24-hour solar irradiance map at each Solar Protocol solar-powered network server. Credits: Tega Brain, Benedetta Piantella
A global network of solar-powered servers shows how it’s done.
The energy demands of the internet, the devices and systems that use it, and the servers that support it are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions on par with those of the global airline industry, and these carbon costs are increasing rapidly as blockchain-enabled transactions expand: The carbon Footprint of a single Ethereum transaction is equivalent to nearly 329,000 credit card transactions.
A new project, Solar Protocol, developed by a team of researchers from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, aims to both show how this trans-global data trade over the internet is a major energy consumer and driver of climate change, and offer a possible one Solution.
On Tuesday, March 15, 2022, the project, originally supported by the Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future program and the Code for Science & Society Digital Infrastructure Incubator, will receive the Mozilla Creative Media Award from Mozilla, the Internet Health by supporting the development of open source technologies in areas such as online privacy, inclusion and decentralization. Mozilla gives the award to people and projects that show how to reinvent data in a way that shifts power away from big technology platforms and towards individuals and communities.
Developed by NYU Tandon Professors of Technology, Culture and Society, Tega Brain, who is also an Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, and Benedetta Piantella, Fellow of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP); and Adjunct Professor Alex Nathanson, Solar Protocol includes a web platform hosted over a network of solar-powered servers located in locations around the world. Aside from being a viable system with implications for future servers, it represents a global installation that sheds light on the politics of the internet and various ways of tracking web traffic.
In stark contrast to large-scale, high-volume web services that algorithmically route network traffic to the server with the fastest response time, usually the closest geographically, Solar Protocol, with about a dozen volunteer-run server nodes around the world, uses the Sun’s interaction with the Earth as the cornerstone. How the sun shapes the daily behavior, seasonal activities, and decision-making of almost all life forms is becoming the “logic” used to automate decisions on the digital network.
“Solar Protocol is a great opportunity for us as artists to bring issues of climate change and how technology is driving it to the forefront,” said Brain. “The project has catalyzed conversations about AI and automation as user traffic on the network is decided by solar power, allowing us to use intelligence from a natural and dynamic versus a data-driven machine learning model; it is an alternative proposal. Why not consider planetary boundaries as intelligence? After all, they will shape the future of life on Earth, whether we like it or not.”
The network takes into account that servers, each powered by photovoltaic cells, are located in different time zones and seasons with different levels of sunshine and different weather systems, and directs Internet traffic to where the sun shines. When a browser makes a request to view the Solar Protocol website, it is sent to the server on the network that generates the most energy.
“It’s not an alternative to the internet, so the point here isn’t to make it bigger. But we’re releasing the system as an open standard, which means that in theory anyone could start a similar network — let’s say a network of art museums,” Piantella said.
Brain pointed out that the project also looks at the language of the internet and how we talk about it, suggesting it has little to do with the concrete realities of our physical environment.
“We talk about the internet as the cloud, for example, and we tend to use the language of magic to describe it without connecting to how resource-intensive it really is,” she said. “So people who get involved in the project as server administrators get very in touch with its material reality and what it takes to set up a server that’s powered by the sun. You start making various design decisions; They think about planetary boundaries and rethink the politics of the internet.”
Kofi Yeboah, Creative Media Awards Program Officer at Mozilla, added, “In our connected world, conversations about power, inclusion and exclusion, and ownership often boil down to one thing: data. How data is collected, managed and AI systems trained impacts billions of lives. But this effect is often invisible. Creative media awards like Solar Protocol make the invisible visible, showing how data can impact everything from the environment to personal safety. The Creative Media Awards also provide a way forward by modeling ways data can be better managed to empower people and communities.”
An educational component of the project is the VIP (vertically integrated projects) initiative at NYU Tandon, which allows students to participate in the analysis of the network’s functional cycle.
Solar Protocol includes multiple collaborators from a range of communities, including faculty members in Chile, as well as arts, cultural and community organizations in multiple areas and indigenous areas in the Caribbean, Australia and Kenya.
