A Systematic Approach to Reduce Digital Waste

Abstract

2021 looks set to be a major inflection point for the digital economy. It’s certainly not the first. We’ve lived through several such moments in the past 30 years, and they have mainly been centered on vectors of innovation and finance. The World Wide Web (1995) was an innovation inflection; the dot com bust that followed (2000) was a finance inflection. The iPhone and App Store were technology and business model innovations, as were advances in machine learning and ‘AI’ products around 2016. The signals that we’ve hit another inflection point are all around us. Multiple competition policy cases in the US, in Europe, and now in China. The precipitous decline in reputation and trust among major social media firms. The story of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and its catastrophic, almost apocalyptic view of modern technology bound to capital accumulation leaving humanity and human values behind. The monetization of hate, lies, and disinformation. It’s hard to see how these issues get put back into a box or managed with only incremental changes on the part of users, firms, or governments. Today’s inflection point will involve both innovation and finance, but it is fundamentally about something different: negative externalities. In simpler language, ‘digital waste’ and the harms that are associated with it. Seen through that conceptual lens, it’s possible to chart a reasoned, efficient, humane, and plausible path forward. If reducing the harms from digital waste is the over-arching objective, there are models we can draw from in other waste management settings to help societies work intentionally and efficiently with a focused approach, rather than haphazardly and in a manner where priorities are buffeted by emotion and pure political maneuvers. In this article we build out the analogy, in order make the case for a simple thought experiment in constructing a systematic blueprint for reducing harms that people experience from digital waste.