Daan van Waardenburg

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Last Monday, billions of people were all of a sudden unable to use their primary means of communication (Peermohamed, 2021). Usually, news of this magnitude then gets extensively covered on Facebook and Instagram, and discussed via WhatsApp, but not this time because it just so happened to be that these social media giants were the victim of this massive communication outage.

The breakdown of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which are all part of the Facebook imperium, painfully displayed two important things. It the first place, this was a reality check for all users, showing how we completely take these social media platforms, and thereby a very big part of our communication, for granted. Secondly, it showed how vulnerable we are if an event like this takes place.

Of course, for some people these few hours will have felt like a welcome break from all the social media madness, but it is also safe to say that the outage will have had great consequences for some (Global Citizen, 2021). Whether it is a group of students hindered in their communication on the evening of a deadline, a parent that can’t reach its child when its cycling home from football practice, or a company which is highly reliable on social media advertisements seeing their campaigns go down the drain, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have taken on an incredibly important position in our lives.

And that is not a good thing. For many reasons, like phone addiction and a poor self-image among young children, but for now lets focus on the vulnerability of our communication. Because, this time the breakdown might have been a simple mistake by some engineer (a mistake with far-far-reaching consequences), but the next time it might also be a group of hackers, or even more frightening, a foreign power with bad intentions.

This is even more important for other parts of the worlds, because where we still have access to other forms of communication like text messaging, large areas in for instance Asia and South America are completely reliant on Facebook to communicate (Sweney, 2021).

Maybe we should regard last Monday as a wake-up call. Maybe it is time to structurally rethink the way we communicate and how immensely dependent we have become on Facebook to do so. Maybe we should start decentralizing our communication and not be (almost) completely dependent on one company. Whether that is by implementing another medium to communicate or by letting Facebook decentralize itself, we should start soon.

References:

Global Citizen. (2021, 7 oktober). How Did the Facebook Outage Impact People in Lower-Income Countries? https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/facebook-outage-developing-countries/

Peermohamed, A. (2021, 6 oktober). The Facebook outage: What exactly happened? The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/the-facebook-outage-what-exactly-happened/articleshow/86779254.cms

Sweney, M. (2021, 5 oktober). Facebook outage highlights global over-reliance on its services. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/05/facebook-outage-highlights-global-over-reliance-on-its-services

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What started as a utopic idea in the wake of the global financial crisis, has become a booming means of trade and payment that reaches all over the world. Cryptocurrencies are undoubtedly one of the biggest disruptive technologies of the last decade with massive possible consequences for our global economy, besides being hard not to read something about when scrolling through the news nowadays.

Cryptocurrencies, which are essentially pieces of code that are being traded as an asset, were brought into this world to offer an alternative to traditional centralised financial systems, as the past has shown multiple times that our banks and financial institutions are not unsusceptible to economic downfall or corruption. Besides this advantage of breaking the control of the banks, advocates of crypto also preach that the digital coin will make transaction fees or banking fees redundant and that cryptocurrency will drive innovation (Szalay & Venkataramakrishnan, 2021). There are large online and offline communities that believe that cryptocurrencies will actually solve some of the world biggest challenges.

Of course that all sounds like a noble cause, one might even call investors in cryptocurrencies activistic, but crypto is definitely not all roses. Opponents of the digital coins have raised concerns about the dangers of its volatility, and even some governments have stepped in now that the technology is increasingly being used for criminal transactions. But perhaps the biggest problem that comes forth out of this disruptive technology is its ecological footprint.

The process of ‘mining’ which creates new coins but is also necessary to verify transactions, is very energy intensive. According to a study compiled by the central bank of the Netherlands, the annual footprint of the global card system and global cash system combined is 7.2 million tonnes of CO2e, whereas the footprint of Bitcoin (the first and most traded cryptocurrency) alone is 64 million tonnes of CO2e on a yearly basis (Financial Times, 2021). Ethereum, another cryptocurrency, comes in at 27 million tonnes CO2e, so it seems fair to conclude that crypto is an extremely unsustainable means of payment.

Regardless if people are interested in crypto for the potential financial gains or to change the world, that should be reason enough to think twice before investing.

References

Financial Times. (2021, July 17). Carbon counter: environmental cost of cash pales against crypto. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.ft.com/content/cd40e708-6126-4685-bb75-9ad2bfe7160a

Szalay, E. (2021, May 28). What are cryptocurrencies and stablecoins and how do they work? Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.ft.com/content/424b29c4-07bf-4612-b7d6-76aecf8e1528

A Plea for Decentralized Communication

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How Idealistic Is Cryptocurrency?

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