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What Has Happened to Our Grand Experiment, the Internet?
With AI threatening to diminish everything that’s been good and useful about online life while creating unprecedented levels of geopolitical chaos, Congress needs to reinstate the Office of Technology Policy.
Jan 07, 2025
By virtue of luck or just being in the right place at the right time, I was the first journalist to report on the advent of the public internet.
In the early 1990s, I was editor-in-chief of a trade magazine called Telecommunications. Vinton Cerf, widely considered to be “father of the internet,” was on our editorial advisory board. Once Sunday afternoon, Vint contacted me to let me know that the federal government was going to make its military communication system, ARPANET, available to the general public. After reading his email, I more or less shrugged it off. I didn’t think much of it until I started investigating what that would really mean. After weeks of research and further discussions, I finally realized the import of what Vint had told me with its deeper implications for politics, society, culture, and commerce.
As the internet grew in size and scope, I started having some serious concerns. And there was a cadre of other researchers and writers who, like myself, wrote books and articles offering warnings about how this powerful and incredible new tool for human communications might go off the rails. These included Sven Birkerts, Clifford Stoll, and others. My own book Digital Mythologies was dedicated to such explorations.
By default, and without due process of democratic participation or consent, these services are rapidly becoming a de facto necessity for participation in modern life.
While we all saw the tremendous potential that this new communications breakthrough had for academia, science, culture, and many other fields of endeavor, many of us were concerned about its future direction. One concern was how the internet could conceivably be used as a mechanism of social control—an issue closely tied to the possibility that corporate entities might actually come to “own” the internet, unable to resist the temptation to shape it for their own advantage.
The beginning of the “free service” model augured a long slow downward slide in personal privacy—a kind of Faustian bargain that involved yielding personal control and autonomy to Big Tech in exchange for these services. Over time, this model also opened the door to Big Tech sharing information with the NSA and many businesses mining and selling our very personal data. The temptation to use free services became the flypaper that would trap unsuspecting end users into a kind of lifelong dependency. But as the old adage goes: “There is no free lunch.”
Since that time, the internet and the related technology it spawned such as search engines, texting, and social media, have become all-pervasive, creeping into every corner of our lives. By default, and without due process of democratic participation or consent, these services are rapidly becoming a de facto necessity for participation in modern life. Smartphones have become essential tools that mediate these amazing capabilities and are now often essential tools for navigating both government services and commercial transactions.
Besides the giveaway of our personal privacy, the problems with technology dependence are now becoming all too apparent. Placing our financial assets and deeply personal information online creates significant stress and insecurity about being hacked or tricked. Tech-based problems then require more tech-based solutions in a kind of endless cycle. Clever scams are increasing and becoming more sophisticated. Further, given the global CrowdStrike outage, it sometimes seems like we’re building this new world of AI-driven digital-first infrastructure on a foundation of sand. And then there’s the internet’s role in aggravating income and social inequality. Unfortunately, this technology is inherently discriminatory, leaving seniors and many middle- and lower-income citizens in the dust. To offer a minor example, in some of the wealthier towns in Massachusetts, you can’t park your car in public lots without a smartphone.
Will AI Wreck the Internet?
Ironically, the Big Tech companies working on AI seem oblivious to the notion that this technology has the potential to be a wrecking ball. Conceivably, it could diminish everything that’s been good and useful about the internet while creating unprecedented levels of geopolitical chaos and destabilization. Recent trends with search engines offer a good example. Not terribly long ago, search results yielded a variety of opinions and useful content on any given topic. The searcher could then decide for her or himself what was true or not true by making an informed judgment.
With the advent of AI, this has now changed dramatically. Some widely used search engines are herding us toward specific “truths” as if every complex question had a simple multiple-choice answer. Google, for example, now offers an AI-assisted summary when a search is made. This becomes tempting to use because manual search now yields an annoying truckload of sponsored ad results. These items then need to be systematically ploughed through rendering the search process difficult and unpleasant.
We need to radically reassess the role of the internet and associated technologies going forward and not abandon this responsibility to the corporations that provide these services.
This shift in the search process appears to be by design in order to steer users towards habitually using AI for search. The implicit assumption that AI will provide the “correct” answer however nullifies the whole point of a having a user-empowered search experience. It also radically reverses the original proposition of the internet i.e. to become a freewheeling tool for inquiry and personal empowerment, threatening to turn the internet into little more than a high-level interactive online encyclopedia.
Ordinary citizens and users of the internet will be powerless to resist the AI onslaught. The four largest internet and software companies Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are projected to invest well over $200 billion this year on AI development. Then there’s the possibility that AI might become a kind of “chaos agent” mucking around with our sense of what’s true and what’s not true—an inherently dangerous situation for any society to be in. Hannah Arendt, who wrote extensively about the dangers of authoritarian thinking, gave us this warning: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Summing up, we need to radically reassess the role of the internet and associated technologies going forward and not abandon this responsibility to the corporations that provide these services. If not, we risk ending up with a world we won’t recognize—a landscape of dehumanizing interaction, even more isolated human relationships, and jobs that have been blithely handed over to AI and robotics with no democratic or regulatory oversight.
In 1961, then FCC Chairman Newton Minow spoke at a meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters. He observed that television had a lot of work to do to better uphold public interest and famously described it as a “vast wasteland.” While that description is hardly apt for the current status of the internet and social media, its future status may come to resemble a “black forest” of chaos, confusion, misinformation, and disinformation with AI only aggravating, not solving, this problem.
What then are some possible solutions? And what can our legislators do to ameliorate these problems and take control of the runaway freight train of technological dependence? One of the more obvious actions would be to reinstate funding for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. This agency was established in 1974 to provide Congress with reasonably objective analysis of complex technological trends. Inexplicably, the office was defunded in 1995 just as the internet was gaining strong momentum. Providing this kind of high-level research to educate and inform members of Congress about key technology issues has never been more important than it is now.
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A Trio of Small Christmas Gifts to Stave Off Climate Despair
From solar-powered data centers and balconies to a landmark legal victory, I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little.
Dec 24, 2024
One of my jobs in the tiny Vermont town where I live is to lead the Christmas Eve service at the little white church alongside the river. I’m not actually a preacher, and it’s not particularly denominational—my wife and my daughter, who are Jewish, are usually on hand to belt out carols and there’s occasionally a reading from Dr. Seuss. But the neighbors stand at the pulpit one by one to recite the Scriptures that tell the story of this remarkable baby, and then I do my best in a short homily to pick out some points of light. A little harder this year than most, but perhaps more important because of that. The goal is to make sure the community holds, now more than ever.
And I suppose that in some way the community we’ve built around this newsletter is a congregation of sorts, with me again in the role of shambling, ill-trained preacher. So I’ve poked around in the news to bring you a trio of small gifts—ambiguous, by no means definitive, but nonetheless things to build on.
The first comes, somewhat remarkably, from Silicon Valley.
As you almost certainly know, the rapid growth of AI is causing despair among some energy experts. The giant data centers that “train” these various models to do what they do (help lazy students write banal termpapers, say) soak up huge amounts of electricity, and in the last year or two the fossil fuel industry has seized on that as avidly as they seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—anything to make the case for extending their business model a little longer. Arielle Samuelson, writing at Emily Atkin’s pathbreaking newsletter Heated, offers a really powerful account of what’s gone on:
The growth of AI has been called the “savior” of the gas industry. In Virginia alone, the data center capital of the world, a new state report found that AI demand could add a new 1.5 gigawatt gas plant every two years for 15 consecutive years.
And now, as energy demand for AI rises, oil corporations are planning to build gas plants that specifically serve data centers. Last week, Exxon announced that it is building a large gas plant that will directly supply power to data centers within the next five years. The company claims the gas plant will use technology that captures polluting emissions—despite the fact that the technology has never been used at a commercial scale before.
Chevron also announced that the company is preparing to sell gas to an undisclosed number of data centers. “We're doing some work right now with a number of different people that's not quite ready for prime time, looking at possible solutions to build large-scale power generation,” said CEO Mike Wirth at an Atlantic Council event. The opportunity to sell power to data centers is so promising that even private equity firms are investing billions in building energy infrastructure.
So, ugh. Except that it’s important to remember that Big Oil is an industry that lies a lot, and some of those commitments may not be quite as firm as they’re saying. In fact, a new report—this is the first Christmas present—from a team of Silicon Valley types came out last week, making the case that if these data centers are actually going to get built anytime soon, the best bet by far is for Google et al to put up solar farms next door. Building new gas plants, as they point out, takes a number of years—really, anything that requires a new connection to the grid goes slowly. But if you have a “co-located microgrid”—i.e., a dedicated solar farm right next to your mysterious warehouse of servers—that can be put up in a relative trice.
Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around two years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders.
The only one of the authors I knew before this was Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist employed by the payment company Stripe, but the others come from reputable places (Paces, which expedites renewable development, and Scale Microgrids) and they thank a passel of collaborators at places like Tesla and Anthropic. And their research seems impeccable—they work through the costs and the reliability of renewables paired with batteries, and they return again and again to the speed with which these new facilities could be built.
One thing they don’t stress, but which I think could be politically important, is that all of these big AI players have promised in recent years that they would zero out their emissions. And though no one in the White House will hold them to that, most of these companies are in places like Washington and California filled with environmentally committed workers and investors; we should be able to organize some pressure on them to do the right thing. It’s not the perfect thing. In a rational world we’d postpone the glories of AI long enough to power up all the heat pumps and cars from renewable electricity first. But if they get expertise building solar farms for their data centers, the experience may turn these behemoths into better crusaders for clean energy. One can hope, anyway. Here’s the final bottom line from the report:
Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the U.S. Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives… The advantages to whoever moves on this quickly could be substantial.
And then there’s the second present I promised, which was delivered Wednesday afternoon by the Montana Supreme Court. It upheld, on a 6-1 vote, a lower court ruling that the state’s children have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment,” and that that includes carefully analyzing state energy policies to keep them from damaging the climate.
This ruling is under the state constitution, which was amended shortly after Earth Day in 1970 to include environmental protections. (America’s Western states have not always been bright red). The landmark ruling comes almost a year and a half after a remarkable trial, which featured a mix of young Montanans explaining how climate change was damaging their lives (breathing wildfire smoke, for one) and nationally renowned climate experts who volunteered their time to make a compelling case. The state all but punted its response, not even putting its lead climate-denier on the stand after paying her large sums of money to prepare testimony, and the district court issued a powerful finding that’s now been upheld.
This doesn’t necessarily have national implications—shamefully, the Biden DOJ has buried the federal equivalent, Juliana v. U.S., under a blizzard of writs, picking up where the Trump administration left off. And it probably won’t immediately change Montana’s current commitment to using more gas. But it is a clear moral victory that will cast a long shadow. As Cornell legal scholar Leehi Yona said this morning, “This is a historic case and one that could serve as a model for state-level lawsuits, particularly as an alternative to federal courts (such as the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently seems unreceptive to climate cases).”
Mostly, I’m happy for the kids involved. I got to interview a couple of them on stage this fall at a gathering sponsored by Protect Our Winters. They were eloquent and moving, and I hope very much that this ruling strengthens their commitment to fight. The Trump era will end someday, and we’ll need a new wave of smart and moral people to carry on the crucial fights—these are them!
And the third? Attentive readers will remember how happy I was earlier this year at news that half a million Germans had taken advantage of a new law to hang solar panels from the balconies of their apartments. Well, according to a new report in The Guardian, by year’s end that number has swelled to a million and a half Germans, and now it’s taking off in Spain and elsewhere.
Manufacturers say that installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give a saving of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill. With an outlay of €400-800 and with no installation cost, the panels could pay for themselves within six years.
In Spain, where two thirds of the population live in apartments and installing panels on the roof requires the consent of a majority of the building’s residents, this DIY technology has obvious advantages.
With solar balconies, no such consent is required unless the facade is listed as of historic interest or there is a specific prohibition from the residents’ association or the local authority. Furthermore, as long as the installation does not exceed 800 watts it doesn’t require certification, which can cost from €100 to €400, depending on the area.
“The beauty of the solar balconies is they are flexible, cheap, and plug straight into the domestic network via a converter, so you don’t have to pay for the installation,” says Santiago Vernetta, CEO of Tornasol Energy, one of Spain’s main suppliers.
Putting up one of these would be illegal almost everywhere in America—but that’s something to work on next year. Why should Europeans have all the fun? Belgium has just ended its ban. As one official explained: “If 1.5 million Germans have bought solar balcony kits there must be something in it,” he says.
I wish I had yet more such gifts to offer (I’m keeping a close eye on Albany, where Gov. Kathy Hochul may still sign the crucial Climate Superfund bill before year’s end, and if that happens I’ll let you know). But I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little. I can tell you that it’s snowing this afternoon up here on the spine of the Greens. And since I’m typing up the program for the Christmas Eve service this afternoon, I can tell you how it ends: with everyone in town walking through the church doors and into the (hopefully crisp) night air singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
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With AI, Big Tech Is Ruining the Planet to Push a Product Most People Don’t Want
The true AI doom scenario is not a sentient robot uprising but the oncoming environmental catastrophe caused by the expansion of AI infrastructure.
Dec 19, 2024
Texas’ electrical grid made national headlines in the winter of 2021 when the state experienced statewide power outages. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT—the state’s power grid operator—was caught completely off-guard when a winter storm exposed the organization’s lack of severe weather preparedness. Embarrassed, ERCOT developed a roadmap to increase the reliability of its energy delivery system.
But guaranteeing a reliable flow of energy from the state’s generating plants to the homes and businesses of Texan residents has proven more difficult than expected. ERCOT recently announced that if a comparable storm were to hit the Lone Star State this winter, there is an 80% chance that they would again experience blackouts during peak hours.
Failure to resolve Texas’ power grid bottlenecks is perhaps not entirely ERCOT’s fault. Demand for energy in the state has ballooned in recent years thanks, in part, to the explosion and hype around artificial intelligence.
Texas is a microcosm of the threat artificial intelligence poses to the world—lack of energy security for households, an accelerating climate crisis, and the consolidation of corporate power.
A significant expansion in the supply of data centers is needed to meet artificial intelligence demand because the systems rely on vast computational power. AI systems are energy hungry—for example, a query using ChatGPT takes 10 times the energy of a traditional Google search.
There are approximately 342 data centers currently operating in Texas. Running these systems non-stop, daily, for 24 hours, requires a gargantuan amount of electricity. As a result, ERCOT has identified data centers as presenting a potential energy emergency alert risk at night and during early morning hours this winter. Data centers are currently consuming close to 9% of the energy produced in Texas, and it is putting a significant strain on its power grid.
Texas is a microcosm of the threat artificial intelligence poses to the world—lack of energy security for households, an accelerating climate crisis, and the consolidation of corporate power.
It is estimated that new AI servers that will be sold in 2027 will consume between 85 and 134 terawatt-hours annually. This is comparable to the electricity consumption of 18 million people living in the Netherlands.
Data centers can be the size of multiple football fields, and they are dependent on energy-intensive cooling systems that prevent computer servers from overheating and crashing. Water is an important component for cooling towers, and lots of it is needed to bring down the temperature of server equipment.
An analysis conducted by The Washington Post and the University of California, Riverside found that generating a 100-word email with ChatGPT-4 requires the use of at least one water bottle. Multiply this by millions of queries that are inputted each day, and you can get an idea of the scale of the tech sector’s water consumption.
In regions where water is already scarce, the unquenchable thirst of Big Tech hits especially hard. In 2021, a Google-owned data center in The Dalles, Oregon consumed nearly one-third of the town’s water supply even as the community grappled with a prolonged drought. As one frustrated resident aptly put it, “Google has become a water vampire, basically.”
This surge in AI energy demand use has led utilities to build new gas plants and delay the retiring of current fossil fuel infrastructure, thereby forestalling progress on our much needed green energy transition.
Both Google and Microsoft released reports this year effectively razing to the ground the climate goals they set for themselves by the end of the decade. Targets to reduce CO2 emissions are off track and both companies have blamed their investment in data centers for their increased carbon footprint.
This wave of resistance reflects a growing awareness that unchecked AI expansion comes at a cost to both consumers and the climate.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently suggested at an AI summit in Washington D.C. that while the negative effects artificial intelligence will have on the environment are inevitable, we should continue to invest in AI development because “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway.” The true AI doom scenario is not a sentient robot uprising but the oncoming environmental catastrophe caused by the expansion of AI infrastructure.
What’s worse is that tech companies are wrecking the planet to push a technology that most consumers do not even want. Aggressive investment in AI has resulted in their needless integration into existing consumer products, like an AI toothbrush or a Coca-Cola AI beverage, often without assessing the actual value added.
A recent study found that consumers were less likely to purchase a good if it contained the descriptor artificial intelligence. It demonstrates that the tech industry has created a frenzy that is less about solving real problems and more about staking a claim in an industry fueled by its own hype.
The demand for AI is largely manufactured by Big Tech itself, not the everyday consumers who bear the brunt of its consequences. Tech companies are not pouring billions of dollars into the industry with the hope of solving the climate crisis or initiating a post-work society, but with the aim of surveilling labor and, of course, increasing their rate of profit. They are plundering finite resources in their pursuit of endless growth.
Energy consumption for the sake of AI is pulling energy resources away from other very important endeavors like the green transition.
“There are ways to improve AI to use less power,” Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, toldThe Daily Texan. But “decarbonizing the power grid is really the most important thing.”
But this will never occur if we continue to privilege the insatiable energy appetite of Big Tech over the collective need for environmental sustainability.
Yet, there are reasons to be optimistic. Communities are beginning to organize, and they are pushing back against the unchecked expansion of data centers and the drain they incur on local resources.
In Loudoun County, Virginia, officials rejected a data center application due to the strains it will put on the local electric grid. Atlanta’s city council shelved a similar proposal, citing an additional concern over local water supply depletion. In Peculiar, Missouri, public outcry led the city to reverse its decision to allow for the construction of data centers in their community, with one resident capturing the broader sentiment: “Big Tech is preying on small communities all over this country.”
This wave of resistance reflects a growing awareness that unchecked AI expansion comes at a cost to both consumers and the climate. By standing up to Big Tech, these communities are laying the groundwork to resist climate change and corporate greed. They are struggling for a future where people and the planet—not profits—take priority.
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