[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1558/jocr.v5i2.197
We need to focus on sustainability, otherwise Mars will also be unsustainable.
Just wait until oxygen itself becomes a commodity, like in the film "Total Recall". Except unlike in film, there's no deus ex machina native ancient technology to suddenly make the entire atmosphere breathable.
And more importantly, efficiency in the consumption is not translated in efficiency in the use of resources (which is the important one): transporting goods by horse vs faster transportation with combustion engines.
But with growth beyond a certain point, cash flow becomes so significant and so many fewer people are handling it that the room for misguided actions, not just unforseen but often hidden or obscured, can quickly overcome the profits from much earlier technology milestones which took much longer for the entire org to implement. Which can not be replaced unless more technology breakthroughs are forthcoming, but even when a steady stream of excellent new technology keeps coming down the pipeline it could still be a sinking ship. Then if only the top people think it's not seaworthy, or know what they've done that might make it so, they're going to completely deceive the rest of the crew as effectively as possible or all the lifeboats could be used up.
When it comes to building cash flow, profits, shareholder value, and overall company valuation not every economically sensible executive is going to pursue or achieve the same balance among these, regardless of motivation.
When a company originally thrives because the early talent can make profits that are good, it can be the firm foundation for what could be long-term, even exponential growth.
Later leadership which does not always have equal talent for profits will often have more experience utilizing cash flow itself to substitute as a resource for bonuses, dividends, and things like that when much needed technology boosts are not the windfall they once were.
The net effect is people make money for a while then the technology is wasted.
Because profits actually weren't pursued enough, and cash flow too much instead
Like when a huge company acquires a rapidly-progressing technology group but no more progress occurs after that, or progress becomes intentionally discontinued or even reversed.
Like a gravitational field so massive that it draws in other planets and absorbs their potential for continued growth, rather than leveraging progress using the overwhelming resources.
A smallco that made excellent profits primarily from innovation itself, looks excellent on paper because it is actually a good acquisition target. When absorbed into a bigco their impressive profits no longer add up to more than a drop in the huge bucket so focus ends up being placed elsewhere besides the profit-making innovation that was supposed to be so promising.
The cloud as a business is mostly about building products that address ever changing needs and making the clients more dependent on said products. There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.
I really think the opposite is true, what makes you think that?
Everything else links back to matter. Even my "internet points" on HN are tied back to the food I had to eat to type in that sweet sweet snark.
This notion that economics isn't ultimately a resource scheduling theory that falls out of a base set of behaviors (commerce). If we removed choice, we get operations research.
Capitalism is akin to wanting to cook a hotdog on a campfire and burning down an entire house to do it.
Cloud is still computing. Computers with a finite life that need to be produced, from natural resources.
Computing that needs to be powered and cooled.
Those have environmental impacts and very much align with OPs quote.
First off, where do you think "the cloud" comes from? Even if we assume 100% renewable grid (which is currently impossible) the computers that run the cloud require an enormous amount raw materials and labor to manufacture.
But far more importantly, where does your clients capital come from?
The greatest accounting trick capitalism every pulled was to get people to think of individual parts of a system rather then the entire thing.
There's real magical thinking involved to think that capital just appears in these clients at now real cost. At some point labor and resource exploitation is required to create economic value which is then passed around throughout the system. Just because you can skim off some surplus value selling some SaaS product in the cloud doesn't mean that the value you are paid with doesn't come from the exploitation of resources.
Finally, you can easily dispel this myth by looking at the current state of our global environment. Show me any period of economic growth that isn't also tied to increased energy and resource usage.
We may well develop technologies that allow us to generate more with less, but there are limits to this.
Yes, Coca-cola may invent a new soda, but that soda will always have some material inputs.
Cloud computing most definitely does not escape this - it relies on massive networks of physical infrastructure that require huge investments of natural resources and human capital to build.
Even the monetization of things that appear at first blush to avoid this issue such as the monetization of human attention do not do so in reality as our mental faculties themselves rely on the continued sustenance of our physical bodies.
All this demand for software and ever changing needs, and more cloud computing environment is coming from somewhere. You want to know where?
Merely 2 decades ago, the average household had one computer in the house, and it was typically a desktop, and the adults and teenagers had had cellphones.
Now, almost everyone that is middle class or above has multiple computing devices in their possession at all times. Every member of the family has their own laptop or tablet and cellphone, probably even a smartwatch or two, even kids as young as 4. There's probably multiple TV screens and gaming consoles as well. Devices that are designed to be replaced in a mere 2-3 years through planned obsolesce. We have more cheap shit than ever before and it gets thrown in the trash at an ever increasing rate. There are screens literally everywhere now: My gas station pump, the wine and beer isle at my grocery store, at the checkout line, walking out into the parking lot, on my wrist, in my pocket, at my coffee shop, in my restaurants.
That results in more companies needing to have digital presences, more apps, more games, more features, more data collection and spyware tracking you around the internet, more ML models being trained and draining energy, more crypto-mining and 4,000 watt PSU's coming online, so on and so forth.
All this stuff requires an ever increasing amount of rare earth materials and burned fossil fuels to produce and operate.
Sure, but that also increases Google's net profit and allows its users to make more queries. That profit is then maybe invested to penetrate new market segments like transportation or hardware production, or is distributed among CEOs who buy bigger houses and more cars.
In essence, the efficiency gains of improving the algorithm are lost because of the free-flowing streams of capital.
The efficiency gains of improving the algorithm ARE free-flowing streams of capital.
Computers need matter, energy, and space.
Lots and lots of apps are going to be rolled up into forms solutions, for example.
It's Zeno's Paradox - if you have use half of the resources, and then half of the remaining, and then half of that remaining, you could continue forever.
Whether or not you agree with the analysis, the core problem it posits - that capitalism will grow out of markets to expand into, and that once it does, it will fundamentally change the game - matters.
We can necessarily not have growth forever - if not before, eventually we run out of exploitable energy within our light-cone. In practice we'll hit limits far sooner that will cause competition to drive down production cost will be far harsher than it needs to be in an environment where you can compensate by expansion.
Marx thought that would happen "soon" - when capitalism has spread to the entire world. But it's a question when, not if, we hit a ceiling where further demand growth can't physically happen, and quite likely we'll reach a ceiling long before there where it's not happening fast enough to counter competitive pressure. The world population is expected to stabilise and start dropping - at least for a while - possibly as soon as towards the end of this century. What happens to growth then?
Whenever we reach a point where capitalism is no longer getting growth by growing into expanding markets, the question becomes whether capitalist competition will drive us to a level of automation that threatens to kill capitalism. Marx believed that would happen by causing crises of "overproduction", where improved efficiency would cause mass unemployment and by extension kneecap demand by taking away peoples incomes. Alternatively, whether we'll be able to as a society reign things in and ensure people share in enough of the improvements in efficiency for capitalism to survive - be it with UBI, or shortening working hours, or other means.
Because it's easy to forget that one of the "promises" of capitalist competitive pressure is to drive margins towards zero, because a company that can survive with lower margins can out-compete one that can't. And ultimately that means driving every cost that can be reduced down, and that means ultimately driving labour costs down as far as they can go...
I believe in the 20th century, this conundrum was resolved in enormous growth of what we consider to be property assets. We have not only reached the limit of exploitation of natural resources on the planet, but also added intelectual property, military-industrial complexes, various financial instruments, healthcare, and as of late, we have monetized human attention and behavioral data. On top of that, we monetized human servitude, now lot of well-off people are in debt (at least with mortgages and student loans).
Ultimately that means addressing labour costs. For an individual capitalist it makes sense to drive labour costs towards zero. But if everyone does it, then their markets shrink unless there are external factors (e.g. UBI or similar) that counters the market-wide effects of their reduction in labor costs.
This is also why UBI is a "liberal" (in the classical, not US sense) policy, and not something the socialist left is very interested in - from a socialist point of view UBI is bread and circus to keep capitalism from imploding.
It seems to me we had a form of capitalism that flourished (piggy-backed) well on top of democracy, and now it has morphed into a form that thrives best in a plutocracy (where democracies are eventually just Putin-style husks of their former glory).
Corporatism.
It's publicly-traded corporations that cause many of these negative effects:
* Since investors treat corporations as black boxes that are just numbers going up or down, they are separated from the non-financial ethical consequences of what the business does. We all, through our 401ks, probably own stock in companies doing outright horrendous things to human rights in developing countries or harming the environment.
* Investors put pressure on corporations to grow at the expense of all other things. Corporations that fail to prioritize that will be replaced by better-capitalized corporations that do. It is an evolutionary environment where the primary selection pressure is growth.
* An effective way for a corporation to grow is, instead of competing, simply acquire competition to reduce selection pressure and then do things like regulatory capture to rig the system.
The problem is that private ownership leads to the classic collective action problem, where actions that are individually rational to each private owner have consequences that are collectively irrational and make the world worse off.
This is not to say that private ownership should be abolished. But there has to at least be a heavy collective counterweight to self-interested wealth accumulation.
Just a nitpick, there is another condition, which is that the labor is traded on the free market under capitalism. I can imagine a society where everything is done in cooperatives where the workers are also the owners (they have shared private ownership).
Excuse my language but... who the actual fuck thinks otherwise? This is extremely perplexing to me.
How many layers of double speak must one hide behind before you can believe that sustained growth for its own sake can be a healthy, sustainable goal?
Allocating resources is a hard problem to solve. If we had infinite resources we would not need to solve it.
There is complexity there (you need to ensure there aren't any easily exploitable loopholes), but markets have lots of uses.
This is where true why is our way of life less sustainable today than it was 1000 years ago?
Nearly all first nations tribes lived in a way of live that was sustainable indefinitely. In 250 years of developing capitalism we have destroyed most of the biosphere, and trigger climate change that has the potential to undo civilization as we know it.
Capitalism and rapid hydrocarbon extraction has allowed the species to surpass the carrying capacity of the planet in away that cannot possibly be sustained.
Personally, I think this was always our destiny, but to try to delude yourself into believing that capitalism is making things better is a strange form of denial.
The CO2 emissions per person, which is a much better way to measure how much energy it takes to sustain a persons life style is unimaginably higher.