At the beginning of the book

1 ─ Digital Industry and Ecosystem:
A relationship that is nothing more than a fantasy

- Smart cities that protect the Earth's bedside
The true environmental price smart cities must pay
Mathematics in the name of nature
- When the digital industry rewrites the future
- The geography of 'likes'
Pollution from digital technology: Awareness of the severity

2 ─ At the pinnacle of smartphones

- A Journey to the Heart of the Graphite Mine
- Produce less to earn more?
Estonia's Challenge to Complete Digitalization
- The era of electronic purges
- Other types of information are possible

3 ─ Dark matter that creates immaterial things

- MIPS or elements of unexpected materials
- The dizzying scale of digital technology
The Debt the Nano World Owes to the Environment
- Pushing energy policy
- In the digital vapor
Honeywell: A Helping Hand or a Hurdle in Combating Climate Change?

4 ─ Cloud Exploration

- Data centers, factories of the digital age
The unexpectedly powerful power of shared electric scooters
- The end of anonymity
- Expansion of the area called data
- When America's 'Silicon Valley of the East Coast' Wants to Preserve Forests
- The man who made the NSA anxious
- Surveillance and contamination

5 ─ The chaos caused by electricity

- A storm raging through the clouds
- Digital must continue no matter what.
- Nervous Amsterdam
- No selfies without coal
- Will GAFAM bow down before Dominion Energy?

6 ─ Battle in the Arctic

- Technology for cleaner data
- Very cold data center
- The aesthetics of immateriality
- Dam of Discord
- Las Vegas of the Arctic Circle
- A solution that will get us on a digital diet

7 ─ The expansion of the digital world

- High frequency for liberated machines
- 5G: Ecological issues remain largely unknown
- Towards the 'access gate'?
- 16,777,216 nuances of blue
- Red mechanism

8 ─ If robots are worse polluters than humans

Robots: Exponentially Growing Digital Activities
- Pre-programmed human obsolescence strategy
- Multinational corporations pursuing passive investment
- Superintelligence that saves the Earth
- Green giant vs. human?

9 ─ 20,000 tentacles under the sea

- A being that shines in the internet
- Cables, fine white sand, and beach towels
- Finding the time you've earned
A Second Life for the Pipes of the Web
- Risk of 'insufficient capacity'?

10 ─ Geopolitics of Digital Infrastructure

- A new highway in the Arctic
- When China tries to unfold a 'digital silk road'
Fiber Optic Cable Systems and Cable Laying Vessels: A Global Marine Epic
- The day the military protects the network
Europe's quest for digital sovereignty

The path of the future
Acknowledgements
supplement
main
References

★★2022 Veolia Environmental Book Award, Elina & Louis Powells Award Winner
★★ The most cutting-edge problem awareness that shatters existing stereotypes about the digital industry.

Would reading e-books instead of paper books help the planet?
The illusion that digital is harmless to the environment

The advent of the digital age has liberated the human body from the weight of material things.
With a single, palm-sized smartphone, we can stay connected to others, make payments without a wallet, access 1,000 books, 10,000 photos, an ever-expanding search engine, and even converse with artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.
The digital transformation in our daily lives is an innovation that reduces the number of items we need in our daily lives, making our hands lighter and more refreshing. It is also considered an "environmentally friendly" practice, like going paperless.

But is that really true? This book argues that the idea that digital technology is as light as a feather, or even weightless, and that it helps solve environmental problems is simply a delusion.
Estonia, for example, saves resources by digitizing 99 percent of its administrative tasks, replacing “the amount of paper documents equivalent to the height of several Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other” with electronic documents.
However, this cannot be considered a true saving, as it continuously consumes a huge amount of resources, including electricity and water, to keep electronic documents stored in a database.
Furthermore, manufacturing a single smartphone requires “small quantities of metals with very specific chemical properties,” and the process of refining and packing these metals into the smartphone already accounts for “half the ecological footprint of the entire life cycle of the product.”
Given this reality, why have we so far perceived digital transformation as environmentally benign, if not beneficial? The author identifies the digital industry's strategic marketing of the illusion of "green IT" as the culprit, and uncovers the truth they have desperately sought to conceal.

Do ‘likes’ have color, smell, and taste?
A sensory exploration of the digital underbelly, from submarine cables to data centers.

Do you remember the fire at the SK C&C data center in Pangyo on October 15, 2022, which caused most services provided by Kakao, South Korea's largest mobile lifestyle platform, to go offline? This "outage," which impacted the daily lives of countless people, is a frequent occurrence not only in South Korea but around the world. Within the data center industry, it even has a nickname: "total darkness."
The author argues that 'total darkness' not only causes discomfort, but also forces us to confront a paradoxical truth.
Only when we are confronted with 'complete darkness' do we finally realize that the messages, emails, photos and 'likes' we have thought of as intangible virtual things beyond the screen of our smartphones cannot exist without a physical entity of massive scale.

To uncover this paradoxical structure of the digital world, the author explores the global landscape, following the footsteps of information and communication technology from the beaches of France to China, Northern Europe, and the Arctic. While clicking "Like" on social media is a simple and everyday action, transmitting that "Like" requires the deployment of seven layers of the Internet—modems, antennas, cables, and data centers—the largest and most expansive infrastructure ever built by humans.
Intangible digital actions are often considered "dematerialized" because they are based on "virtual reality," but they are actually much more material than we would like to believe.

This book guides us through a sensory experience of the digital world, pointing out that, just like real, physical objects, the Internet has colors, smells, and even tastes.
Through this, we are faced with the fact that the 'cloud' where we store our data is not a clean white cloud but closer to a dark storm cloud; that self-driving cars are not autonomous as their name suggests because they are entirely dependent on information from nearby data centers; that the Internet, which we thought was free, is actually charging us by dataizing every single one of our Internet activities; and that, although we thought all wires had disappeared thanks to Wi-Fi and 5G, we need antennas that occupy the ground and submarine cables that fill the ocean to create this wireless world.
In other words, we are living in a hyper-connected era where “we are more wired and connected to each other than ever before.”

Is the Internet really stateless?
A power struggle between superpowers over digital sovereignty

John Perry Barlow, a researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, issued a manifesto in 1996 opposing Bill Clinton's telecommunications reform bill, arguing that the Internet network was "a space for completely free expression."
In this declaration, he states that the legal concept of a state is based on material things, and the Internet network is not material, so it cannot be applied.
As John Perry Barlow argues, it's easy to think of the Internet as a space where national borders disappear, because we can communicate freely and without restrictions with people living across the ocean and on other continents within the Internet network.

But is the Internet truly the stateless space we know it to be? The author argues that the Internet network, in fact, is a material world with a vast infrastructure, and thus cannot be truly stateless. Furthermore, digital infrastructure is inevitably linked to geopolitical issues.
Even if it's a multinational company's data center or an undersea cable, it has to be located somewhere on Earth.
Every time digital infrastructure is built on their territory or in their waters, countries around the world want to exercise sovereignty over it.
Because “data, accumulated in digital infrastructure, is the new fuel for what we call the pursuit of power, fame, influence, and prosperity—in other words, the eternal engine that propels history forward.”
The digital industry is not unaware of this, and “rather than ignoring geography, it celebrates it.”

The author closely examines the dynamics between China's "Digital Silk Road" and the Western nations that seek to block it, and how the power struggle between corporations and major powers for central position in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is redrawing the world map.
At a time when the importance of digital infrastructure is growing so much that a single submarine cable could completely upend the global stock market, who will seize the new advantage? Which country or company will curb this dominance? What measures will countries employ to protect their digital infrastructure? This book answers these questions one by one through a geopolitical exploration, helping us predict how the next decade of digital transformation will unfold.

In the face of environmental issues accelerating the digital sovereignty war,
What can we do?

It's entirely possible that we will eventually reduce our Internet use, not because the network can no longer sustain us, but because species, the environment, and some values ​​dictate it.
In short, restrictions on Internet use will likely be imposed for political rather than technical reasons (pp. 269-270).

Digital geopolitics and the new dynamics it shapes are accelerating the rise of digital industries.
This trend will ultimately encourage us to produce more data by consuming more digital content, and will extract enough data from us every day to fill the memory of nine 16-gigabyte iPhones.
To store all this data, data centers will become more numerous and larger, submarine cables will expand further, and the Earth will become increasingly heavier.
The author analyzes how the geopolitical and environmental issues surrounding digital are so closely linked, and argues that the beginning of a new change can be for each of us to move beyond the illusions instilled by the digital industry and face this reality, our exact position.
Because “this technology will be just as environmentally friendly as we make it – no more, no less.”


“If we like to waste food and energy resources, digital technology will only exacerbate this tendency.
On the contrary, if we want to think beyond the limits and think about a sustainable Earth, we can gather an army of supporters in the blink of an eye.” As we approach the advent of a hyper-connected society where everything, from objects and animals to even the human brain, is connected to the Internet, the author’s voice, which reorganizes our perception of the digital and suggests new practices for a sustainable Earth, is definitely something we should listen to.