It has long been said that virtually every area of society cannot go on like this, that the world is devouring the brunt of neoliberalism. We've realized the gravity of climate change, even though most governments around the world take very little action to deal with it, which makes us sick and die slowly, so it's not so spectacular. With the spread of covid-19, the opposite happens: it kills in an instant and the measurements are taken much faster. If at Christmas someone had told us that the world economy was going to stay almost in the first quarter of 2020, we would have considered it an idiot. But that has happened, and the voices that say that we cannot continue with the current neoliberal model have multiplied.

The lack of growth and change in lifestyle are, once again, a lot of contradictions: in the era of artificial intelligence, will it save us from returning to mechanical society? In other words, what is more profitable from the point of view of development for the world: Turn on the light and turn on the kitchen light or turn it on by actuating the switch? Modernity, and Silicon Valey's business model, demands doing it through the voice, but ecological accountability says doing it in order of voice consumes a lot more energy, because it needs a very complex digital technology to do what's simple in itself.

In Larrun last December, we saw the threat of digital capitalism to humanity. How liberating fascination on the Internet has become a nightmare, but then we do not tackle the digital world from an energy point of view. This contribution is found in the illustrative article written by Information and Communications Professor Sebastien Broca de Le Monde Diplomatique in March: “Digital technology works with coal.”

Silicon Valley and Oil

The world’s new digital owners, called Gafam, are increasingly related to big oil and coal energy companies. Amazon, Google or Microsoft, among others, help them manage big data and artificial intelligence, but that also gives them a bad picture when so far they relate Silicon Valley to renewables. Many of its workers have asked their companies to break with these energy multinationals (Chevros, Total, Exxon…). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos responded to his family’s requests, with a model phrase of greenwashing: “We want to give them the most appropriate tools to make ‘the transition’.”

The truth is that thermoindustrial capitalism based on oil and coal and digital capitalism, supposedly immaterial, post-industrial and green, are two sides of the same coin: “Cloud computing starts with coal,” said Mark P. in 2013, funded by the wire industry. Consultancies Mills. I wanted to make it clear that today's digital industry is also a continuation of the coal industry that began two centuries ago. According to the International Energy Agency, coal production will not be reduced in the coming years, driven by countries such as China or India. In general, energy consumption continues to grow in the world (2.3% in 2018) and in 80% it depends on fossil energies. Of course, the digital economy is not responsible for this, but its responsibility is great: it consumes 4% of the world’s primary energy and increases every year by 9%.

What is this energy spent on? Most of it is dedicated to the manufacture of equipment (computers…) and the construction of network infrastructures, followed by the consumption of equipment, networks and data department stores. When you build a computer, for example, you emit 330 kilograms of C02 into the atmosphere, and it needs a lot of water and lots of curious minerals. The simple inspection of the videos we make the citizens of these gigantic repositories of data is equal to the CO2 emitted by the Spanish State throughout the year. Or, as Greenpeace says, only 12 percent of the total energy that Amazon spends, the giant Virginia processing center (EE.UU. ), which channels 70% of the world's internet traffic, is renewable, and the rest comes mainly from coal extracted in the Apalache mountains. And 73 percent of the energy consumed in Chinese data centers comes from carbonization. Well, what you want to see in Broca's article is a lot of data that shows that the Internet and artificial intelligence have a high ecological cost.

Centre and periphery

In the end, Professor Broca clearly describes what this digital capitalism is built, “based on the global economy explained by historian Fernand Braudel”, that is, a coherent set of economic actors whose relationship is based on the separation between the center and the periphery. And here's an example. “San Francisco Bay is a heart, and to a large extent its well-being is based on its asymmetrical relationship with other places on which it depends, such as African coltan fines, Asian assembly plants or Ghana’s electronic landfills.”

In this global system, industrial processes have ecological costs, but these are distributed in a very unbalanced way and the most serious costs are borne by the dominated countries. As Broca points out, it is about updating the “inadequate distribution” theorized by the Marxist economist Arghiri Emmanuel in the 1960s: “The capitalist world economy is based on the asymmetric transfer of resources between the center and the periphery.” And the professor gives us the following example: A northern company buys a country from the South raw materials worth $1,000, which is paid a further $1,000 in exchange for its intellectual property. The two values are equal in monetary value, but not in nature’s influence, as the center eliminates the environmental effects of its development.”

Coronavirus and world economy

We still do not have much data to compare the coronavirus, but the logic of the center and the periphery will also extend strongly in the logic of the global economy, not by the distinction of viruses, but by the means to combat it. And, in short, this also indicates that the development of pandemics necessarily requires a transformation of economic and life models, starting with the industrial food model at the heart of pandemics. This industry, like Silicon Valley, also eliminates the costs of producing its food, such as the expansion of Covid-19, because, if it were to take them on board, the pork or chicken from the supermarket would not be so cheap and would not be viable.

Although in a very terrible way, COVID-19 is giving us a new opportunity. Change, however, will have to be carried out by people, when the dialectic of the dominators and the defeated is perhaps the most terrible of all. This dialectic takes place through struggle, so get ready. We came from the battles of the crisis still unfinished in 2008, to see if it serves us.