“The first thing is that very few people know about the carbon impact of the internet!” So says Nicolas Paries, founder of 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 the cloud is on the ground. The internet is by far the biggest machine ever built. If the internet was a country, it would be the seventh-largest polluter. We produce enough e-waste every year to build a Great Wall of China.