Calculating, Reducing, Compensating, and Disconnecting: Summons of Digital Excess

Abstract

Digitalisation typically amounts to a modernist progress story of constant renewal, innovation and endless possibilities. The unprecedented scale of digital content production and storage has led to digital excess, with vast amounts of data, much of it redundant, accumulating without clear utility. Drawing from both Bataille's theory of excess and disconnection studies, the chapter conducts a situational analysis of how users are informed about the environmental consequences of digital excess and summoned to calculate, reduce, compensate and disconnect to mitigate their digital carbon footprint. While the digital carbon footprint is largely a structural problem, users are called on to engage in actions like reducing unnecessary data usage, adopting energy-efficient user practices, compensating emissions through carbon offset initiatives and detoxing from social media platforms. Overall, the authors argue that the concept of digital excess provides a useful tool for deconstructing different practices of dealing with the overflow of data.