The dissemination of this kind of practical knowledge out into the community – knowledge about the very stuff that it takes to power computers, laptops, phones and other essential devices – takes it out of the preserve of commercial power networks, electrical engineers and professionals, representing a kind of community empowerment. It echoes similar experiences in other parts of the world with community and rooftop solar and the transformation enabled by bridging the gap between the (seemingly, if not actually) ethereal realm of the digital and the more obviously material realm of electricity production. With solar and real-time energy monitoring enabled by cheap wifi-connected sensors and smart phone apps we are seeing a reversal of longstanding norms in which consumers are alienated from the actual energy impacts of their choices, until the quarterly power bill comes in, at which point it is far too late to do anything about it. This is the upside of the vision of Resource Man, and in Australia the rooftop solar revolution has catalysed a huge uplift in general awareness of the energy demands of household appliances, lighting, heating and, at least tacitly, with the associated emissions. Though it still remains largely concentrated among property owners, this sort of monitoring is increasingly supported by government programs and subsidies, becoming more and more accessible to those who don’t own a roof for solar panels, like renters and those in public housing.

The other standout piece from the new Solar Protocol Network collection is Anne Pasek’s ‘On being anxious about digital carbon emissions’ in which the media scholar reflects on her own attempts at generating thought and practice that engages with the environmental harms of digital infrastructure. She tells the story of opening a zoom meeting with an attempt to foreground the entire network of offsite infrastructure and invisible sites of extraction and energy generation involved in the call:

In addition to the usual land acknowledgement (a ritual common to us in Canada that details the treaties and First Nations of the territories on which we are gathered) I also attempt to chart the digital and energy infrastructures involved in our transatlantic Zoom call. Here, I show, are the Equinix data centers, the power plants, uranium mines, and unanswered environmental harms that play a role in our meeting today. Let’s acknowledge them too. We are all meeting and living inside the frame of the problem.

At another time, while giving an online lecture, she entreats attendees ‘to turn off their video when they aren’t talking, stressing that this will reduce the carbon intensity of the endeavour.’ She also describes her reflection on these gestures with humility and honesty, noting that they are somewhat uneasy gestures:

I am in these moments, I know, being a little weird – maybe also a little extra. I am trying to achieve both pragmatic and constitutive ends: to reduce, in some small way, the carbon footprint of our online gatherings, and also to frame this question as a problem worthy of individual experiment and collective concern.

But as she progresses in her experiments at low impact computing – hosting a video recording of the lecture on a local server, a low-power Raspberry Pi device, powered by a backyard solar panel – she ends up coming to a deeper understanding of the infrastructure she is working within. Through direct engagement with material elements of digital infrastructure, and through learning more about how these networks operate, Pasek comes to understand more clearly the dynamics and details involved, and how it undermines her earlier certainty:

My injunction to my Zoom audience to turn off their cameras, for instance, ignores the fact that the carbon intensity of digital streaming doesn’t neatly scale with the amount of data passing through network infrastructures. Transmission equipment, data centres, ISP operations, and home routers are more or less always on, drawing the same amount of electricity regardless of consumer use (Ericsson IndustryLab, 2020). Our gesture, ultimately, didn’t achieve that much. I was incorrect to presume (and instruct!) that it did.

We might be tempted to conclude from this that the lesson is to be less didactic, less categorical about what counts as a meaningful response to the environmental harms of digital media – however I don’t think it’s quite that straightforward. Pasek herself agrees, suggesting that one of the dangers of these kinds of (dare I say, technically naïve? Unsophisticated?) initial gestures are a potential trap in that they can often presume ‘individual consumer behaviours are the best, or only, starting place for environmental politics.’

A more effective response to digital-driven climate impacts is, almost certainly, going to require a more connected, more collective, more ecological approach. In the words of Timothy Morton (2010: 1):

The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy – for some, strangely or frighteningly easy – to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.

Another recent digital artistic project that applies this consideration, and further opens up the world, is Alison Parish’s in-progress ’Solar Powered Dawn Poems’. Combining both form and function, Parish aimed to generate poetry drawn from ‘the genre of poetry which depicts lovers parting at dawn’ using only the power of the sun and small microcontrollers. The experience, for Parish, has been salutary and I can fully understand why:

There’s something really magical about getting a computer (even a tiny computer) to do meaningful work with no wall wart, no USB cable, and no batteries – just the energy that you get from setting the breadboard out in the sun on the windowsill for a few hours.

As an owner of a rooftop solar system, the pleasures of knowing with certainty that you are cooking your lunch with the power of the sun is real. Minimising reliance on the fossil fuel power system is nothing short of delicious. Even though Parish’s is a relatively small, self-contained project automating the process of solar energy collection and poetry generation, taking such an approach guides Parish to consider the other devices that her breadboard would normally connect to: web servers-, databases, Bluetooth controllers, and so on. She notes, however, that her aim ‘is to make a standalone device that generates poetry with power from the sun, and if that device requires a second device to be active – a device that will most likely not be solar powered – then I haven’t really achieved my goal.’

I’m struck by the efficacy of considering the energy demand produced elsewhere in the digital network: perhaps this then is the unexpected upside to digital sobriety. Parish’s project runs into other creatively productive constraints as well, as she faces issues with power management when looking to store the output of her Markov chain generated poetry. By avoiding exporting storage to another (non-solar) powered device, she is left with local data storage options for the project, opting to save to an SD card, finding that reading and writing to the card was blowing ‘80–90% of my power budget’ and forcing more creative workarounds.

I think it is no accident that these sorts of constraints produce new, useful knowledge for both the individuals and a wider network of practitioners – whether it’s the Low Tech solar server, a 4G raspberry pi cluster, or tiny dawn poems run in the brief moments a supercapacitor releases the stored energy of an hour of sunshine. It’s messy, complicated work, maybe even unavoidably technical in a way that will exclude some, but there is something novel – the beginnings of a new kind of digital ecological logic that is being sketched out across these kinds of projects.

I don’t even think it’s too much of a stretch to compare the sort of media specific knowledge developed here to an attitude and openness to digital media and computing which approaches the level of craft. It’s not a world away from a painter learning how specific oil paints reacts with light, or how a potter learns the resistance and give of types of clay.