Most folks who do not study social media and digital content wholistically do not understand the environmental impact of generating and circulating digital content. Indeed, the very idea that the average consumption of digital content accounts for 40% of our carbon budget gets lost in the discourse.
i took a class on this shit and it was like opening the ark of the covenant
paper doesn’t make the claims you suggest. Yes the use of the internet is a lot of electricity, but electricity is the fastest-decarbonizing sector in the world. It’s far less plausible to cut off internet usage to an appreciable level than it is to imagine generating electricity sustainably
What? US carbon footprint is 25% electricity. Maybe your “budget” is something else, but even if every bit of electricity went into making YouTube it wouldn’t come close to 40%. This entire comment is nonsense.
This isn't that distinct from other technologies: electric vehicles, for example, had an outsized impact on the environment due to their reliance upon rare earth minerals until more sustainable (by which I mean less damaging) methods of battery production matured.
The primary difference is that the people demanding more data centers aren't looking for a solution. Indeed, their actions demonstrate that they give a fraction of a fuck about the impact of their technologies on our planet and they leverage public opinion (like yours) to this benefit.
Thus, to answer your question, it is not different ecologically and by all rights should be placed under the same scrutiny as datacenters for LLMs and other AI technologies. The main difference is SOCIALLY where public awareness of the ecological impact of these technologies is concerned.
Insofar as our understanding of the ecological harms of technology is filtered through our social understanding of the value of that technology, it's omnipresence in our lives, the ecological harm of streaming media, social media, and other ICTs is easy to overlook in comparison to the harms of AI.
Thus, the ubiquity, and the imposition of the technology into EVERY SECTOR has resulted in a social context where we are examining the ecological cost of this Valen-forsaken technology. Had social media not wrecked our democracy, I'm sure that its environmental impact would be more common knowldge.
Oh, and here's a fun resource for y'all.