Everyone’s time is precious, especially in the run up to the Christmas holidays. With that in mind, I’ve highlighted the most insightful thing I’ve read this month.

Every year Alex Russell (Microsoft Partner Product Architect on Edge) writes a report on the The Performance Inequality Gap. If you manage a website or build them for clients, the insights in the report are invaluable. Alex is a passionate advocate for creating a more equitable web and websites that are accessible (in all senses) to all users. Many websites built today are designed for top end devices and high speed connections and therefore offer a degraded experience to the majority of the world’s connected users.

In Alex’s words “Creating a better web starts with respecting the limits of the hardware and networks that most of the world’s users carry” and the Performance Inequality Gap reports provides the data to help developers do just that.

• A quick summary of why you should read it.
• It provides a budget calculator to ensure your site performs for the majority of users
• For the key insights into why median pages sizes continue to rocket upwards (hint, it’s not good old CSS and HTML)
• Thoughts about why a more restrained approach to development is more ethical (and conforms to sustainable web design principles to boot)
• The balance of data nerdery and clarity of explanation is spot on

Alex’s insights, thoughts and frustrations with the state of the web today are well worth a read. Adopting his standards for your site might just make your site more efficient, emit less carbon and get more eyes on it at the same time.

The best of the rest, kicking off with this really insightful and realistic presentation on navigating the ethics of AI usage from Tom Wright. It gave this hardened AI skeptic pause for thought and is well worth a watch. There are lots more useful talks on the channel including one on digital sustainability by yours truly.

If you end up using the Digital Sustainability Canvas above and wonder what you can do about the digital emissions that you can’t reduce at present the lovely folks at ZeroBadge might be able to help. They offer a digital carbon offset scheme via Trefadder, a leading player in carbon capture through Norwegian climate forests.

Whatever your views on the effectiveness of the COP summits, they remain an important part of the fight against climate change. Carbon Briefs’ comprehensive run down of the key outcomes from the COP30 is required reading for anyone with skin in the game (that’s all of us).

Data centers are a divisive topic at the moment. Could micro servers that sit in your shed and help to heat your home be the answer?

When it comes to choosing digital platforms, knowledge is power. This micro-site explains the increasingly authoritarian ideologies behind some of today’s big tech platforms. It’s a sobering and important piece of journalism with some brilliant data visualisation showing how tangled the connections are.

Elon Musk appears prominently in the Authoritarian Stack site above and in this Mother Jones article on Twitter’s Foreign Influence Problem. A simple way to reduce the amount of carbon your digital activities produces would be to close your Twitter account (if you still have one).

One way of combatting authoritarian digital platforms is to become a luddite. Most people think of the term as meaning anti-technology, but in reality Luddites were actually concerned with the consolidation of control and the impact of technology on people. This article from Brookings looks at how a Luddite outlook can help us navigate today’s digital privacy and AI challenges.