Over at witty title pending, sky posts:

In some senses,it’s true that things work differently online - one of the most important aspects of this (for my work) is the ability to easily copy and share information. However, online and offline space are never truly separate. Part of what I’m arguing in my thesis is that even movements that don’t use the Internet much should care about what happens online, because it will end up affecting their work. It’s also important to remember that the abstract space of bits and bytes that is represented on cyberthrillers by flows of bright green numbers is based on real infrastructure. Fibreoptic cables and satellites and huge banks of servers.

The implications of this are manifold. The IT industry produces a not-insignificant amount of carbon emissions, in part because it has to run and cool those huge banks of servers. And all those devices we use to access ‘cyberspace’; mobile phones, PDAs, netbooks, laptops, PCs, are made somewhere, and have to go somewhere when we throw them out. There are plenty of stories on the problems associated with recycling electronics (try here or here or here), and probably plenty of articles on the terribly conditions which electronics workers face. A new report has just come out on the latter issue (via BoingBoing and Difference Engines).

I’d thought about the online / offline divide related to some of my research on virtual worlds, but labor and resource consumption implications of splitting these spheres, obscuring the ways they’re entangled and related, had not occurred to me. It’s almost as if talking about online culture and its supposed immateriality actually happily suppresses the data centers, power, chip manufacturing labor, coltan civil wars, and toxic waste that goes into these things.