AFTER DIGITALISATION
RJ 2022

DIGITAL MATERIALITY

Nina Wormbs

Translated by Clare Barnes

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
in collaboration with Makadam förlag

MAKADAM FÖRLAG

GÖTEBORG & STOCKHOLM

WWW.MAKADAMBOK.SE

After Digitalisation is the 2022 Yearbook for Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Editor: Jenny Björkman

Editorial board: Nicklas Berild Lundblad, Ingrid Elam, Lisa Irenius, Sven Anders Johansson

DIGITAL MATERIALITY

© Nina Wormbs 2022

Graphic design: Johan Laserna

eBook: Bulls Graphics, Halmstad 2022

ISBN this volume 978-91-7655-405-0

ISBN for the box set of six essays: 978-91-7061-404-0

ISSN 2000-1029

This work is licensed under Creative Commons — Attribution 2.5 Sweden.

To view a summary of the licence, go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/se/ or contact Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Contents

Foreword: After Digitalisation

Is the post-digital different?

An overriding ideology that promises a better future

Conceptualised characteristics of the digital

Expansion and acceleration

Immateriality and virtuality

Materiality and impact

Resource extraction and e-waste

First into the future and last off the Earthly plane

Post-detox

Notes and list of illustrations

Presentation of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Foreword:
After Digitalisation

“After digitalisation”? The theme could give the impression that digitalisation is complete: first we lived analogue lives, then digitalisation arrived, and now it is finished. But the “after” of the heading does not mean that digitalisation is a stage we have passed through, nor that the relationship between the digital and its analogue counterpart is as simple as we imagine. Nevertheless, perhaps we have arrived at a situation or state in which we can gain perspective on digitalisation, and examine its effects and conditions in a critical and nuanced manner.

The essays included in this collection are wide ranging in their subjects, but they all relate to the question of what the digital is and how it affects our lives. Hans Ruin’s piece examines the paradoxical longing for control and submission that can be discerned behind our expectations of AI, artificial intelligence. Malin Åkerström’s essay about meetings as a phenomenon demonstrates how digital technology encourages both a new meeting etiquette and new opportunities for escape. In turn, Orsi Husz reveals the continuity behind the transition from a paper-based regime of identity to digital surveillance capitalism, and Jesper Olsson describes how binary code infiltrates and reorganises not just reading, as in the case of audiobooks, but culture in general, while demonstrating how the new is always more intricately intertwined with the old than it may appear. In area after area, the consequences of digitalisation appear to be double or, rather, dialectical. The digitalisation that promised simplicity seems, in reality, to entail the generation of increasingly complex systems, writes Nicklas Berild Lundblad. If technology reveals the world, simultaneously it also appears to hide it.

In this essay, historian of technology Nina Wormbs describes the material conditions of digitalisation, conditions that are often forgotten or neglected, not least in commercial and political contexts – as if the digital is something esoteric, removed from the world of the senses. The digital is presented as clean, efficient and correct, with its structure of ones and zeroes. In this way, as Wormbs shows, digitalisation fits into a familiar and broader idea of progress, one that rests upon the belief that sciences and technology will make the world a better place. However, there is also a tendency to regard digitalisation as something that transcends old boundaries: “The digital – says the rhetoric – is not just any old activity, but is differentiated from previous eras thanks to its specific characteristics and abilities.”

Nina Wormbs takes us beyond this rhetoric by highlighting the dirt behind the ones and zeroes: the impact, waste, lack of resources, and power consumption. Digitalisation entails neither the disappearance of materiality nor the end of history – there is always an after, and the potential for afterthought.

The Editors

Is the post-digital different?

What is the digital, actually? Answering this question is almost impossible but, now and again, we must pause and consider the way we talk about so many things as digital, simply because they can be categorised as a particular type of binary technology.¹ What we do know is that the digital, despite its perceived weightlessness, has a materiality. If the technology is to help us, we must embrace this materiality’s earthly values; we must recognise and value its impact in both time and space. If the post-digital can entail such a shift in understanding, there is good reason to hope for change.

The answer to the question of what the digital is should probably not be sought at a fundamental level, where we find electrical signals, but rather at an overarching and aggregated level, where we may discover communities; it is no longer simply a question of technology if we can talk about the post-digital, in almost the same way as post-industrial implies that the period we left behind was not just about factories. Quite simply, the post-digital must entail that what came before – the digital – can be regarded as a relatively coherent phenomenon that had a geographic and temporal dimension and to which we have become accustomed. By giving the digital the prefix “post”, we are making a claim for change. The digital must be pervasive for us to say that we have entered a new phase.

If we talk about digitalisation, rather than the more elusive digital, it is perhaps a little, but not much, easier. Digitalisation can be regarded as something ongoing, a process that occurs on a small, technical scale and on a major, transformative scale. There is work and activity here, recently replacing previously static terms such as the information society. It may also be easier to make digitalisation political, although defining its boundaries remains a challenge. Nevertheless, we cannot say post-digitalisation, because digitalisation indefatigably continues.

Just as with other changes or phenomena, something does not disappear simply because it has reached a conceptualised plateau or passed a conceptualised maximum. For example, post-industrial society has many more industries and uses many more raw materials in production than industrial society did, just in different places. Eras are superimposed, existing simultaneously, like different ages within a person. Similarly, the post-digital does not mean that we are entering an era in which the digital has no meaning, quite the opposite.

Florian Cramer, a researcher in modern visual culture, believes that the post-digital is the era in which the upheaval caused by technology is behind us.² As long ago as 1998, Nicholas Negroponte, one of the leading fan-bearers for digitalisation, said that a world beyond the digital means we are so accustomed to the digital that we will only discover it if it disappears.³ A decade later, computer scientist Mark Weiser, from the Xerox research centre, coined the term ubiquitous computing, which means that programming – and thus the services that are the purpose of programming – occurs in such a way that “technology recedes into the background”.³

In the post-digital, computers are everywhere and nowhere. Life is only partially the same, but not everywhere and not for everyone. The “post” prefix is not only or primarily temporal, it also contains a potential criticism. It may highlight how the digital is not unambiguous, but has changed our societies in numerous different and often contradictory ways. The digital is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, to paraphrase science fiction writer William Gibson.⁵ This also applies to hopes and utopias, disappointments and broken promises; these are not particularly evenly distributed either.

Few of the promises of the digital are grounded in the materiality of the technology. In the tension between what could have been, what is, and what can be, I want to discuss sustainability and resilience for the digital, both physically and metaphorically. I ask what consequences we can see from the digital and whether we will succeed in keeping this radical change within planetary limits. Contrary to the rhetoric that surrounds the digital, it has a very tangible impact, not only on our lives but also on our environment and the climate.

An overriding ideology that promises a better future

In the spring of 2021, a telecom company, Telenor, launched a mobile telephony campaign with the text “Change your mobile phone and be first into the future”. The previous year, the company had produced a campaign in which the future was a colourful combination of screens and horses, hay and robots, with milk in glass bottles and cyborgs with rollers in their hair. The message of this slightly psychedelic advertising film was “The best is yet to come”. This was followed by an almost equally zany film for streamed television, everywhere, in which the main character’s apartment was actually a tiny capsule that wandered around an extraordinarily beautiful landscape on lanky robot legs. The message here was “However and wherever you want”.

So what is it like to be the first person in the future? According to Telenor, it is fun and convenient. You sleep in a bed, but when you wake up it’s like Donald Duck on Mickey Mouse’s caravan trip combined with Wallace and Gromit. Waking up is mildly entertaining, and then small flying robots help you with your personal hygiene and good news is handed to you in the bath. A stripey suit and a perky little rainhat illustrate how great the future will be, rounding off with the promise: “5G! From now on, anything can happen.”⁶

Telenor sells broadband and telephones to consumers, so its focus is not on structural transformation and economic growth, but on making ordinary life better for individuals. Who wouldn’t want to start their Monday by jumping up, full of energy, expectation and optimism? No more treadmill lifestyle and no dull Formica surfaces in muted colours, à la Roy Andersson. Still, this is not far removed from the more comprehensive images of the future that digital technology, in all its forms, has given rise to, and where the audience has instead been politicians, corporate managers and citizens. The most recent is AI, a concept currently being used to prop up almost every idea of tomorrow’s world. How did this happen?

The ability of the digital to provide us with visions of the future must be seen in relation to the overwhelming belief in science and technology as a force for societal change, which grew out of industrialisation and the organisation of science in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In itself, the idea of progress has older roots, but due to the rapid changes that Western societies underwent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it gained a somewhat different shape. Railways were built across countries, leading to the development of an extensive transport network that shrank distances. The telegraph service enabled rapid global communication, which influenced news flows and diplomacy. These technologies also brought about the need to standardise time, as they tied together places in a new way, meaning that minutes suddenly also counted. The establishment of mains water and sewerage in urban areas gradually improved people’s living standards, electricity brought light, aeroplanes appeared to vanquish the laws of physics by lifting humanity, the radio seemed magical in allowing invisible communication over vast distances, and nuclear power proved to have unparalleled potential, both as a source of energy and as a weapon of mass destruction.

These changes provided support for a narrative in which progress primarily resulted from science and technology. The increased investment in science, technology and innovation to stimulate growth in the post-war years is sometimes called the linear model and, even if there is now a more refined understanding of the relationships between these activities among researchers and politicians, the idea that science and technology are where we must invest to achieve change and wealth is strong and widespread in society.

In their simplicity, Telenor’s advertising films illustrate how the technology that has worn the mantle of the future over the last few decades is that of digital information, based on electronic components. We have had various forms of information technology for millennia, entirely free of electronics, and, in terms of the digital, a piano can be called a digital instrument because the notes are separated by discrete steps, while a violin is analogue, because it can be made to resonate everywhere on the strings, continually. But this is not what we usually mean. When we talk about digital technology and information technology, we primarily mean all the technology that can electronically store, process and present large amounts of data in a short time. These three activities – storage, processing and presentation – have undergone enormous changes since the first computers arrived in the 1940s. Also, what are regarded as large amounts and a short time have changed. It is even possible to maintain that these changes are why digitalisation can be regarded as an era, or the third wave, to use an old phrase from Alvin Toffler, author and futurist. Fast and plenty are key words in the information society.

If the technology of the nineteenth and early twentieth century painted a rosy-pink future, then the future of digital technology is drawn in a luminous neon pink. This is also because digital technology is general and all-encompassing and, unlike some other epoch-making technologies, able to work at every level and at every scale. Computers are found in the very smallest devices imaginable and everywhere on Earth, as well as in space. There is almost complete consensus that digitalisation is beneficial, which is why some call it an overriding ideology – digitalism.

Developments take place at the speed of light and are “unavoidable and unstoppable”.⁷ As a politician it is impossible to oppose digitalisation without being called reactionary, which is also why it is possible to talk of digital cultural policy, despite this meaning nothing other than it should be better and more modern than the old cultural policy. I have called this the digital imperative, because this development appears to demand action from politicians and business leaders.⁸

This is linked to our understanding of new technology as essentially better than the old technology, whatever its actual performance. This is not unique to digital technology, but it is perhaps slightly paradoxical that this idea is so deeply rooted. Just think about how much experience many of us have of switching to a new, more complicated technology where the infinite possibilities hide the most important functions, where updates are full of bugs and where instructions rarely seem to have been written for users. This perception is reinforced by the talk of generations, such as 3G, 4G and 5G, a parlance that provides evolutionary associations and hints that the development of technology follows a natural line of development.⁹ This is not just found in networks, but also in equipment models, that are often numbered in upward sequences. We also find it in software, which continually appears in new versions and updates.

This linear understanding of change has strong teleological characteristics and means that we believe we can extrapolate curves to know what we can and should do in the future. If we are quick, we may even get ahead of history by making the right decision.¹⁰ The digital has been slotted into a narrative that goes both broad and deep, but which primarily leads us forwards.

Conceptualised characteristics of the digital

The interaction between what technology achieves and what we believe it can achieve is what allows us to paint such a bright and colourful future by invoking the digital. Technology, like other phenomena and activities, has characteristics that can be studied or developed, as well as conceptualised characteristics that are only partially observable. And, even if technology’s functions and repercussions are interesting, what we think and believe about technology – technology’s history of ideas – is also important. Our conceptions of technology’s potential have enormous significance for which technologies we want to invest in and thus also spend time developing and refining.

The very term “digital” carries with it an understanding of a fundamental technology that is clean and defined, greatly contrasting with digitalisation from a societal perspective, which is instead characterised by ambiguity. When it comes to the technology itself, we have learned that – unlike analogue technology – a digital signal entails a flow of ones and zeroes, where the smallest unit that carries meaning is a one or a zero, an either or; the opportunities for misunderstanding have been removed, there is no ambiguity, no dirt and no waste.

Digital purity can be transferred to practical applications and is often emphasised in contexts such as music, where raspiness disappears, or digital television, where the image becomes sharp. This purity is also efficient, which is another aspect that is often emphasised. Unlike older analogue technology, the digital is economic with resources and can save bandwidth, for example, or power. Of course, it can also save money, as with all efficiencies, if the extra capacity entailed by savings is not utilised.

The digital is also truthful, because these clean signals cannot be misinterpreted, which is associated with our imagining that a one is a one and a zero is a zero. In addition, the technology is self-correcting; if, against all expectations, there is an error, there are digital opportunities for fixing the signal. In turn, digital technology is an excellent fit for a society that wants to have control and create order.¹¹

These general conceptions about technology work together with the expectations or unexpressed requirements for technology that developers and companies attempt to relate to. One of these unexpressed requirements is constant access – we do not accept interruptions. The digital must be immediate. This is fundamental in a time when boredom is not acceptable. Additionally, the technology must be available everywhere at good resolution. We also expect to be able to store our data and have opportunities for sharing them with others and between services.¹²

The dialectic between conceptions and requirements is driving a change in digital technology, which has come to be increasingly problematic and where issues of sustainability are, in principle, entirely invisible. Telenor’s advertising for 5G, the latest mobile phone, and streaming services, picks up several of these conceptions. New networks will facilitate as yet unguessed futures, the device is the portal through which we enter this future, and streamed data is like air for human survival – available always and everywhere.

Expansion and acceleration

Back in the 1960s, Gordon Moore, chair of the IT company Intel, noted that the proportion of semiconducting components on an integrated circuit grew exponentially; their number doubled in twelve months. In principle, this meant that the performance of electronics had exponential growth. Moore’s Law, as it came to be called, has become emblematic of the information society and given rise to the perception that technology is unlimited and infinite. Chris Preist and his colleagues, who study digitalisation and sustainability, have called this a cornucopian paradigm – one characterised by its abundance.¹³ There are no limits to how fast and how much is transported, processed or stored. Not even everyday language is adequate; we have to learn about Greek prefixes to deal with all the zeroes in these incomprehensibly large numbers, such as gigabyte (109), terabyte (1012), petabyte (1015) and so on.

The exponentiality of the digital coincides with what climate researcher Will Steffen and others call the great acceleration. Steffen and his colleagues used data from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and compared trends in the natural system with socioeconomic ones. Graphs showing carbon dioxide in the air, for example, or nitrous oxide, methane, ocean acidification, surface temperature or the loss of tropical forests from 1750 to 2010 all display accelerating increases after World War Two. These changes to the natural system were then compared to some of the equivalent indicators in the socioeconomic system, such as water use, global population, urban population, actual GDP, international tourism or the production of artificial fertiliser, which have accelerated in the same way. Twelve dimensions of each system produced 24 graphs which, collectively, illustrate the correlation between the natural and the socioeconomic systems, which we often now speak of as the Anthropocene, and how this era is characterised by accelerating change.¹⁴

Telecommunication was one of Steffen’s twelve socioeconomic graphs. It was calculated by adding landline telephony 1950–2010 to mobile subscriptions 1980–2010 – but it would have been possible to use other changes in the information society. Moore’s exponential curve also has equivalents in other measurable dimensions: the amount that can be stored on a disk drive is called Kryder’s Law; bandwidth is Nielsen’s Law; and fibreoptic capacity is Keck’s Law.¹⁵

The exponential curve was already important in the understanding of societal change. Historian of ideas Gustav Johansson has shown how important it was for the influential Limits to Growth report from 1972, which used pictures and statistics to demonstrate the limits of growth, applying it to trends in population increase, industrial development and foodstuffs. The report used the exponential curve to illustrate a threat, just as in the discussion about the great acceleration. Accelerating and explosive change leads to unwelcome and perhaps even catastrophic consequences, but Moore’s Law and its equivalents have not been used that way. Quite the opposite, this increase is regarded as an asset, and as necessary for the continual growth that technology is itself experiencing and facilitating. Being at the top of this exponential curve should not instil reflection and fear, but admiration and fascination. Of course, how this expansionism takes the idea of economic growth as its primary reference asks us to reflect. We have long regarded this rising curve as a curve that points in the right direction, but climate change and environmental change tell a different story. Untangling these phenomena is a formidable challenge, because the wealth that has so far been generated by growth is in many ways as much a problem as a solution.

However, the metaphors surrounding the digital show that these are different types of curves. The digital – says the rhetoric – is not just any old activity, but is differentiated from previous eras thanks to its specific characteristics and abilities.

Immateriality and virtuality

One of the most obvious characteristics to be emphasised by representatives of digital technology is immateriality. For example, Nicholas Negroponte, who was mentioned above, stated in Being Digital in 1995 that digital technology was weightless and friction-free and that, because of this, the atom had been tamed. This idea was fairly widespread in the 1990s and, naturally, it had roots; back in the 1970s, there were discussions about how post-industrial society would be characterised by information and services instead of factories and industries. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, this rhetoric disseminated further and more strongly. There was enormous faith in the revolutionary power of technology, and governments in various countries followed each other in their attempts to put these visions in print. Sweden’s IT Commission did emphasise that technology was a tool, but its report was characterised by technological optimism, allowing human abilities to take wing.¹⁶

Flying has long been a dream, and even if it has already been realised through combustion technology, jet engines and rockets, the wings the IT Commission summoned were instead metaphorical, intended to produce an image of a new, almost weightless state. There is of course an interplay with how many applications are in virtual environments, where communication and participation are mediated in different ways. Meeting virtually, in a place that cannot be fixed on a map, contributes to an understanding of this technology as both weightless and locationless, where resources and solutions become invisible.

The metaphors surrounding the digital remains important.¹⁷ This may be because the technology is in itself largely invisible. The digital shares this invisibility with electricity, for example, where we see the consumption but the production is far away. The main difference with digital technology is that we don’t really know where our information is stored or the routes our data packages take in networks, which is also one of the factors that makes technology so flexible. This flexibility can be regarded as a counterbalance to heavy industry and further reinforce immateriality, with cloud services as one example of this. We may have learned to pay for things that exist in “the cloud”, but the transaction remains opaque to most people.

In her studies, anthropologist Asta Vonderau has shown how metaphors interact with local self-understanding.¹⁸ Locating server halls that require cooling in the cold north appears to be natural. In northern Sweden, Norrbotten can market its natural benefits in the global struggle for investment from major corporations, which also applies to the location of battery production facilities in Skellefteå. This is also attractive for local politicians, who see this type of industry as clean, compared to the heavy, dirty work done in the parent industries. They see the potential in resources, in the form of fossil-free power and the still-cold climate, bringing direct benefits to Norrland, Sweden’s northern regions. This must be considered against the background of Norrland as a place from where the southern areas of Sweden have mostly taken resources.¹⁹

It remains to be seen whether this expansion in northern Sweden will entail a re-materialisation of the digital, allowing the discussion about digital technology to also be understood in terms of resources, power and jobs.

Materiality and impact

The discourse surrounding weightless and clean digital technology has been criticised, including by researchers who have performed lifecycle analyses through the systematic investigation of information technology’s actual environmental and climate impact.

Replacing a product with the equivalent digital service is sometimes called dematerialisation. Dematerialisation has a clear sensory dimension; by letting the material example disappear, we also lose our sense of the product. Something that is less material and weighs less can give the impression that it has less impact on the environment and on the climate.²⁰ Having many books on the same tablet, the CD collection in an MP3 player, or the holiday snaps on a USB stick gives us a perception of efficiency and the economic use of resources – but we cannot only consider what things weigh (or what they are made from). Instead, we must make a more comprehensive calculation of the resources consumed and their impact, to make a comparison with material media.

Each product can be divided into the environmental and climate impact from production, use and recycling. This has proven to be challenging research, primarily because usage is extremely difficult to calculate, but also because recycling has significant uncertainties. It is not as easy as saying that the eBook is better than an old paper book, because it depends on how often and for how long the tablet is used and if it is then recycled.²¹ It also depends on whether you print out parts of the newspaper or book, or burn your own CD from downloaded files. The circumstances are decisive, which may have contributed to this type of research not being so widely known, as it does not create attention-grabbing headlines.

However, the consequences are not just found at the product level, where one thing can be replaced by something else and we see a direct consequence. There are also indirect consequences which can, in turn, be divided up in a variety of ways, such as how the technology is used in production processes, or whether we replace a business trip with a digital meeting. We may therefore need to investigate structural and behavioural effects when our value systems and habits change. For example, if things become cheaper and we have more money to spend, the risk is that we consume more. If shopping gets easier and we have more time to spare, this could have the same effect.²² Increased internet shopping with free returns influences our transport sector, which could be effective, but could equally well be suboptimal. A small transport company perhaps does not have as many vehicles or drivers, which may mean that a small mobile phone travels a long way in a very big and almost empty truck.²³ In turn, the transport sector is dependent on logistics and warehousing, where demands for direct delivery have led to the growth of logistics centres located along major roads between cities. To fully account for these changes is a gigantic piece of work; we have to realise that the calculations are complex and depend on a range of different factors, as well as containing a great deal of uncertainty.

One relatively delimited area is that of streaming services, which has expanded significantly in recent years. However, there is great uncertainty here too and, as sustainability researcher Tove Billstein and her colleagues have established, there is no consensus about how to measure the environmental and climate consequences of traffic in digital networks. One of the major challenges is where to set the limits of the system and what should be included. Disagreement about methods makes comparisons difficult, although these are in increasing demand.²⁴ It is already complicated for consumers to know what fruit they should buy in the supermarket, but making an informed choice about data transfers may not even be possible.

One celebrated flagship among Sweden’s IT companies is Spotify, which has services that primarily build upon us not listening to music though the radio or from a solid medium (such as a CD), but streaming data instead. However, it is impossible to produce a lifecycle analysis of whether this is more sustainable, because the company will not disclose the necessary information, including about power consumption. Therefore, someone trying to investigate this must do so using approximations, which leads to great uncertainty. Another example is cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin being the most widely known, and where the electricity used to produce the currency has recently become comparable with the total power consumption of countries such as Finland or the Netherlands.²⁶ We can expect demands for greater transparency in the future. A study from 2018 estimated that the lion’s share of emissions from the IT sector came from infrastructure, particularly server halls and networks.²⁷

This research is sometimes summarised under the heading of the rebound effect, or Jevons’ paradox. By rebound effect, we usually mean that efficiencies are eaten up by changes in use. If a car engine becomes more efficient, driving costs less, but this does not lead to us limiting our travel – instead we travel more. Jevons’ paradox was first formulated by British economist William Stanley Jevons in 1865, in relation to that era’s efficiencies in coal power technology, which meant that prices dropped and the demand for coal increased. In public debate, knowledge of this paradox is limited, probably partly because it is difficult to summarise in a punchy manner. This is understandable, because lifecycle analyses build on many assumptions and there is especially great uncertainty in this area.

Knowledge about simpler and entirely material exchanges of one product for another are more widespread, although not generally known. The best-known example is probably where an LED light source consumes half the amount of energy, but replacing the light source leads to us buying two; thus ending up with both more light and more waste, but no energy savings.

Few studies have tried to calculate the total contribution of the digital to emissions and energy consumption but, in line with the sector’s own calculations, its environmental impact is expected to significantly increase.²⁸

Resource extraction and e-waste

Grasping the energy consumption of electronic products is difficult. Similarly, it is difficult to determine exactly when you should give up attempting to fix a device and buy a new one. On the other hand, it is easier for us to understand the materials, resources and work that the digital entails, even if it turns out that these calculations are not that simple either. We can imagine how these devices also need to end up somewhere, after we leave them in the specified place at our recycling centre. Of course, this does not apply to the old mobile phones that we have saved in a box at the back of the wardrobe, just in case, from laziness or the fear that our undeleted secrets will end up in the wrong hands. But most of us have, at some point, started the waste management of other electronic waste by getting rid of it.

Even if we understand that a mobile phone is not immaterial, calculating how much energy and resources are necessary to produce it, or any other electronic device, is a challenge. Of course, this is partly because the devices are different, but it is also linked to how transparent the companies are. In general, we can say that the more complicated the phone, the more resources are necessary to produce it. The striking thing is that for many products, the consumption of resources for usage is a fraction of those for manufacturing; the production of an iPhone 6 takes anywhere between 50 and 80 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents, while normal annual usage results in around 5 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents.²⁹ Therefore, there is a lot to be gained by extending the life of a mobile phone.

Some of this resource consumption is because the phone is full of metals, some of which are rare earth metals, which are difficult to find and extract. The search for these metals often ends in China, or on the African continent with its enormous natural wealth and long history of exploitation.³⁰ Substances are extracted there in both controlled and uncontrolled forms, in large mines, privately or state owned, and from holes in the ground. Work in these mines is often incredibly hard and dangerous, involves child labour and takes place without protective equipment or safety devices.

The clean rooms in which production takes place in special conditions to avoid various types of unwanted particles during assembly can also be hazardous. In the early days of digitalisation, these chemical plants were located close to research and development. Even then, technology proved to have a dirty underbelly. Silicon Valley was affected by environmental disasters in the 1970s and 80s, with poisoned water and ill-health close to the facilities. The workers employed at the plants were affected by numerous diseases, birth defects and miscarriages. Environmental legislation, media attention and union activism contributed to operations being changed, even if the responses from the industry varied.³¹ Plenty indicates that the transfer of production to places where unions have little power or are outlawed, and where wages are low, means that work is still hazardous to health and the environment. It speaks volumes that there are so few products on the market for which the manufacturers can guarantee that mining and production are conducted fairly and in an environmentally safe manner.

If the production of our devices and our infrastructure is dependent on the global flows of rare earth metals, knowledge and labour, the equivalent also applies to the management of defunct products. A collaboration between the United Nations University, the International Telecommunication Union and the International Solid Waste Association is tasked with following the development of global e-waste. It is called the Global E-waste Statistics Partnership, and it is hard to spend much time on their website.³² In the bottom left there is a counter which, based on the most recent statistics, shows how many kilos of e-waste were produced on Earth during the time the user’s browser window was open. As I wrote these thirteen lines, 177,834 kg was produced.

Two major reasons for the huge amount of waste are planned obsolescence and the prevailing idea that we must replace our devices. Once again, advertising is a rewarding way of capturing contemporary life, as it is where we discover that we have the “right” to a new mobile every other year. And, of course, this is more than tempting when one vital element, namely the battery, is as good as worn out after two years.

But there is also waste we don’t see. We are all digital hoarders – we not only have old files saved in multiple places, but also old versions of texts and pictures at different resolutions.³³ These data are literally lying on servers as forgotten waste, on old phones, USB sticks and hard drives. Compared to other waste, it takes up minimal space, which is probably why we keep it, but it still raises questions about the smart home in which holiday snaps are kept with six different versions.

In 2019, around 53.6 million tons of e-waste was produced globally, equivalent to 7.3 kg per person.³⁴ The Basel Convention, which regulates the management of e-waste, was signed in 1989 and came into force in 1992, but there are major problems: partly the definition of what is waste and what is recycling can be made flexible, and partly there is a great deal that is not collected. However, just as at the beginning of the production chain, it is obvious that waste does not end up in the places where Telenor’s advertising films are located.

First into the future and last off the Earthly plane

The concept of sustainability not only encompasses the environment and the economy, but also society. This is also what garners the most attention in public discourse about the digital, for example technology’s capacity for strengthening or threatening democracy, reducing or increasing isolation, creating a constructive or destructive sense of community. However, in the light of the recurring talk of the digital’s immateriality, it is interesting to enquire into how technology interacts with our physicality.

As the internet began to achieve broad acceptance in the West, it brought not only enormous hope of societal change, but also of individual self-realisation. Direct democracy was good for society and for the citizenry. There was an idea that technology could make us cleverer, something emphasised by concepts such as smartphones and intelligent networks. It also seemed as if the internet was emancipatory, allowing you to be who you wanted to be and to discard the chains of materiality.

But things didn’t really work out that way. These democratic utopias received a setback in the Arab Spring and even more so when the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica erupted, where data from Facebook was used to influence voters. Author Nicholas Carr asked whether Google actually made us less intelligent,³⁵ and gender scholar Jenny Sundén was able to prove that few people took the chance to test out another existence. Her study of online gamers showed that most retained their fundamental defining characteristics, such as age, gender and geography.³⁶

Digital technology can be used to achieve personal “improvement” through what has been called the quantified body. Using apps that monitor movement, sleep and nutritional intake, you can track your health and make changes that help you feel better, perhaps have more stamina. Examples of complications include if the information reaches insurance companies that then change terms and conditions for different people or, on a larger scale, if totalitarian states use this data as a basis for rewards or punishments. One indirect consequence of the images of other people’s perfect, happy lives that stream towards us via our screens may be a sense of failure. Instagram has been proven as increasing ill-health among young women.

When it comes to relationships, techno-sociologist Sherry Turkle claims that mobile phones undermine trust between people and reduce our ability to feel empathy. A mobile phone on the table at a meeting says that, at any time, a signal could be sent by someone more important than you.³⁷ Newspaper articles warning of our new socialising patterns and, perhaps most of all, of our impatience and new restlessness, follow each other in close succession.

Industries that deliver content, or convey content the users produce themselves, want us to remain in their service as long as possible, which is why the battle for our attention is vital. The more time we spend with our screens, the better. But perhaps we should ask ourselves what happens to interpersonal relationships when the last thing we touch before we fall asleep at night is a screen, not another person’s hair or skin.

Not even death is the end. Messages from people who left us long ago are now sent via social media on birthdays or on other automatically set occasions. As long as an account remains, you still exist in some form. Perhaps the ultimate challenge to our own staying power is that the rules for our departure have changed, due to social media’s conditions and algorithms. After all, our biological existence is still, as media and communications scholar Amanda Lagerkvist points out, limitation, forgetfulness and embodiment.³⁸ The digital is the antithesis of all three of these dimensions: limitless, eternal and virtual.

The question is whether the limitless, eternal and virtual will change if we regard our contemporary world as post-digital, or whether this fundamental dichotomy remains.

Post-detox

The conclusion of my overarching argument may appear paradoxical. Because we live in an era when the idea of progress still dominates our conception of changing times, and because this primarily rests upon science and technology being what bring us a better tomorrow, we are continually chasing this technology. Individuals and consumers, businesses, governments and states, all try to capture technology. Nowadays we also pursue it because it will save us from climate change and recover our faith in the future, but all this chasing further contributes to the overuse of resources and environmental breakdown.

The problem is that the digital provides us with just as little sustainability as analogue technologies. Technology can only be sustainable in relation to how it is produced, used and scrapped. Technology gives us a tool, but a computer is not sustainable if it sits in its box. Sustainability is not an intrinsic quality, nor an essence; sustainability is about how we take care of the Earth and its resources in a way that does not interfere with our children’s future.

We must strive to live and work within planetary boundaries, which includes all aspects of the digital.³⁹ Historian of technology Gabrielle Hecht has called our exploitation turning the world inside-out.⁴⁰ She has followed the hunt for resources, mainly in Africa, and revealed how old colonial patterns are repeated in obtaining precisely the right elements and metals.⁴¹ The gigantic holes our mines make in the Earth and the mountains we build from waste, stand in strong contrast to the invisible carbon dioxide equivalents of climate change. But despite materiality, we do not see the holes we have dug and the piles we have left behind. At least, not those of us who are privileged enough to be able to take Telenor at their word and be first into the future. If we do not start to raise awareness of digitalisation and its material impact, stepping into the future may not be quite so celebratory, even if you’re wearing a stripey suit and a perky little rainhat.

Thank you to Elina Eriksson, Lina Rahm, Hanna Vikström and Francis Lee for valuable comments on a previous version of the article.

Notes and list of illustrations

1. I consistently use “we” and “our” to mean the generally Western middle class, to which I and the ten richest per cent in the world belong.

2. Florian Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?”, APRJA, vol. 3, no. 1, 2014, pp. 10–24.

3. Nicholas Negroponte, “Beyond Digital”, Wired, no. 6 (12 December), 1998, https://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html (retrieved January 2022).

4. Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century”, Scientific American, September 1991, pp. 94–104.

5. The quote “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” is usually attributed to William Gibson.

6. The films are available on Telenor Sveriges Youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/telenorsverige (retrieved January 2022).

7. Negroponte quoted in Nathan Ensmenger & Rebecca Slayton, “Computing and the Environment: Introducing a Special Issue of ‘Information & Culture’”, Information & Culture, vol. 52, no. 3, 2017, pp. 295–303.

8. Nina Wormbs, “Det digitala imperativet”, in Efter the Pirate Bay, ed. Jonas Andersson & Pelle Snickars, Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2010.

9. Nina Wormbs, “Ett naturligt teknikskifte? Exemplet marksänd tv”, Polhem: Tidskrift för teknikhistoria, 2006, pp. 155–162.

10. Nina Wormbs, “Kunde vi ha legat före?”, in Oväntade framtider, ed. Arne Jernelöv & Joakim Palme, Stockholm: Santérus, 2007, pp. 59–64.

11. Wormbs 2010; Wormbs 2006.

12. Chris Preist, Daniel Schien & Eli Blevis, “Understanding and Mitigating the Effects of Device and Cloud Service Design Decisions on the Environmental Footprint of Digital Infrastructure”, Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, CA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2016.

13. Ibid.

14. Will Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration”, The Anthropocene Review, vol. 2, no. 1 (16 January), 2015, pp. 81–98.

15. Bonnie Nardi et al., “Computing within Limits”, Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), vol. 61, no. 10 (October), 2018, pp. 86–93.

16. Informationsteknologin: Vingar åt människans förmåga. Betänkande, SOU 1994:118; Lars Ilshammar, Offentlighetens nya rum: Teknik och politik i Sverige 1969–1999, Örebro: Örebro universitetsbibliotek, 2002; Jonas Johansson, Du sköna nya tid? Debatten om informationssamhället i riksdag och storting under 1990-talet, Linköping: Institutionen för Tema, Linköpings universitet [distributor], 2006.

17. Ensmenger & Slayton 2017.

18. Asta Vonderau, “Technologies of Imagination: Locating the Cloud in Sweden’s North”, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, vol. 8, no. 2 (6 September), 2018, pp. 8–21; Asta Vonderau, “Scaling the Cloud: Making State and Infrastructure in Sweden”, Ethnos, vol. 84, no. 4 (8 Augusti), 2019, pp. 698–718.

19. Sverker Sörlin, Framtidslandet: Debatten om Norrland och naturresurserna under det industriella genombrottet, Stockholm: Carlsson, 1988.

20. Åsa Moberg, Clara Borggren & Göran Finnveden, “Books from an Environmental Perspective. Part 2: E-Books as an Alternative to Paper Books”, The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, vol. 16, no. 3 (1 March), 2011, pp. 238–246.

21. Ibid.

22. Frans Berkhout & Julia Hertin, “De-Materialising and Re-Materialising: Digital Technologies and the Environment”, Futures, vol. 36, no. 8 (1 October), 2004, pp. 903–920; Miriam Börjesson Rivera et al., “Including Second Order Effects in Environmental Assessments of ICT”, Thematic Issue on Modelling and Evaluating the Sustainability of Smart Solutions, vol. 56 (1 June), 2014, pp. 105–115.

23. This example is general, but one I have experienced myself. This particular truck risked getting stuck on the very narrow gravel road to our cottage, because turning such a large vehicle around there was impossible.

24. Tova Billstein, Anna Björklund & Tomas Rydberg, “Life Cycle Assessment of Network Traffic: A Review of Challenges and Possible Solutions”, Sustainability, vol. 13, no. 20, 2021.

25. Jussi Kangas & Ella Söderberg, “LCA av musikstreaming: Utmaningar och möjligheter”, Bachelor’s essay, Stockholm: KTH, 2019; Maria Eriksson et al., Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.

26. It is difficult to be precise but, over time, activities have required increasing amounts of electricity. “Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index”, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finances, University of Cambridge, https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index (retrieved January 2022).

27. Lotfi Belkhir & Ahmed Elmeligi, “Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint: Trends to 2040 & Recommendations”, Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 177 (10 March), 2018, pp. 448–463. In my text I simplify to the IT sector, but the researchers discuss ICT, information and communication technology.

28. Belkhir & Elmeligi 2018.

29. Ibid. Carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, but the carbon dioxide equivalent measure is used translate the others to the same effect as carbon dioxide to make comparisons easier.

30. Gabrielle Hecht, “Residue”, Somatosphere, 8 January 2018, http://somatosphere.net/2018/01/residue.html (retrieved January 2022).

31. Christophe Lécuyer, “From Clean Rooms to Dirty Water: Labor, Semiconductor Firms, and the Struggle over Pollution and Workplace Hazards in Silicon Valley”, Information & Culture, vol. 52, no. 3, 2017, pp. 304–333.

32. The Global E-waste Statistics Partnership, https://globalewaste.org (retrieved January 2022).

33. Nardi et al. 2018.

34. V. Forti et al., The Global E-Waste Monitor 2020: Quantities, Flows and the Circular Economy Potential, Bonn, Genève & Rotterdam: United Nations University (UNU)/United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) – co-hosted SCYCLE Programme, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) & International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), n.y.

35. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”, The Atlantic, July–August 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ (retrieved January 2022).

36. Jenny Sundén, Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment, 2nd ed., New York: Lang, 2003.

37. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, New York: Penguin Books, 2015.

38. Amanda Lagerkvist, “Embodiment: The Digital Afterlife”, in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in Digital Media, ed. Heidi Campbell & Ruth Tsuria, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2022.

39. Nardi et al. 2018.

40. Gabrielle Hecht, presentation at a meeting with the Society for the History of Technology, Milan 2019, under publication.

41. Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

List of illustrations

Punch cards used in jacquard looms. Photo: Christopher Payne.

Cloud. Wikimedia Commons.

Rubbish tip made from PCB cards, close to QingYu, Wenlin, Zhejiang, China. © Greenpeace / Lai Yun.

The Escondida Mine in the Atacama Desert, Chile, is one of the world’s largest copper producers. © BHP Billiton Ltd.

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond:
promotes, inspires and participates

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) is an independent foundation with the goal of promoting Swedish research in the humanities and social sciences. The foundation was established through a resolution in the Swedish Riksdag in 1964, when a donation from Riksbanken (the Swedish Central Bank) was approved and the statutes adopted. RJ’s establishment was part of the tercentenary celebrations for the world’s oldest still operating central bank. These celebrations also included the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and the bank building on Brunkebergstorg, Stockholm. The Riksdag and Riksbank aimed to use the foundation to benefit an urgent national issue: scientific research linked to Sweden.

For more than fifty years, the foundation has promoted research in the humanities and social sciences. In 2021, total funding for research and collaboration amounted to more than SEK 500 million. Hundreds of researchers in these disciplines have received grants for conducting research, building infrastructures and networks, establishing new contacts and participating in conferences and seminars, as well as in public debate.

RJ 2022

After Digitalisation

Editor: Jenny Björkman

Editorial board: Nicklas Berild Lundblad, Ingrid Elam, Lisa Irenius, Sven Anders Johansson