Ninety per cent of data is waste. In more than 25 years of working with some of the largest organizations in the world, this has been my consistent experience. Data management is amateur to non-existent. The philosophy of practically every organization is to collect everything – we’ll sort it out later, and anyway it’s cheap to store. ... Read More »
“The first thing is that very few people know about the carbon impact of the Internet!” So says Nicolas Paries, who has founded Hey Low, a design studio building low-carbon brands and websites. This is the constant, recurrent theme of digital. Its invisibility. Its seeming immaterialism. The fact that it’s “in the Cloud.” Except that t... Read More »
I have a friend who has two young children. For the last six weeks the entire family has been sick with one thing or another. They are fully vaccinated. About four months ago the entire family had COVID. By far the hardest and most stressful thing I ever did was try to be a half decent parent. I cannot say I was a huge success, but I t... Read More »
Once upon a time, there was a country that wanted to attract high-value entrepreneurs to set up in its beautiful cities and rolling countryside. “How will we attract such rare, high-net-worth individuals?” the country’s planners asked. “These people are so hard to attract, their time is so incredibly scarce.” “Let’s develop an idiot ch... Read More »
“There has been strikingly little research on the sociology of the pandemic, even though billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on vaccines,” Zeynep Tufekci wrote in October 2021 for The New York Times. “The assumption that some scientific breakthrough will swoop in to save the day is built too deeply into our national mythology — ... Read More »
Make way! The tech bros have arrived. They’re going to save the world. And they’re going to do it with such speed. A couple of weekend all-nighters will prove their macho credentials as they produce something in fast, fast time, because lads and lassies, forget the quality, feel the speed, oh the glorious speed! Hey presto—like magic—o... Read More »
I have long admired Scandinavian societies. I remember doing workshops over a number of years in Denmark and being struck at how collaborative a society it was. People were always sharing ideas and work practices, always trying to learn from each other. I spent time in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and occasionally Iceland. These were model s... Read More »
“Back in 2008, when we first started, people talked more about waste as a visual problem, not an environmental problem,” states Anneli Ohvril, founder and CEO of Let’s Do It World. “They would say things like: ‘I don’t like that waste is everywhere because it’s not beautiful.’ Now, we don’t talk anymore about the visual impact. Now, it’s... Read More »
If someone looked inside your computer or your Cloud account would they find a tidy, clean, well-maintained place? Or would they find a messy, chaotic dump. Imagine if old, waste content smelled. How smelly would your computer be? We accept behaviors from ourselves in digital spaces that we would never accept in the physical spaces we ... Read More »
iPhone updates are responsible for almost 5 billion gigabytes (GB) of data being transferred every year. When it comes to CO2, most of the damage lies in the embedded costs of manufacturing the hardware. However, the way you transfer data can have a significant impact. The most environmentally friendly way to transfer data is by using ... Read More »