Te Radar: The ecological cost of data

Who doesn't love a good cat video? Photo / Getty Images

Sit down, child, and listen to my story. Once upon a time a cat got into a box. It was hilarious. So someone filmed it…

Somewhere in the ether of the internet I have an abandoned MySpace page, several redundant email accounts no doubt bulging with spam, some old blogs set up with the best of intentions, a video of my cat, and various other digital detritus. They are all taking up space somewhere.

This storage space is not an amorphous cloud that some would lead us to believe exists. It's housed in a physical amalgam of metal and plastic and elements I've never heard of, all constructed in ways I can't fathom. The resources used are phenomenal.

It's not just the physical space on the servers that all of the neglected e-data takes up that's the problem. The energy used to power those quietly whirring (I assume) servers, their air conditioners, the lighting, and the toasted sandwich makers of the security guards protecting them, must cost a fortune financially and ecologically. And we think the internet is free.

Am I an e-hoarder? If so I'm not alone. But what happens to all of our neglected data? Will we reach a point where the internet runs out of memory? Perhaps someday there will be a search algorithm that finds and deletes anything that hasn't been accessed for years.

When it comes to e-waste data storage is just the beginning.

I have several old computers and various zip drives and hard drives and memory cards that I've kept because I might want to access the information one day. They sit on top of a pile of old VHS tapes, full of knowledge, but as cold, silent and useful as stones.

They are stored next to numerous printers and fax machines and other tech-ware that I know I should recycle but haven't. At least I have finally unplugged them all.

While I want to recycle them, I can't help but imagine they'd all be shipped to some poverty-stricken province of a faraway land. Here toddlers' tiny fingers are used to strip out the parts and elderly folk sit gently winding wires onto spools, while behind them the mountains of our discarded e-waste rise to submerge them in ever-darker shadows.

I know that there are better systems out there, but I'm still haunted by the beautifully composed photographs of the legacy of our e-love.

I'm not sure where this will all end. We're caught in a cycle of creating more and more storage units to hold the terra-torrents of content generated every day, which we can then access on more and more devices, each hungry for more content.

And what of our constant need to update devices that are rendered obsolete faster than they are being shipped to stores?

Take the computer I am typing this into. It's a solid workhorse, and while it's still serviceable, it's getting old and worryingly unreliable. Various parts have been replaced, but its still suffering from a mildly debilitating form of electrical Alzheimer's, as it slows down to think about simple requests on a regular basis.

Sometimes this can take tens of seconds. I don't have tens of seconds to spare. I have things to do. Admittedly, this often includes loitering online watching videos of other people's cats being hilarious. To be fair, a recent study concluded that this is actually beneficial to people's mental health.

I can't help but worry however, about the physical space and environmental cost in housing so many cats in cyberspace. It's entirely possible that the children of the future will be told tales of previous generations squandering the world's resources in order to ensure a constantly available supply of short films of cats sitting in boxes.

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