communication and administration problems. These problems occur long before AI enters in our daily life. I hope AI robots will not create more interpersonal conflicts as a result of miscommunication between humans and machines. This uncharted territory is uncertain. Similar arguments about creating jobs were made when fracking boomed in the mid-2000. Did oil and gas companies inform the public thoroughly that these jobs bring good money and bad health to humans and non-humans?
Technology is not to blame. Who uses the technology to achieve what goal is a gray area. We don’t have an energy crisis. We have an energy transition crisis. I’ll save this subject for next time to explore.
Generally speaking, the best, top-notch technologies will be first applied in defense. Battles and wars are test grounds for these advanced technologies. So, it baffles me when American civilians are able to purchase and use firearms that are supposedly for military defense. At hearing the news that the American private company SpaceX provides satellite internet service to Ukraine, I wonder if this is the epitome of a surrogate warfare outside the territory of the U.S. As we’re bombarded with (true and false) news about the frontline in the Ukraine war, where can the public inquire about how much gains the big American fossil fuel producers have made from this geopolitical tragedy? Can the EU be energy-independent without the aid of the U.S.? Can this become a case study of American oligarchs shaping the 21st century world order?
This January when the world’s first pig-to-human heart transplant surgery was executed successfully, English-language news feeds flew everywhere like ticker tape over a parade. Two months later, the first pig organ receiver died. The sad news was treated much more coldly in the free press. If consuming too much negative news is doom scrolling, which could lead to low spirits, doesn’t the lopsided public reaction to a medical experiment reflect how typical the fear of failing is among us?
The Ukraine war has captured many eyeballs, images, and wars of words around the globe. But what we don’t know is a much quieter and hidden attack and counter-attack in cyber security among great powers. How can ordinary folks like me tell if the images, videos and word-of-mouth are not part of war propaganda? Unless you have a clear line drawn between you and your enemy, there is no right or wrong about war propaganda. Otherwise, the gray area of war propaganda wouldn’t have inspired the creation of many spy films and espionage thrillers.
Does a tech war promote binary thinking?
What if the weapon and propaganda in a tech war is humanity-centered design that embraces love, kindness, peace and decency?
Will the robots sacrifice their machine life to bring humanity together to finish the puzzle of a sustainable retreat?
Do exponential technologies help us to cultivate the universal core values or diminish them?
War is horrible in whatever format and scale. I have my utmost respect for the two Associated Press reporters who had been the only international media present in a southern city of Ukraine to document the frontline chaos.
Two years ago when I was in a graduate program of natural resources and global sustainability, I watched actor Joaquin Phoenix’s award-winning speech on the internet. He said in an unscripted speech, “. . . When we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that is beneficial to all human beings and to the environment.” At the end, he said, citing his brother’s lyrics, “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” The speech struck a chord with me and my peers in the same graduate class. Two years later as I listened to the same speech again, it’s still resounding but with a bit of melancholy.
Has the world war of public health against Covid-19 that has lasted three years ever united humanity to tackle more health-related climate change challenges?
This world war of public health is a silent killer. No firearms are needed. But there are surely tears, screams, casualties and deaths. As of March 7, 2022, the pandemic has claimed more than 6 million lives. Nonetheless, many lives are unaccounted for due to lack of data in some countries and regions. This world war of public health has also driven gas prices on a roller-coaster ride and broken supply chains. This world war of public health has torn apart many families because of different stances on prevention measures. This world war of public health has deepened the abyss of income gaps and increased the number of mental health patients. An intense heat wave resulting from global climate change is another silent killer.
This world war of public health is about how big countries manipulate the livelihoods and future generations of small countries. The destruction in war-torn Ukraine will take years to rebuild. How much do you know about Ukrainian wildlife? According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Ukraine is home to more than 100 species of mammals, including wolves, roe deer, elk, moose, bison and wild sheep, along with close to 350 species of birds. If we have a humanitarian corridor for the intelligent species called humans, should we call for a no-fire zone for wildlife to escape and for scientists to transplant local plants that cannot run for their lives?
The Ukraine war somehow verifies my argument in my case study about Kiribati, a low-lying island country in the central Pacific Ocean. Kiribati is living in our unequipped future from climate change, and yet its people and natural resources will be swept away long before the big nations stop fighting for dominance in the name of peace and security. Author and reporter Joshua Keating wrote in his book, Invisible Countries, “Countries cannot be destroyed; they can only become other countries, the land they occupy now controlled by someone else. But what if there is no more land?”
(To be continued)