Why do data centers love deserts?

In so many ways, data center water use is more intensive than the way an ordinary person uses water, as Shaolei Ren explained to Reece Rogers for Wired: “The water that is available for people to use is very limited. It’s just the fresh surface water and groundwater. Those data c … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 days ago

Data center water scam

Data gets hot. Computer servers get hot. They need to be cooled. There is a direct correlation between the amount of energy a server or data center is using and the amount of water required to keep it cool. “On average, between one to nine liters of water are evaporated during th … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 11 days ago

Anatomy of a data center

A data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Only worse. Super-high, aggressive security; ugly warehouse buildings. A prison will bring a decent quantity of jobs. Data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center will consume massively more wate … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 18 days ago

Moore’s Law is breaking down

Chips and storage would get cheaper, faster and more powerful forever, they said. No limits. Every couple of years, Santa would arrive with twice the power at half the price. They called it Moore’s Law. For what seemed like an eternity—from the 1960s—chips were getting faster and … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 25 days ago

When does Silicon Valley begin?

What goes around does eventually come around. The outsourcing of harm and the pursuit of the very cheapest labor was too wildly successful for Silicon Valley. By the 2020s, China was rising and nearly all the best chips were made in Taiwan. Security and dominance fears grew and a … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 1 month ago

The future is bright green

According to tech futurists like Gregory Stock, the only function biodiversity had was to entertain humans. “There is an immense roster of species,” he noted, “that neither affect nor interest the vast majority of humankind.” This was in 1999 and these tech bro views have only ac … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 1 month ago

The anti-Nature Valley

It worked, and like a magic trick, the digital warmonger was born and boomed as something greener, something softer. However, impressions cause reality distortions. By keeping things low and out of sight, urban sprawl spread faster than anywhere else in the United States. Those l … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 2 months ago

Silicon Valley: designing for invisibility

“A lot of that design was about deliberately placing industrial infrastructure out of sight,” scientist Josh Lepawsky explained to me. “Literally putting it underground. Things like chemical storage tanks needed to store the chemicals for the manufacturing process. So, it was a d … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 2 months ago

The greenwashing of Silicon Valley

It wasn’t always known as the Valley of Pimps and Pushers. Once upon a time, they called it the Valley of Heart’s Delight. From far and near, families would come on Springtime pilgrimages to participate in the famed “blossom tours” in Santa Clara Valley, California. “Miles and mi … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 2 months ago

It takes coal and charcoal to make silicon

That silicon stuff. Sand, right? Right. It takes coal and charcoal, multiple metals and materials, and over 400 toxic chemicals, to make a silicon chip—the foundation of everything that happens in clean tech. “The environmental impact of chip making is huge,” Ian Williams, profes … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 2 months ago

The three chip problem

They like their chips well engineered in the USA. Long, straight and thin. Good looking. To get such handsome chips requires large, round, smooth potatoes, and to grow such potatoes requires soft, loamy, sandy soil. Such soil is thirsty. In such thirsty soil, water seeps through … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 2 months ago

Cut the crap

We’ve never had more data and yet we’ve never had less information architecture skill. Organizations don’t want to invest in the hard and vital work of professionally organizing and managing data. AI is making things worse because it is feeding the idea that humans no longer need … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 months ago

Digital will sink in its own crap

It’s not simply crap content. Computer code bloat is everywhere. For starters, most software, most features, serve no useful function. A pile of crap software is launched and then either it dies a death, or else for years badly designed fixes are made to try to get it to work in … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 months ago

Crap data everywhere

We need to talk about data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred photos and cat videos, binge watch Netflix, and ask ChatGPT inane questions and get instant wrong answers. We’re destroying our environment to store copies of copies o … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 months ago

Extreme secrecy of data centers

As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker recounted for Wired. Ruiter, a local Dutch councilor, had parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that rose out of the flat N … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 months ago

Data centers are noisy as hell

You do not want to live close to a data center. Having one near your home is like having a lawn mower running in your living room 24/7, as one local resident described it. Residents talked about low-pitched roars interspersed with high-frequency screeches, as the whir of loud fan … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 months ago

Data center surging electricity demand

Like Moore’s Law, energy efficiency for data centers began to run out of steam by the 2010s. After substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, the energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much between 2018 and 2024. It didn’t stop the PR spin about how Big Tech is so efficient a … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 months ago

Data center energy scam

For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for the environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more po … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 months ago

Data center jobs scam

The data centers were coming. Rural Washington, USA, was going to be transformed. There would be so many jobs, so many jobs. Making Rural Washington Great Again. All it required was cheap land, cheap water, cheap electricity, and huge tax breaks. The data centers came. Where were … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 months ago

Data centers are eating and drinking our environment

In some ways, a data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Super-high security, ugly warehouse buildings. In other ways, a data center is much worse than a prison. A prison will bring some jobs; data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 5 months ago

We need morals to combat AI

Morals matter. Ethics matter. Character matters. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is riddled with fast and greedy characters. AI is the latest bitcoin, the latest blockchain. It is the latest way scammers, con artists and grifters think they can … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 5 months ago

How to reduce digital waste

There are lots of simple yet effective steps we can take in order to reduce digital waste. Either as individuals or organizations we can: Reduce the creation of wasteful data or content. Make sure that what we create contains the least waste possible. Make sure that what we creat … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

CO2 for Irish councils, government departments, political parties

It’s a climate crisis. Everyone can do something to reduce CO2 and other harmful gases and activities, not least Web professionals. Inspired by an excellent UK Council Website Emissions website, I decided to do something similar for Ireland. In the UK, the average council website … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

CO2 footprint of data

The Internet is the largest system of infrastructure ever created. Moving data across the Internet is a highly complex process, with a lot of hidden environmental costs. Transferring data has many dependencies, according to Tom Greenwood from Wholegrain Digital. “Are you transfer … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Do not track

Digital has become too much about the creation and collection of content and data. We are flooding the present with so much content that we are diminishing our critical abilities to think, plan and design for the long term. “I think distraction is another key aspect of digital,” … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

The Cloud is on the ground

The Cloud is on the ground. I used to think that digital was immaterial, that sending an email was an act of climate activism, while sending a physical letter was like climate hooliganism. It’s only in the last couple of years that I have come to realize that digital is an accele … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Digital: the great accelerator of the climate emergency

The Website Carbon Calculator is a real go-to tool for me when I want to find out how much CO2 a particular Web page is creating. This, and many other great initiatives, comes from Wholegrain Digital, a company founded by Vineeta and Tom Greenwood in 2007. Tom has recently publis … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Transferring data: convenience versus saving energy

Over a wire is the most energy efficient way to transfer data. In a Digital Waste survey, when we asked people if they tried to transfer data (particularly large quantities of data) using wired cable instead of using Wi-Fi, or 3G, 4G or 5G, 62% said no. A German study found that … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Reducing digital energy waste

If it takes you three minutes to write an email on a smartphone then the total CO2 involved in that exercise could amount to about 1 gram. Writing the same email on a laptop could amount to 5 grams of CO2, while on a desktop it could be as much as 11 grams. The above… Read More » | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Launch and leave culture created climate crisis

We’ve been developing a survey to identify wasteful digital behavior. About 180 people completed a test version. There follows a highlight of the most interesting results. 60% of respondents said that it was not easy to find content and other information on their organization’s i … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Publish the website you can maintain

90% of data does not get used three months after it’s published. 91% of webpages never get found in Google. We have a global content waste industry feverishly producing enormous quantities of really expensive content that is essentially useless, and creating lots of CO2 pollution … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Content is critical so why do we launch and forget?

“We still live in a ‘publish and be damned’ world,” Sarah Winters says. “Now, it’s up. Now we can forget about it and move on to the next thing. I’d quite like to see if websites could only have a finite amount of pages, a finite amount of services because then it would be like… … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Content is critical (Part 1)

On the Web, content is indeed critical. If we need more convincing of this statement, we only have to throw a cursory glance at current events. Content is driving the conversation. Content is leading to action. Content is critical. Sarah Winters defined the term ‘content design’ … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

The more you remove, the more you can remove

It seems that before most people put their tech hat on, they carefully take their brain out. For every one good tech idea, I see at least nine really stupid and unnecessary ones. But most organizations can’t resist more technology. The new website I got built for customercareword … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

The price of free is waste

All “free” systems are wasteful by design because a free system merely hides or displaces its costs. Take for example Google and Facebook. These so-called free services cost the earth. Even as both organizations vigorously participate in greenwashing, saying how they embrace rene … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Reducing website weight

In the digital fairytale, the evil character is Delete and the hero is Save. Digital heaven is where nothing gets deleted and everything is saved and you never know what you might find if only you look in the right place. Digital designers and particularly software developers hav … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

From digital unsustainability to digital sustainability

The homepage for my website (customercarewords.com) used to weigh 957 KB. Through a series of design decisions, we were able to bring the size down to 70 KB. With the exact same amount of content. With the exact same visual design. A 93% saving in the CO2 pollution that page crea … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Moving beyond the Cult of Volume (Part 3)

Did you ever wonder how much data you produce? In 2020, it was estimated that 1.7 megabytes of data were created every second for every person on earth. We have created more data in the last two years than in all of previous human history. When Liam Nugent shut down his digital a … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Moving beyond the Cult of Volume (Part 2)

Digital’s easy and cheap creative capabilities trap us in a Cult of Volume. According to digital agency founder, Liam Nugent, “a typical designer or programmer sees their job as to do, to make things. They ‘outsource the thinking’ because it’s a job, because that’s what they’ve b … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Moving beyond the Cult of Volume (Part 1)

If there’s one thing digital has done it is to explode the creation and production of digital stuff. It requires herculean efforts to focus on quality in a digital environment because digital tools are so relentlessly focused on quantity. Digital feeds and accelerates a culture o … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Let’s green the Web

Let’s Green The Web is a five-day Twitter campaign starting this week (Monday 15) to encourage and support everybody to measure the carbon emissions of websites and share tweets highlighting the results. Let’s Green The Web aims to “both encourage, as well as support, those who r … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 3 years ago

Change has become an excuse for lazy design

Modern technology is causing us to lose our capacity to think ahead, to plan, to prioritize, to design with any degree of depth. The Cloud says that we can store and save everything. Google says we don’t have to organize anything. And there’s an app for everything. AI is making u … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 years ago

Technology is part of the problem

Technology is the problem. Our elites have failed us. So much of humanity is Trumpian, invested in global gaslighting, in greedy, narcissistic bling, in climbing the pyramid scheme, in fetishizing the Great Man and dancing to some grand illusion of some glorious past and some ‘pu … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 years ago

Embracing sustainable digital design (Part 3)

The most sustainable Web design is maintenance. The greatest creativity is reuse. Fixing what you have nearly always reduces waste and increases value more than buying something new. One of the core principles at Netlife, a Norwegian digital design agency, is: “We make what human … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 years ago

Embracing sustainable digital design (Part 2)

“When I was working for Ruter (a Norwegian public transit company), one of the key principles was that people should travel with us without having to think,” Beth Stensen, CEO of Netlife, a Norwegian digital design agency states. “And I asked why? What’s so bad about thinking? Wh … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 years ago

Embracing sustainable digital design

How do you work sustainably as a digital professional? If you are a producer of code or content then you are a producer of CO2. How do you ensure your digital activities produce as little CO2 as possible? Better still, how do you ensure that your digital work is useful enough tha … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 years ago

Top Tasks and COVID-19

One of the most important things I’ve learned as a result of observing the voting intentions of some 500,000 people in more than 100 countries is that there are indeed top tasks that are universal. With Toyota we found that there are universal top tasks in relation to how Europea … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 years ago

Google’s increasingly dark shadow

Timnit Gebru, a leader and pioneer in the ethics of Artificial Intelligence at Google, was working with colleagues on a new research paper. The paper addressed some of the dangers inherent in the Google approach to AI, including data center energy consumption and the impact on ma … | Continue reading


@gerrymcgovern.com | 4 years ago