Pokémon’s Big Carbon Footprint Illustrates Energy Reality

The astonishing success of Nintendo’s augmented-reality (AR) game, Pokémon GO, is a harbinger of yet another digital revolution. It’s also a teaching moment for the inconvenient—or at least generally ignored—truth of the ineluctable linkages between the cyber and physical worlds. Virtual worlds live inside the real worlds of massive communications and Cloud computing infrastructures manufactured with real not virtual materials and consuming real energy.