I am not sure paper usage is down. Overall, humanity is using more than ever.
As for video calls, they don't need massive data centres since it's supposed to be p2p for all sorts of reasons.
I am struggling to get where you come from. The actual content is so wrong, that it seems satirical, yet it's presented in a very serious, almost patronising way
Not everything can be measured with carbon emissions. For example, assuming the paper industry emits as much CO2 as the computing industry, does it mean they're equally polluting? Micro-electronics require hundreds of different chemicals/ore which means polluting many more extraction sites and using their local water supplies... then comes all of the ore refinement processes which itself requires considerable amounts of water pollution. Then of course, there's waste disposal which incurs even more pollution because to this day electronics aren't being recycled (because they're designed for performance/miniatureness not recyclability).
Overall, the IT industry has a much higher ecological impact.
It is, but it's worth making the trade-off explicit. In a day and age where 1/3 of the world population drinks water polluted with lead, and a recent study was published this week on HN claiming out of over 1000 water streams studied only 2 were unpolluted by medicine, the chemical treatments and quantity of water required for some production are key metrics to consider.
I mean it's not that i'm not worried about CO2 emissions. But tackling this problem is super easy and it's just no politician/businessman is interested in the answer (degrowth and low-tech). Forever-chemicals and polluted water sources on the other hand is a much harder and yet mostly-undiscussed problem beyond collapsologist circles.
+2°C is worrisome and will have significant damage on many species. Polluted water sources challenges the very idea of humanoid life in much of the world. It's interesting to note that both problems have the very same origin (industrial capitalism) and the same solution: don't produce shit we don't need, don't produce un-durable stuff, don't produce stuff from cheapest imported/synthetic materials.
Overall humanity is much larger and richer than it was 40 years ago. Paper use includes packaging, plates, toilet paper, etc so it’s hard to get actual numbers as it relates to IT. Especially when recycling initiatives have resulted in new uses for lower grade paper products.
That said, personally I am way down due to IT not just replacing forms but also physical books, newspapers, and even bills.
There are many billions of people on the world that have a lot of room to grow consumption to even come close a fraction of typical developed world consumption.
And some of the typical developed world consumption is ridiculous and should be considered an affront to human decency rather than an ideal for the world to reach.
Of course, that is why the only solution I think will work is making fossil fuels 10x more costly. Without $20/gallon gas/petrol at the pumps and $10k flights, I do not think we see any meaningful impact to environmental problems.
But until then, the music will keep playing and everyone is will keep dancing.
This is only true due to bad protocols and network infrastructure. As long as ISPs have incentives to make Netflix go fast and the connection to your actual neighbors go slow, P2P can't take off. Also multicast networks could easily outperform cloud infrastructure in many setups, but something something business incentives.
I'm not saying otherwise, although i don't have any experience with multicast (i just know people who were playing with that some years back). Feel free to point to some more detailed/critical resources if you have links at hand.
But even on unicast networks Bittorrent (and other P2P protocols) largely outperforms any cloud provider in terms of bandwidth, especially in parts of the world where your "cloud" company has no infrastructure.
What i was denouncing is that many ISPs (at least in France) make sure if you have 10Mbit/s upload it will work fine on a route to Google, but you won't ever get the full 10Mbit/s to your literal neighbor who's using a competing ISP... You'll be happy if you even get 1Mbit/s.
There's no technical reason for that, it's all political/economical considerations (the same that make us have asymmetric bandwidth, no static IP, no configurable reverse DNS, etc).
As for video calls, they don't need massive data centres since it's supposed to be p2p for all sorts of reasons.
I am struggling to get where you come from. The actual content is so wrong, that it seems satirical, yet it's presented in a very serious, almost patronising way