
Oil Is the New Data - jeffreygoesto
https://logicmag.io/nature/oil-is-the-new-data/
======
Merrill
Hasn't Big Oil been a leading edge customer of IT all along? Wasn't processing
of seismic data one of the drivers for commercial High Performance Computing
and then for Beowulf clusters?

~~~
imglorp
Oh yeah.

I almost took a job with Halliburton in the early 90s. Everyone I talked to
had 4 shelf-feet of orange VMS manuals and a huge color display for looking at
seismic plots in 3d. They were absolutely at the confluence of 3d
visualzation, DSP, fluid dynamics, geology, and all sorts of things.

I'm glad I didn't participate.

------
ovi256
If you're working in what we commonly call tech, and you're not in the clean
energy or automatization sector, you're part of the problem. I know I am.

After the clean tech bubble burst, there's a lot less funded positions that
directly work on reducing GHG emissions. So you'd have to be willing to take a
big cut in pay - and lifestyle, unless independently wealthy. Very few people
do.

Anything else is at best neutral on GHG.

~~~
CalRobert
I'd love to find ways to make my career focused on fighting climate breakdown
and haven't figured out how to do so without defaulting on debts/obligations

~~~
macawfish
You're not alone in that. People are out here working to pay not only their
own debts but their landlords debts as well.

~~~
CalRobert
Debt, combined with shortages of necessities (often unnecessary) is a
fantastic way to ensure people work on what makes the most money and not what
they'd like to be doing.

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golergka
> The TCO managers claimed that monitoring workers was necessary for keeping
> them safe, or to prevent them from stealing. But it wasn’t convincing in the
> slightest.

OP clearly has very little experience with a post-soviet work culture. In
Russia, Kazakhstan and other nearby countries, drinking at the workplace (and
I mean, getting blackout drunk) and stealing from your employer is still very
common for blue-collar workers.

~~~
aristophenes
It's such a blind cultural arrogance. Build a narrative of how the world works
in the high-tech areas of the USA and just bring that with you everywhere.

------
ckastner
Slightly tangential, but:

> _Chevron alone has thousands of oil wells around the world, and each well is
> covered with sensors that generate more than a terabyte of data per day._

That's around 12MB/s, which sounds extremely high for something as "boring"
(for lack of a better word) as an oil well. What could they possibly be
monitoring, and at what frequency, and most importantly: for what purpose?

~~~
wwwigham
Monitoring 11000 wells (in the US alone, according to Wikipedia) at that rate
is only roughly 1KB/s per well. I'm actually surprised it's so small. Sampling
intervals for most sensors must be on the order of multiple seconds - or
there's not many sensors.

~~~
iguy
Isn't a single CCTV camera going to give you MB/s? To be honest I'm astonished
that there are oil wells without video cameras. Or perhaps those are counted
elsewhere.

------
herova
Looks like that author suddenly became aware that Oil companies use IT more
extensively than Uber. Wow. So many new things to know.

~~~
pascalmahe
Good on you for knowing already. But not everyone knows or knows how deep the
rabbit hole goes. And articles like this are good reminders or good ways to
learn.

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cyborgx7
This comment section is full of people criticising the tone, the writing style
and the "injection of personal politics" to avoid facing their compliciteness
in fundamentally unethical businesses.

~~~
BiasRegularizer
One can report facts about unethical businesses without asserting personal
beliefs, otherwise it's just bad journalism. If the background and evidence
are sufficient, the readers can draw their own conclusions. There is no need
to tell the readers what is evil and what is not.

In this case, the author emphasized too much on his/her own belief, which
erodes into the integrity of the valuable facts he provided. His/her personal
opinions turned an exposé into an editorial.

~~~
cyborgx7
This is hyperindividulaism driven to an absurd degree. Activism is a good
thing. We shouldn't all be limited to apolitically spout facts at eachother,
hoping enough people will independently come to the right conclusion and
spontanously solve the problem.

Convincing people and trying to organize are essential in affecting change.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
The number one thing that will derail the whole “public cloud” is the idea
that the cloud is not public. It is highly likely that every Fortune 500
company has at least some business that someone in the tech sector would find
unseemly. If they get the idea that they are an employee protest away from
losing their business, they are not going to transition to the cloud.

For this reason, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have been signaling that they
intend to keep it a public cloud. Going forward, it is reasonable to expect
that the workers who do these type of protests will find themselves let go
from the companies.

~~~
sanxiyn
Public cloud already disallows spamming. Additional restrictions don't seem
implausible.

------
sails
Very interesting to see how tech-giant employees are recognising their
positions of leverage and feeling compelled to take a stance for what they
believe in, even if they are unsure of what the implications may be.

climateaction.tech [0] has a useful community and provides some ways to get
involved if this sparks curiosity. I'm using it to inform my opinion on where
I stand.

[0] [https://climateaction.tech/](https://climateaction.tech/)

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curiousgal
What's the point of using a pseudonym? It won't be so hard for Microsoft to
find out who the writer is.

~~~
manderley
But not as easy for other parties. Maybe that person wants to be able to get a
job at other companies in the future and not get pointless hatemail from
randos?

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blackhaz
Let's imagine American tech bails out from oil contracts in those countries -
overnight. What happens? Russians will replace them immediately, or Chinese.
That won't help those countries in any way. There is no quick process to get
those countries jump over hundreds of years in general education and gradual
development of business and manufacturing culture.

------
wwwigham
While the essay's main drive is on climate, can we put that aside for a minute
and talk about the orwellian surveillance apparatus talk in the central
section of the essay? Or am I supposed to take the lack of comments on that as
a combination of apathy and the increasing acceptance of persistent
surveillance?

Like

> When I reflect back on this meeting, it was a surreal experience. Everyone
> present discussed the idea of building a workplace panopticon with complete
> normalcy.

I get being uncomfortable working with Big Oil when you care about climate,
but that kind of discussion spooks me way more. That goes way beyond climate
and uncaptured externalities - that's pretty much a direct line on helping
repress a people (in the service of ossifying existing power structures, ofc);
potentially an attempt to utilize technology to help enforce a modern day kind
of class slavery. Is that not the most obviously wrong new piece of
information here? Isn't that that most notable component of this essay? Big
Oil seeks to extract more Oil - that's to be expected, given their profit
motivations, however unfortunate. You feel about that how you feel about that,
and with respect to this essay, I don't think it's putting up much new
information. But the surveillance goals of the management there? Those feel
_new_ - like, if some engineer made the mistake of agreeing to assist creating
those tools, that seems like it'd be _much_ more likely to goad people to
anger. Me, at least, clearly.

> In particular, they wanted to implement computer vision algorithms that
> could detect suspicious activity and then identify the worker engaging in
> that activity.

Using ML to pick people out of a crowd for enforcement before they actually do
anything seriously wrong... Literally the plot of a bunch of fictional
dystopian thrillers, no? I find the concept that we'd actively seek to build
such a thing quite disconcerting.

~~~
ovi256
>before they actually do anything seriously wrong

In this context, it's preventing industrial accidents before they happen.
Obviously, after they do something wrong, the harm is done.

This is already done currently by human supervisors BTW. Go look at any
construction or industrial site. Why not free that supervisor from this burden
?

~~~
wwwigham
You could call it Luddite, but I think I'm much more comfortable with human
judgement being involved. Especially since that also provides an obvious place
for blame to lie, if such preventative enforcement is used extrajudiciously or
without reasonable cause (there is a degree of tension between supervisors and
workers - that's part of why unions exist). I can also trust to some degree
that the supervisor will pull someone aside and engage in a conversation, as a
fellow person - robosupervisor might not be so considerate without serious
consideration by it's implementors and executors (especially if such
consideration doesn't help the bottom line).

~~~
pbalau
Why do people jump so easily from "lets build an efficient monitoring system"
to terminators? Why do you think that first action that will be taken in such
a condition will be something bad for the employee in question? Might be a
simple notification for the human supervisor to check the situation out or it
could even be a notification for the employee: "don't walk there, you might
fall in the bloody tank".

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because in terms of human relationships, there's such a thing as "too
efficient". Compassion, mercy, discretion, joy, friendliness - they all exist
in the inefficiencies of a system, they happen in places the ruthless process
hasn't reach yet. They die when turned into code - whether on computers or in
papers, as bureaucracy is nothing but software running on a distributed
protein runtime.

People aren't worried about a system that can deliver a timely safety warning
to an employee. People are worried about a system that can spot everything
that looks like wrong or inefficient use of your time, everything that may
_perhaps_ lead to a problem but didn't yet, and count all that against you,
and then _keep counting_ until you cross the threshold of getting fired, and
there's no one who cares or even can do anything to help you.

Systems are buggy, their inputs aren't reliable, they have no understanding -
and it's all too easy to everyone in the command chain to excuse themselves
from responsibility by saying "but the system says so", or "but the system
doesn't let me!". Next time you're wasting hours dealing with a customer
support clerk of a bank or a corporation, constantly hearing "the system won't
let me do that", think that at least it's just some product you're paying for,
and not your very livelihood.

~~~
paganel
> Systems are buggy, their inputs aren't reliable, they have no understanding

Unfortunately this gets less and less acknowledged by many of today's
technicians and engineers (I'm a programmer myself). People need not
necessarily focus that much only on the Kafka-like stories or on the Bentham-
inspired panopticon (both of these being real problems, I agree), but instead
they should also go back to (re-)read Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad" [1] in
order to see what unreliable and buggy systems can do to a society that relies
too much on them.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad)

------
batushka3
How you can continue reading after such childish intro:

    
    
      Big Tech is forging a lucrative partnership with Big Oil, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all.

~~~
masonic
Worse yet, this is the fourth submit in 36 hours:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Oil%20Is%20the%20New%20Data&so...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Oil%20Is%20the%20New%20Data&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

------
BiasRegularizer
This exposé would have been more convincing if the author/whistleblower did
not inject so much of his own political views into it. State the facts and let
readers decide.

I am a big proponent for climate actions, but excessive vilification and
oversimplification are counter productive to the cause.

~~~
coldtea
> _I am a big proponent for climate actions, but excessive vilification and
> oversimplification are counter productive to the cause._

I'd argue the opposite. Excessive "it's too complex", overanalysing, and
spreading the blame thin, is counter productive and is used all the time to
obfuscate pressing issues, delay action, and deflect blame...

------
badrabbit
Dear OP,

The basic principles of economics show us supply means little withour demand.
The dependence on fossil fuel is not due to current supply of the fuel source
but rather a result of how the global economy has evolved to rely on it. You
don't even have specific actions recommended as solutions big oil can
implement to alleviate fossil fuel dependance. At this point you can't even
blame them for the cost disparity with renewables since they are much more
competitive. These "oil" companies call themselves energy companies because
they are investing well outside of petrol for energy supply (such as wind
farms).

Fossil fuels are not strictly oil and gas. And petroleum had many many
critical uses well outside of fuel. R&D is focusing on making "smart" things
instead of cheap renewable powered solutions. The likes of Exxon spent a lot
of money trying to lobby against climate change mostly to protect their
business interests but why are your politicians sk easily bought out? It seems
you have a political problem here. Should they listen to big tech's lobbyists
instead? Or maybe big tech should protest government's being bought so cheaply
by any big corp?

Regardless, what is your solution? Make it harder for them by denyig them
business? Slow them down? That won't happen. How hard is it for big oil to buy
out one of the lower end cloud providers and offer it as an industry optimized
alternative to big tech?

How about protesting car and plane manufacturers,airlines and cruise
ships,etc... as well? You're picking on big oil because they're big and loud
not because they can affect the most change.

Is this much different than targeting drug cartels in the drug war? Did it
work? The solution it appears after all this years is solving for the more
difficult problem of why dependence is formed and how to legally and safely
administer drugs while solving for the root cause.

The problem is too critical to waste time and attention on curing symptoms.
The root cause needs solving. The planet was dependent on oil long before
climate change research was established, why was dependence formed and what
steps can be taken to elimnate it?

It feels nice to blame on big bad guy and have a villain to terminate but in
the process you're wasting time and effort.

And also, please ffs stop trying to do activisim by making companies do things
politicians should do. Figure out why the election ballot is not effective
before you vote with your wallet.

~~~
sqldba
How much did an energy company pay for you to write this garbage?

~~~
badrabbit
None. If someone has an opinion different than yours this is your reaction?

------
nashashmi
These conversations about how "[industry 1] is helping facilitate the the
proliferation of [industry 2] and indirectly is part of the [problem ||
solution]" is deeply disturbing and signals to COMPLETE fragmentation of
entire civil societies.

Fill industry 1 with the likes of tech, finance, government, oil.

Fill industry 2 with the likes of CO2 emitters, military, human rights
violators, deportation police, surveillance machines.

Proliferations and advancement in harmful tech (nukes) leaks into helpful tech
(nuclear medicine). And vice versa. One cannot exist without the other.

But if we start choosing who to help based on some random ideology and random
understanding of when an indirect action becomes complicit in an act, we are
destined to become unstable in our judgement and motives.

There needs to be a line drawn.

Canada president Trudeau is anti carbon. But supports the proliferation of
Canadian oil. And he hears vitriol and accusations of hypocrisy. But being
anti carbon doesn't mean you have to hurt supply. It means you only hurt
demand.

Thoughts like if you don't like war, then hurt weapons manufacturing, can also
create war by causing weak rich countries envied by strong poor nations.

There is more to say and more examples to give but I'd rather ask the more
intelligent hn crowd to say them.

