I’m letting go of the “green web” thing

For a while I was interested in the idea of "sustainable websites" - in 2020-21 I even built my website around it and was betting on that as a my career going forward! I felt relieved to be able to "do something for the climate" inside my work as a web developer.

That’s no longer the case.

Building a green site! (what’s the impact?)

In January 2021, I built the website for a startup building a carbon footprint tracker for corporations. They reached me because they were interested in my approach to a low-carbon web - after doing a talk on the topic, this was the perfect opportunity to turn theory into practice, and I jumped eagerly at it.

I obsessed over optimizing every nook and cranny of a tiny static site for a starting company with unvalidated product, making tech choices that became obsolete and hard to maintain the second I shipped. I’ve wasted time & resources of a company in dire need of them: what could’ve been a 2-day project on Webflow, became 3 weeks of intense programming, with thousands of lines of code and a weird headless CMS to manage it.

Needless to say, I felt void of meaning when I shipped.

But I still needed to do something for the climate, right? Imagine on scale, this would matter! “Do you know how many people download the awfully bloated Google.com per second?!”

So I attended online conferences, read articles and wrote countless notes, with the promise of eventually publishing a lot, running a newsletter, lecturing a course, etc.

But the more I did it, the less I could justify what I was proposing. The most common question was along the lines of “what’s the impact of this in my individual web project?”, and I simply couldn’t feel good about any honest answer.

Sure, the inflated MBs shipped on Amazon.com do mean some good tonnes of CO2 emitted per year, but it’s insignificant close to the destruction done by Amazon-led consumerism.

With this unsettling truth circumdating as almost-conscious feelings in myself, I kept postponing “the dream of being a green builder”, until I started drawing more attention and money in other markets. And so ended my tech sustainability journey, of which the only rubble is my still-green website (which is still beautiful, thanks Mari!)

Going beyond utilitarism and individualism

Since then, I’ve developed my thoughts a bit further on sociopolitical and environmental topics. Most importantly, I’ve developed more closeness to myself, other people and nature, going into the body and emotions, and beyond what the intelect can reach. That gave me a lot of perspective on this failed attempt, not all of which I’d be able to articulate.

For one, I was seeking the money and vanity of being one of the first on a nascent field. Individualistic, status-driven, self-centric modern society at its finest.

Also, what kept me from acting in the end was the “lack of value” of the work - an utilitarian notion which keeps us producing always more, giving higher surplus to our capitalist overlords.

And more recently, I finally understood that any commodity that names itself “sustainable” (in this case, websites) is just paving the path for corporate greenwashing and guilt-free consumerism. Even if the proposers of the so-called sustainability are well-meaning.

Companies trying to make a buck co-opting this web sustainability discourse have been reaching me out more and more, which was what prompted me to write these thoughts. If this isn’t a glaring indication of the issue above, I don’t know what is.

On October 2020, I closed my talk on an “eco-friendly web framework” saying we don’t need more tools, we need education.

I still agree with this statement. But I no longer think it’s about educating programmers to build leaner websites and designers to rethink the need & scope of what’s being built.

I now think we should be educating people to become anti-capitalist, and embrace the anti-racist, anti-racialist, feminist, agroecological movements that are required for this change to happen.

If we want to “save the planet”, we need ecosocialism, not an eco-friendly web.

How am I becoming an ecosocialist myself, you ask? Still learning, and glad to learn with you, feel free to reach out!