What the Internet Cannot Do

IT IS impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.” Thus Victorian enthusiasts, acclaiming the arrival in 1858 of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. People say that sort of thing about new technologies, even today. Biotechnology is said to be the cure for world hunger. The sequencing of the human genome will supposedly eradicate cancer and other diseases. The wildest optimism, though, has greeted the Internet. A whole industry of cybergurus has enthralled audiences (and made a fine living) with exuberant claims that the Internet will prevent wars, reduce pollution, and combat various forms of inequality. However, although the Internet is still young enough to inspire idealism, it has also been around long enough to test whether the prophets can be right.

Grandest of all the claims are those made by some of the savants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the Internet's potential as a force for peace. One guru, Nicholas Negroponte, has declared that, thanks to the Internet, the children of the future “are not going to know what nationalism is”. His colleague, Michael Dertouzos, has written that digital communications will bring “computer-aided peace” which “may help stave off future flare-ups of ethnic hatred and national break-ups”. The idea is that improved communications will reduce misunderstandings and avert conflict.

This is not new, alas, any more than were the claims for the peace-making possibilities of other new technologies. In the early years of the 20th century, aeroplanes were expected to end wars, by promoting international communication and (less credibly) by making armies obsolete, since they would be vulnerable to attack from the air. After the first world war had dispelled such notions, it was the turn of radio. “Nation shall speak peace unto nation,” ran the fine motto of Britain's BBC World Service. Sadly, Rwanda's Radio Mille Collines disproved the idea that radio was an intrinsically pacific force once and for all.

The mistake people make is to assume that wars are caused simply by the failure of different peoples to understand each other adequately. Indeed, even if that were true, the Internet can also be used to advocate conflict. Hate speech and intolerance flourish in its murkier corners, where governments (as France is now discovering) find it hard to intervene. Although the Internet undeniably fosters communication, it will not put an end to war.

But might it reduce energy consumption and pollution? The Centre for Energy and Climate Solutions (CECS), a Washington think-tank, has advanced just such a case, based largely on energy consumption figures for 1997 and 1998. While the American economy grew by 9% over those two years, energy demand was almost unchanged—because, the CECS ventures, the Internet “can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fibre-optic cable.” No wonder one enthusiastic newspaper headline begged, “Shop online—save the earth.”

Sadly, earth-saving is harder than that. Certainly, shopping online from home is far less polluting than driving to a shopping mall. Ordering groceries online, and having them delivered, means that, if the logistics are handled efficiently, one truck journey can replace dozens of families' separate car trips. Reading newspapers, magazines and other documents online is more efficient than printing and transporting them physically. Yet doing things online is more energy-efficient only if it genuinely displaces real-world activities. If people shop online as well as visiting the bricks-and-mortar store, the result is an overall increase in energy consumption. Thanks to the Internet, it is now easy for Europeans to order books and have them extravagantly air-freighted from America before they are available in Europe. And it is more efficient to read documents online only if doing so replaces, rather than adds to, the amount of printed bumf.

Furthermore, as more and more offices and homes connect to the Internet, millions of PCs, printers, servers and other devices gobble significant quantities of energy. Home computers are becoming part of the fabric of everyday life, and are increasingly left switched on all the time. One controversial assessment concluded that fully 8% of electricity consumption in America is due to Internet-connected computers. The construction of vast “server farms”—warehouses full of computers and their attendant cooling systems—has contributed to the overloading of the electrical power network that has caused brown-outs in Silicon Valley.