Ever notice how many defunct websites exist on the internet? Ever stumble across deserted blogs? I do. Often.
Our culture of consumption and waste is out of control. We burn through virtual resources even faster and more prolifically than we do physical resources. One of the great illusions of the internet and technology in general is that the ether is a place of limitless resources. That’s simply not true. Every action we take through technology in the universe of the ether results in a reaction in the “real world.” All the copper and aluminum and silicon and graphite and plastic and rubber and glass that goes into the gizmos that drive our techno lives come from the Earth herself. Natural resources are consumed at an astonishing rate to put that little smartphone in your hands or that tablet on your lap. Forget the packaging and the fuel required to move all the parts from the mining operation to your local Big Box store; the gizmo itself is composed of resources mined, extracted, drilled, and collected from all corners of the globe. And it’s assembled in a third-world sweatshop at a human cost.
That’s the waste of our physical world. Is the iPhone 4S better than my iPhone 4? Sure it is. Somehow. But, in the grand scheme of Life, the iPhone I carry with me works just fine. It does more than I could have ever dreamed a computing device could do when I started programming on my Apple IIc. I took more photos with that phone this year than I had in the previous…uh…30-something…years of my life. There are over 2000 photos on my phone. TWO THOUSAND. And I’ve deleted quite a few.
Every “click” of that camera consumes energy. It drains the battery. I recharge that battery every night by plugging it into a wall outlet. It drains electricity from the grid. Miniscule amounts, right? Like any tiny, delicate snowflake, put enough phones on the grid, and you have an avalanche of electricity that comes from…where? Coal. Atoms. Water. Wind. The infrastructure that generates the electricity has to come from somewhere, too. More metal. More plastic. More rubber. More, more, more.
The space we waste in the ether, in the vast new network of electrons and photons and the manufactured hardware that runs it, translates directly to waste in the real world. Don’t think that just because your disorganized, cluttered e-hoarders paradise is out of sight and mind…well, it behooves us to remain conscious of the human, ecological, and economic costs of every byte of data we consume. We’ve simply managed to find an innovative, 21st Century method to perpetuating our culture of waste.
Illuminate Possibilities 