Coding Systems

We hear all sorts of green marketing lines about how apps, algorithms, and the internet can "unlock" efficiencies, enabling lower emissions, less environmental impact, etc. But there is nothing inherently environmental about the internet. I think of it as just the latest mechanism humans came up with to control people and machines. It's a coding and communication system.

What I'm claiming in this comic is that the internet is literally and physically the latest update to a control system that goes way further back than the industrial revolution.

If we do ever achieve global environmental impact reductions, it will be primarily because we enacted limits on the size of that control system, not because we tweaked its material configuration.