The titular essay from Thomas S Mullaney’s book “Your computer is on fire”. The book itself is a collection of arguments about how awful computing is for the environment.

Bottom line up front

I rate this 2.3.

8 pages of directors-cut feeling intro, the radio edit would only include the punchy bits of the first paragraph and the first half of the last paragraph.

Summary

Thomas is writing to me. Right out of the gate, he compares himself to a Luddite and then provides examples of excuses I would use to hand-wave away issues. It is done first in a punchy paragraph that says everything, then boiled down to a rambly page and a half where nothing new is said. Then we’re off to the races.

Nothing is virtual

There is no cloud, instead, somebody else’s computer consumes 2 percent of global energy, and this is just going up. There’s also a high human cost. Electronics are made of spooky chemicals made and ‘recycled’ in unsafe conditions. Underpaid or volunteer mods watch gore and cheese pizza without any support from employers. Thomas doesn’t imply this is exhaustive, but I’d have also mentioned crunch time in game dev. I’d also be tempted to bring up Aaron Swartz, although this manifesto was published by MIT press. They may not have been excited to publish something about the time they drove a kid to suicide.

This is an emergency

Short and ranty para re-hashing the intro a 3rd time.

Where will the fire spread?

It’s not clear where we should focus our efforts. Deep Blue and AlphaGo win at games, china built a big supercomputer, T9 keyboard is popular in Korea. I’m not sure why I read this. The fire analogy is already wearing thin on me. I’ve caused a few out-of-control fires in my time, but have never been baffled by ‘where should the fires be fought?’.

The time for equivocation is over

Tells me the rest of the book will just assert ‘sexism is a feature, not a bug’ and ‘AI is a human’. I’ll be watching for this now. The rest of the paper explains why this choice of wording is done. I think this is the important paragraph, or could even be the entire intro. Basically “We asked for the essays to be worded like this”, pre-emptively shooting down the lazy “well ackshually” counterpoints.