Dirty Data

We put faith in technology to help us solve the current global warming crisis, and to provide us with ways of conserving our environment whilst meeting our energy needs. But is digital tech really green? We like to think of the internet as this weightless, immaterial thing that exists ‘up there’ - but the reality is far different. The web relies on vast server farms that consume enormous amounts of energy, not to mention the carbon footprint associated with manufacturing all of our modern gadgets. This Chrome browser extension monitors your web activity, and calculates the resulting carbon footprint. As you surf the web, the extension tracks how long you spend viewing a page, and uses a conservative estimate of 0.2 grams of CO2 per second. This total is displayed whenever you click on the extension, and can also display individual calculations for each of the websites that you visit. This piece is part of a larger project - USER_FRIENDLY - by Dan Cainey, which uses Post-Internet art to examine people's increasing faith in technology. www.dancainey.online