Core Post: the Cost of the Instantaneous

Though we tend to think of digital devices as gleaming and clean gateways to an immaterial expanse, Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of massive e-waste landfills give a sense of the other side of the coin: the enormous scale of digital refuse. Ensmenger and Hogan both clarify that digital technologies are not immaterial, as terms like “the Cloud,” may suggest. In reality, current digital processes require several other environmentally devastating practices, including unsustainable extraction of rare earth minerals to power devices, massive water consumption for cooling servers, and management of the growing landfills of obsolete, toxic products. Despite their invisibility to users, server farms that power the Cloud exhaust as much power as large cities. One compelling metric of this waste is the number of machines on standby (around 90%) in case there is a surge of activity. Ultimately, this 90% wasted energy is a result of the demand for instantaneous recall of information from massive databases by billions of users:  “This may be the single most telling insight about the archive—the ideal of instantaneity imparted onto it by users who are simultaneously creating and subjected to such an unsustainable modality. The cost of such instantaneity is that almost all the energy that goes toward preserving that ideal is, literally, wasted” (Hogan, 9). Only a few potential solutions are mentioned in these texts, for example locating server farms in areas with cold climates to reduce water consumption. Or manufacturing devices that require less power. What other actions would help to reverse the ecological impact of digital technologies? Changes in policy? Adjusting expectations away from instantaneous fulfillment? It is helpful to have diagnoses of the mounting problems, but there is a scarcity of solutions. What is the way forward?