“… research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy…”
I would love to see that number on a graph next to the energy consumption of training the next bullshit AI chatbot.
IMO, it’s just more / another form of blame shifting.
“Look at how energy-wasteful sharing memes is, but don’t look at the massive waste of power for all these useless chatbots” is just a rehashed “Shame on you for using a plastic straw”.
Let’s call a spade a spade: “blame shifting” isn’t precise enough. It’s victim shaming in the form of consumer blame packaged in a virtue signaling wrapper. Just like the entire recycling concept, DARE, etc al. Fuck all of this bullshit that tries to point fingers at us plebs. The only “Heroes Work Here” signs should be on top of guillotines.
Engaging in a shared culture is killing the planet please just wake up, go to work, and go to sleep
And the ad industry, considering half of all consumer internet traffic is ads.
This is so stupid. It doesn’t cost electricity to keep data in storage. That’s why people can put data on hard drives and safely disconnect them without losing that data. RAM uses a few watts, but it’s negligible.
The real climate dangers are the fossil fuel industries, and the gigantic AI processing centers, and the giant bitcoin miners spinning up ancient coal plants, and the billionaires taking joyrides to space, and the warmongers…
There’s so many more problematic sources of climate change, I have to wonder if this was funded by the fossil fuel industry as a disinformation “study,” or worse, a preliminary effort to cull undesirable information under the auspices of “preventing climate change.”
Excuse me. Can you please limit your posts to one paragraph each? Your valid points are killing the planet.
Shipping companies burning bunker oil is a much more significant problem
Not even pretending to hide the blame shifting. This is so egregious. Just like the “carbon footprint” shenanigans, happening in real time
Yeah, so it’s not all the AI mining and surveillance? Okay, yeah, it’s the memes we share on small servers like Lemmy… For sure
If data isn’t being accessed, it isn’t using much power. So it just minisculy hurts the company storage costs
So basically my memes are changing the world? Cool.
End the petrodollar and sever ties with authoritarian petrostates. End fracking and offshore drilling… Or else I will make a meme about it.
Why the fuck are they posting this bullshit? The cost of an email include the cost of the device you use to send or read the email, which is 70% of the cost. Then it’s 15% (energy wise) to transport the email. The cost of storing the email is 0.5%.
With that in mind, think about how much it costs to watch 1h on YouTube or Netflix…
Some explanations in French (sry):
Hm… Memes are being used to just destroy the dumbfucks running for office that absolutely want to fuck up democracy and now memes are the ultimate existential threat to the planet… Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
I mean, if it is forgotten, then it just takes hard drive space (plus extra if the drive is fragmented)…do you mean the fraction of energy used by the hard drive just by being on? Does it add up to anything comparable to actually spending processing cycles?
We used to have libraries to store media history and shitposting controversies like the Dreyfus affair…
