In Truth We Trust


Jonathan Koomey writes in an IEEE Spectrum article (mem) about how unsubstantiated claims appearing in a reputed publication can get quoted over and over again till it becomes popular wisdom. An article in Forbes,99 (subs: the article is available free on this list-serve) stated that the Internet accounts for 8% of all energy used in the United States, Computing equipment uses 13% of US energy and (the best sounding one) that a wireless Palm VII uses as much electricity as a refrigerator when you take into account all the networking equipment used to provide the wireless service. As reported in the spectrum article, these claims sounded great and were irresistible (a google search shows how highly quoted these claims were), but people missed the fact that the work behind the story was funded by a lobbying arm of the coal industry. The story was undoubtedly used to push for more energy plants just as a claim that the data flowing over the Internet doubles every 100 days was picked up by the industry which overbuilt network capacity which would never be used before the equipment became obsolete. People believe what they want to believe, and during the tech boom, claims such as these were instrumental in building up networking and data storage capacity, while claims about Internet spending fuelled the thousands of failed dotcoms.