Projects/Sustainability
Environmental Sustainability
We’re in a climate crisis. The internet contributes significantly to the world’s global carbon emissions. But we also believe in the internet as a global public good that can inform, empower and connect us.
So how can we reduce emissions and advance a more sustainable internet? What else could the open internet do for the planet?
We invite technologists, designers, political minds, activists and citizens who care about the internet and our planet to imagine alternatives and develop potential ideas for the future together.
On our journey to environmental sustainability, we began several open explorations:
- Visit our Museum of the Fossilized Internet. In this research object, we explore the major contributions to the internet's carbon footprint through an imagined (miniature) museum from the future.
- Future Scenarios. In this participatory process, we developed desirable future scenarios where we imagined a greener internet, as well as ambitious changes in society, economics and technology.
- 1000 Ideas. In a series of workshops, we asked what can be done right now to make the internet more sustainable. These ideas range from very specific actions, like changes in UI or hosting providers, to broader calls for more research and advocacy.
All of these explorations are designed to spark conversation and generate bold, actionable ideas. Our hope is that we can collaboration within and beyond Mozilla towards a more sustainable internet, and we welcome working with anyone interested in making that happen.
Individual and collective action need to go together: everyone can do their part and we need systemic change. We’re not looking to vilify people or behaviours, instead we’re inviting everyone to join our journey in figuring out how to do better, and what that even means.
The Museum of Fossilized Internet
"To explore something so big, we first made it very small." — Gabi Ivens, creative lead and miniature maker
Welcome to the Museum of the Fossilized Internet.
This museum was founded in 2050 to commemorate two decades of a fossil-free internet and to invite museum's visitors to experience what the coal and oil-powered internet of 2020 was like. Gasp at the horrors of surveillance capitalism. Nod knowingly at the plague of spam. Be baffled at the size of AI training data and lament the binge culture of video streaming.
Future scenarios
After conducting a series of workshops to gather 1000 ideas for a sustainable internet, we identified some of the more ambitious suggestions and redrafted them as high-level future scenarios. These scenarios were picked to inspire fresh thinking around what is possible and desirable. While they began from a "tech sector" perspective, we quickly realised that positive visions require us to expand the scope to socio-political and economic concerns as well.
Through discussion and reflection, we hope these scenarios may expose where there is consensus as well as disagreement among participants, while also narrowing down the slate of scenarios to those that generate the most ideas, potential shared goals and actions.
It’s a thought experiment. Let's imagine a different world, so we can decide which one we actually want to work towards.
In a next step, we aim to develop these headlines into stories in an effort to identify opportunities, shortfalls, and requirements.
1000 Ideas
There are thousands of things we can do to advance a more sustainable internet.
Here you’ll find a list of the ones we gathered through brainstorming, workshops, and feedback. We've used a "double diamond" approach, i.e. we went as wide and broad as possible, generating ideas regardless of feasibility or likelihood. You can keep adding to them and help us link out to projects and research that may bring them to life. We then narrowed these down to a few top ones (below) that have sparked most feedback and engagement so far.
This is an ongoing collection of ideas and inspiration. Feel free to add and annotate!
About
Mozilla’s Sustainability Steward: Cathleen Berger
She and her team can be reached at sustainability@mozilla.com.
All our projects are inspired and thrive through our champions, who are instrumental to putting Mozilla on a path to environmental sustainability.
Behind the Museum of the Fossilized Internet: Gabi Ivens, Joana Moll, Michelle Thorne.
Behind the 1000 ideas: Michelle Thorne and the many workshop participants.