(00:01):
Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me trying to keep my footprint ball was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet over someone. Please save me. Trying to save the planet over someone. Please save me.

(00:25):
Welcome to In Over My Head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest day is Tilman Santarius. Tilman is a scientific author and writes on topics such as digital transformation, global justice, climate policy, world trade, and sustainable economics. He has co-authored several books, His latest being Smart Green World, Making Digitalization Work for Sustainability. Tillman has studied sociology, anthropology, and economics, and accomplished a Ph.D. in social science. He is a professor for social transformation and sustainable digitalization at Berlin's Einstein Center Digital Future and Heads, a junior research group on digitalization and sustainability at the Technical University of Berlin and the Institute for Ecology Economy Research. Welcome to in Over my head, Tilman.

(01:05):
Hello Michael. Nice to talk to you today.

(01:07):
So when talking about our digital life, I'm curious about the broader picture of how digitalization affects environmental sustainability. Does switching from analog to digital really lower our environmental impact, or does it just increase our desire to consume and how do we make digitalization work for sustainability? In the book, you co-authored Smart Green World, you explore these topics. So I'm excited to chat with you today. I think it might be helpful to start with a great example you have at the beginning of the book. Tell me about the biggest library in the world.

(01:32):
Yeah, Michael, that's a good start. I think, I mean, one of the biggest libraries and even buildings in the world is located in London. It's the British Library. It's been founded in 1,753, I think, at the time of the British Empire. And by now it's been several buildings in total 111,000 square meters. And the bookshelves have a length of 625 kilometers. So there's many, many books, probably 25 million books and close to 200 million other reports and papers and other kind of publications. Now, what happens if we all digitalize this, we could probably digitalize it with a storage capacity of 65 terabytes and 65 terabytes is not that much. If you have a modern hard disc drive, you probably need three or so, maybe four hard disc drives. So you could place the whole content of the British Library on a small site table right next to your laptop. And this is just a metaphoric example of the potential of digital technologies to dematerialize to use less space, less overall resources in terms of bricks and water, and also to save a lot of time because you can access these books in no time, basically through your laptop.

(02:58):
Yeah, that's such a great example, especially when you talk about just how little it would take up if it was on your, your desk. But I guess the thing people think about when they talk about digitalization and sustainability, it's like, okay, so we have all these books on, let's say that hard drive or online on the cloud or something. Yeah. But is that really more environmentally sustainable? Because now you have all the resources that are going into these devices and also running them. So let's talk a bit about that.

(03:25):
Right. I mean, we're currently in a state where we've already seen digitalization ongoing for a couple of decades now, but it hasn't really replaced so many things entirely. I mean, nobody shut down the British library, right? And used the bricks for other houses, rather it's add on. So we have all that digitalization, digital newspapers, digital services like watching movies. But you still have the movie theaters. You still have the libraries, you still have CDs or old records or so, So most of the digitalization is addon consumption, and that is one reason why it's so far hasn't really contributed at large to a demoralization or a decarbonization of our economy.

(04:12):
And why do you think that's happening? Is just that people are so used to having those physical items,

(04:17):
Right? First of all, we have them and they're still running. I mean, think about all the stereos or so, you know the power amplifications and the CDs. Most people still have them either in the living rooms or maybe in the basement or so stored, but they're not broken. There's, they would still function, but besides, we now use Spotify at other digital modes of listening to music. So that's one thing. The other thing is that there is some substitution ongoing. I mean, and now you Michael and me, were talking here through a video stream and we're recording, although you're in Canada and I'm in Germany. So that's, that's a way of replacing. We didn't meet via taking the airplane, right? Mm-Hmm. , but still the numbers of air travel passengers and kilometers haven't declined. So why is that? Yes, we are replacing business travels and maybe some leisure travels by way of digital communication, but we are doing, or other people are doing travels more than before. So the whole economy is growing and our consumer lifestyles are still following the pathway of more and better and further. And that is why even though we see some substitution, there is add-on consumption on other ends and in other occasions.

(05:33):
Yeah, I know in with past guests and in your book it talked about rebound effects, which is what you're referring to there. So I find that very interesting that yeah, it's difficult to just slow our consumption because we have more access to things, so we just tend to take more in, right?

(05:49):
Exactly. The rebound effect will be a special case where the efficiency improvements let's say we're saving time or we saving hustle, you know, energy or we saving money by way of making things more efficient through digital means, and then we can use that save time or that saved energy or that saved money to consume ever more. Music again is a good example, right? Before we might have had like 50 or 200 CDs. Now we have Spotify, we could access all the world's music at one mouse click, and it's probably that we're streaming more than we used to listen via CDs. At least we're streaming songs multiple times, whereas we once bought one CD and listen to that. So again, I think the potential to make things more efficient and to save time and energy, money oftentimes at least lead to more consumption, which is called a rebound effect.

(06:48):
Yeah, absolutely. Would that actually have an environmental impact if we just, you know, downloaded that song once and then just that was it.

(06:56):
Exactly. I think we need to do two things for one to more radically digitalize and more consequentially digitalize and leave aside, let go all these analog modes so that it's not an add-on digital consumption, but it's a real replacement. And secondly we need to think about our consumer habits. So the more, the better, the further is sort of the logic of the linear economies of the last hun 100 years. But if we want to reach sustainable modes of production consumption, we need to give up with these old paradigms and we need to think about what is really enough? How much do I need and just is safe? I wanna listen to a song, I can download it once and then listen to it, and I don't have to stream it 20 or 50 times. So it's also like a matter of reflecting upon our own consumption habits and adjusting them to a more sustainable mode.

(07:55):
Yeah, and I think on the other side of things, like obviously there's that personal responsibility, which I've talked about with other guests, but also that larger societal implications, right? So it's great to slow down our consumption, but I feel like the way that the system is designed, it's designed to make us consume more and want more. And can you talk a bit about that?

(08:15):
Yeah, I mean, it's the, you can call it the system, but on the other hand it's, it's actors, it's people or companies, you know that are driving development overall and digital development more specifically. So I think there's a lot of potential in the tools themselves, in digital tools, like let's say in the internet, you know, or in apps that we can download that help us make our lives resource-light and decarbonized. But oftentimes the interests of those offering hosting the services is rather to sell more and to drive consumption to even greater heights. Take for example, online shopping. If we would purchase everything online and we would have delivery services bundling drives to consumers so that one car can deliver dozens of consumers on one trip, that saves a lot of emissions. We need less cars in total compared to if everybody drives his or her own car to the mall or to the shopping center.

(09:14):
But the problem is that those who run the shopping platforms, the eCommerce platforms, they of course are interested in selling evermore. So we probably see a bit less of transportation, but we see more items purchased. The overall level of consumption increases, the more mobile the shopping becomes. So it's the interest of the actors. I think we need to think about who is driving digitalization and who is actually offering the services. And maybe there needs to be built in some sustainability criteria that it's not the growth paradigm, but rather the sufficiency paradigm, which yes, wants to satisfy needs, but not necessarily ever more needs, but just the needs that we all have.

(09:56):
Yeah, absolutely. And then you talked a bit about online shopping, I think. Yeah. In, in one of the sections of your book, you also talked about transportation more generally, which I found quite interesting. How does digitalization affect transportation?

(10:07):
For one, we talked about replacement and, and potential that video conferencing can replace physical travel, that's very important. Second, it's also, again the efficiency potentials. So you can by eco mode driving or by particular in, in logistics, you know, in, in a truck fleet or so you can optimize a lot. It reduce fuel consumption per trip or per kilometer, driven by way of digital modes by way of digital planning. Also, you know navigation systems and maybe on, on freeways, connected driving modes and other stuff. But thirdly, besides substitution efficiency improvement, there's also a potential to bundle rides like the sharing model, you know, that taking a ride with other people, using public transportation more efficiently and conveniently so that people are more tempted to let the car in the driveway if possible, at least in cities, you know, and take public transportation.

(11:05):
So this is another a third potential, taking several different modes like bike sharing, a bus a scooter or so to come from A to B instead of driving your own private car with one person behind the steering wheel. So that's another potential that we can use. It's probably not necessarily very high-tech. So all the talk about autonomous driving and self-driving cars that would probably remain in the niche, maybe in rural areas that are not at all densely populated. So whereas in more dense areas or even cities, it's probably rather low-tech. You have a couple of platforms that help consumers connect to the services offered and that enables them to let the car in the driveway. And you probably don't need that much of artificial intelligence to solve mobility needs.

(11:57):
Can you talk a bit about some of those apps and how it's a niche market? Do you see that changing in the future?

(12:04):
I think it's not gonna change automatically. I mean, the power and the money, the finances overall that are poured into, for instance, developing driver assistance systems or autonomous vehicles is enormous. And there's a whole lobby, namely the car lobby, but all the industries that are linked to the automobile industry that want to push these technologies so badly. So it's not coming automatically. I think what is coming with, with a lot of market power is the tendency towards driver assistance. What would probably need more societal or even political intervention and more gorgeous support, including financial support would be all those apps, all this multimodality platforms that are currently in a niche, but that don't enjoy those highly stuffed financial very powerful actors behind them. So we need more support and also more consumer choice to help those come out of the niche.

(13:09):
Yeah, absolutely. And in, in talking about that in the book, you talked about even decentralization, how that's important.

(13:16):
Yeah. Again, I think in a larger sense, digital technologies offer many potentials to decentralize the economy. You can think about fancy technologies such as 3D printing so that you can basically print at your home or maybe at a community lab, a fab lab or so you can print in principle, any item, any consumer good that you want, at least in the future. We're probably not yet there, but theoretically that's possible. So that would be a very radical form of decentralization. But even if you don't think about 3D printing, but more of the economic structures, you had many decades of increased centralization. I mean, take supermarkets. So you know, where you used to have all those small shops in small villages, and now you have one chain or a few chains dominating the market with huge warehouses where they bring all the items, let's take agriculture produce from remote regions into one central warehouse, and then they, or storage house, and then they bring it back into all the, in the outlets where they sell them.

(14:18):
So that's a tendency towards stark concentration and centralization. And the main argument was always the labor costs, right? So that centralization would reduce labor costs and you could save labor and optimize the cost of production. And with digitalization, particularly, this argument can probably become obsolete because if you replace parts of the human labor needed by way of digital technologies, you can enable decentral production units without the main argument that it's too costly. And you, you can, for instance, envision some kind of distributed economies where, let's stick to the example of the agricultural food product where you don't bring the ladders from the remote area into the central warehouse and then back into the remote area to the shop, but where you can sort of link the farms to the regional shops right away and save a lot of transportation and decentralize the value chains in a way that the lettuce goes from the farm to the shop right away.

(15:18):
And you can imagine this for many other parts. And you can also see already that companies are bringing back production from Asia, for instance, back to the areas where consumers live like Canada or Germany. That products that industrial products are increasingly reproduced again in those areas. So there's a lot of potential for decentralization in digital technologies. However, again, it will not come automatically because we also see a lot of centralization tendencies in digitalization. Take for example, all the platforms we see platform monopolies arising most severely in, in search and social media, but also in industry, the kind of industry platforms that are now emerging, they are pretty much centralized and there's a few sellers only who offer those services. So I think, again, we need more political intervention to help realize the decentralization potential of digitalization. Otherwise there's the danger that we see a new kind of centralization by way of digital services.

(16:18):
Yeah, and I guess that's part of that bigger, I guess we'll call it a problem, societal problem that these companies are, it's made easier for them to operate into monopolize, right? With let's say tax incentives.

(16:29):
Yeah, exactly. I mean there's the tax incentives or disincentives, right? , they are one problem. The other problem is that there was, for many decades, there was pretty much no regulation at all in digital markets. We saw some deregulation of telecommunication markets in the eighties and nineties. And on that basis, the digital platforms that we see now, which are the most powerful companies in the world, could emerge without much political regulation, standard setting intervention at all. So I think in a way, politics is lagging behind the technological development. So part that we need to catch up and develop new forms of digital governance, which allows society to match the potential of these technologies with the common good.

(17:21):
Do you feel like that conversation is happening, that these things need to change? Like do you feel like people are aware of the big tech and, and monopolies and such?

(17:29):
Yeah, I think the monopoly issue is pretty well in the discussion now. And we see that the United States, China South Africa, but in particular the European Union, are on the way of developing, establishing new legislations to better control those monopolies. In the European Union, you have the digital services package that consists of two significant legislations, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which tries to subordinate the services on those digital platforms. And the companies, the actual actors that are hosting them are offering them under democratic control. So that's the very first important step. And then next steps would be to establish social and environmental standards so that the services on those platforms also help achieve and solve environmental policy goals or social policy goals. That would be the next step, right? So that in the end, digitalization as a toolbox also helps to address some of the severe challenges that human is facing, like climate change or that increased polarization in society and, and other challenges and where we're not yet there.

(18:41):
But I think we are on the way and it's been discussed. We just had a very recent conference last weekend in Germany that a co-hosted and that I initiated and we brought together people from the tech communities like hackers, net political people, people working in digital policy think tanks with, on the other hand, civil society and science and, and other actors from sustainability. And these two communities, the tech community and the sustainability community usually don't need. But at our conference we had 2,500 participants and it was really intensive debates about the future of digitalization and how we can make those technologies be at service to solve some of the social environmental challenges that we are facing.

(19:28):
No, that's great to bring those two things together. And what were some kind of key takeaways that you had from your conference?

(19:34):
I think one key takeaway is we need more governance. As I said earlier these potentials don't come automatically. So we are having, we are seeing a huge power imbalances. And a second takeaway is that a lot of those kind of technologies and a lot of actors that are trying to do good and that are actually designing technologies for let's say sustainability reasons and goals, they're already there. There is a lot of technologies already there that is exactly designed to do that. For instance, you have Uber on the one hand, you know, offering the kind of extractivism capitalism model that is paying bad rates to the drivers. And that is probably generating additional road transportation in cities where you used to have public transportation, which is better for the environment, but you also have other services offered in other platforms that are competing with Uber, but that need more support to get out of the niche. So another takeaway is that, yes, we're already there, but we need to take or make sure that the good technologies are mainstreamed.

(20:39):
Yeah, and that's something I really enjoyed about reading your book is that you were giving examples of some of these, even these apps that you can use to foster sustainability. And I found myself searching them or you know, I even changed my email after reading your book. I'm like, I'm gonna get a new email. This one's much more sustainable. So yeah, I guess that's the, the biggest challenge is a lot of these applications, a lot of these services that are offered are much more sustainable. I was looking at like fair B and B compared to Airbnb, but then I looked at how many places are offering fair B b, and there were that many. How do you think that we improved that? Is that coming from the consumers saying that we want these services to be more available or is it more on that regulatory side?

(21:18):
I think all sides need to come into play. So I think first of all, we need agenda setting in the public and political discourse. And that is why we did the conference last week, right? So we, we need to raise awareness for these issues, both for the environmental and social risks of digital technologies and all the environmental footprint that is going along with the hardware production and with running the hardware. You know, like these numbers for instance, that the internet, all interconnected devices worldwide account for eight to 10% of global electricity consumption. And that most likely the electricity consumption will increase 50 to 80% globally until 2030. So we'll have a huge increase in energy demand by a digitalization in the next few years. So not very many people know that. So we need to raise awareness for those negative implications, but we also need to raise awareness for the potentials and the positive opportunities that digital technologies offer.

(22:18):
So awareness raising I think is very important first, and that goes to all the stakeholders, politicians that they perceive or sort of see the need in developing some regulation or legislation. But our consumers also, we can now already change apps or buy a different smartphone if we wanna buy a new one or switch the electricity provider, et cetera, et cetera. So consumers are also addressed. But last but not least, companies themselves. So I think a lot of services I used from companies for companies, take for example all the cloud computing. I mean here Amazon is the market leader in terms of cloud computing, but there's different or alternative services offered. I only know one example from Germany. We have a very small provider called Wind Cloud. So this provider has a data secure cloud service that is run by their own wind installations, wind turbines. So it's a hundred percent renewable energies that at the same time power the clouds. And these companies also, I mean these or these business models, you know, need to thrive. And so I think if entrepreneurs are aware of the risks and opportunities of digital technologies, new business models, new companies will emerge and that will also help to improve our stances here.

(23:38):
Yeah, I think, cuz from my perspective, you know, I'm, I'm very much about empowering people and education and yeah, I feel like we can use technology to further sustainability, right? And why not? Why not use those apps and, and that technology to make our lives better and to, and to, yeah, allow us to use more fair, more equitable things where I think that's really great. But it's, yeah, it is definitely a challenge to get those things in the mainstream, right?

(24:02):
Mm-Hmm. . Yeah, but we're only commencing here. So I think it's fine. I'm optimistic because usually these things need some time to get in our heads, you know, and to find the ways in the press or in the public debate, you know, or in social media or wherever. I mean take for example the increased sensibility for data protection like 10 years ago people would say, Why There's no problem if Google has all my data. I don't care. That has really changed in the last years. And I think the same will happen to the nexus of digitalization and sustainability. Maybe still today people think, well it's also immaterial, you know, so virtual so it doesn't cost anything, but it will trickle into our heads and in the mainstream that there is some material basis of digitalization and that we also need to take care about rewind effects and others. So it just needs some time. But I'm pretty optimistic that this will reach also the level of policymaking in a few years down the road.

(25:01):
Do you wanna talk about your current research?

(25:04):
We published our book A Smart Green World in 2020. So that was co-authored by Stephen Lange and myself. And we just recently last week we published a report called Digital Reset Redirecting Technologies for the Deep Sustainability Transformation. And this is even more comprehensive than our book Smart Green World. And it's also more up-to-date and it's been co-authored by 15 international experts. So it's been based on a project that I was running the last two years. We brought together a bunch of experts from different fields and disciplines and topic areas, you know, like people who know about platform economics or people who know about artificial intelligence or people who know about agriculture or transport or industry or energy and people from the tech side, but also people from social science and economics. And this group of authors has discussed a lot during the last two years. And we finally came up with our report Digital Reset, which is free for download on the internet. And yeah, we also developed a couple of guiding principles in that report and lots of options. What a particular policy makers can do in the near future.

(26:20):
What are some of those guiding principles that you came up with?

(26:23):
One is that we need to make sure that the design, the designing phase of the technologies become more democratic. That more stakeholders are included in the design, let's say, of a social media platform. Today we're leaving that up to the market and it's basically one company that determines the design. But if we had different stakeholders, communities, consumers, politics at the table, I think these technologies would look different and would have different features. So we call that regenerative design. That's one principle. Another principle is circularity. I think we need to much more radically use digital technologies to achieve or to move slowly towards a circular economy. Again, another principle is sufficiency. And I think that's a principle that we base on also on various other publications that we've done. Also, scientific publications. We've spelled out the concept of digital sufficiency. So what does sufficiency in consumption or in production mean when connected to digitalization? There's a couple of other principles. So take a look at our report. It's been meant that these principles are guiding stars, you know, guardrails where policymakers, consumers, but also company business representatives can orient themselves if they want to make digitalization work for sustainability.

(27:46):
Well that's really helpful and I can link that into show notes. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's, that idea of digital sufficiency really stuck with me cuz that's kind of where I'm at, where, you know, how can we use technology to improve our lives and improve sustainability, but how can we also make it healthy as well, right? And that it's not running our lives and it's not constantly in our lives and yeah, we can use it in a good way,

(28:09):
Right? And, and sufficiency mainly means contributing to the good life. I mean, what we all want to have is a good life, a decent life, you know, with at least realizing all the human rights, the, the physical ones, but also the social ones and political ones. But you know, just having a decent life in good conditions and safe conditions and where we can aspire all our dreams. And I think here it's not always the best route to follow ever greater efficiency. Yes, efficiency is also good, but we need to sort of frame the potential of increasing efficiencies by way of digital tools, by an overarching strategy for what do we actually want to achieve. And that's where digital efficiency comes into play. And let's take a very specific example. The devices, you know, the computer is a universal machine. The whole idea behind the computer is that we do not need various different machines to achieving one result, but that we have a universal machine that can basically do everything and we seize that, that in part in the smartphone where we can listen to music, we can read the paper, we can communicate to our friends, we can do phone calls, we can check the weather.

(29:24):
So it's pretty universal, but at the same time, we need to buy new smartphones every year or every other year. So sufficiency would mean making use of that universality of the machine, but relieving people from the need to buying every more staff or buying every new smart, every new smartphones every second year. So prolonging the lifetime of those devices, making sure that software updates are provided by the hardware sellers until the physical lifetime of the device ends. This is all liberating because it enables us consumers or citizens to realize our desires without ever more consumption.

(30:08):
So like as it is right now, do you feel like digitalization helps us live the good life?

(30:13):
Yes, of course I think it does, but at the same time it has some counter effect, right? So in, in a way it makes lots of things easier and it opens up new possibilities, most particularly the option to communicate with people around the globe just as we do Michael right now. So this is great opportunities, but also in terms of access to knowledge, access to information or finding like-minded people or finding alternative shopping items or if you live in rural areas, having access to consumption possibilities that you didn't have before. So lots of potential or actual contribution of digital technologies to improve our life. But at the same time, there's some disadvantages like connectivity that we're always connected or like people lose their job due to digitalization. Lots of new jobs that are coming along with digitalization are rather in the low-paid sector and all the debate about the polarization of public debate and political debate. I think we need to spot these risks and tackle them right on so that we can only enjoy the positive contributions

(31:22):
In the things we've talked about, about how the technology can benefit our lives and how it can make things better. And that positive social change, I guess I always go back to, you know, this show is about empowering people to take action on the climate crisis. And I know you talked about how things are changing and the mindsets generally changing, but what are some things that people could do today to have an impact When it comes to things we've been talking about,

(31:43):
It could be very hands-on, you know, prolong the lifetime of your smartphone, switch to a renewable electricity when running the internet. Use those applications or platforms that are run cooperative and that probably contribute themselves to environmental goals using those services that are already running on renewable electricities, even in the data centers, or using search engines like cozia.org for example, that plant trees rather than reinvesting the money into evermore ads and shopping. So these are very hands-on possibilities that every consumer, every listener to this podcast series can do. On the other hand, we're citizens. We're not only consumers, so we're citizens. So we can raise our voice, we can unite and formulate demands for policy or for companies. You know, we could also voice our claims at companies directly and make them aware that they should do more and that it's currently what we're doing as society is not enough to stay on a 1.5 degrees Celcius global warming pathway. So we need to do more. So we're citizens and I think besides the things we can change in our everyday lives, we should become active and demand those changes in the wider society.

(33:00):
That's really helpful. This has been a very informative conversation, so thanks so much for coming on the show.

(33:05):
Thank you Michael. Yeah.

(33:08):
Well, that was my talk with Tilman. I loved all of the examples Tilman gave about apps that are helping with sustainability and I'm really excited that hopefully, we can bring those things out of the niche and into the mainstream. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz. Here's the feeling a little less in over our heads when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again soon. In Over My Head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us, email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible.

(33:40):
I'm trying to save the planet. Oh, will someone please save me?