"Digital waste can have personal consequences: your passwords or banking information leaking out into the dark corners of the internet. It can also accumulate into larger, societal-level harms: disinformation, surveillance, economic inequality and a lack of accountability. Remember that less than 20 years ago, it was a matter of faith that the digital revolution would enable transparency, opportunity, democratization and a rebalance of power away from incumbent institutions. It seems apparent that waste products have now overwhelmed the system and left those promises behind.

There are usually multiple ways to manage the waste that every ecosystem produces: toleration (trace amounts of toxins in drinking water), recycling or transformation (old tires, cardboard), pushing it into some other ecosystem where it is thought to do less damage (New York City’s garbage barges) or encapsulating it in isolated containers separate from any ecosystem at all for thousands of years (nuclear waste).

But there comes a moment in the evolution of almost any socio-technical ecosystem where a significant proportion of people realize that these strategies aren’t enough, and that the waste stream can’t simply be managed — it needs to be reduced. This happened for carbon in the atmosphere over the past half-century or so. “Don’t throw anything away,” read a 2007 Shell ad. “There is no away.” Whether or not it was sincere, it was a powerful message about the limits of ecosystem waste-processing that much of the world has begun to understand.

We’re about to hit such a moment for digital waste. Digital waste management services are overwhelmed. A poignant and direct example, just one of many, is the way in which criminal organizations have built a massive and sophisticated market for stolen data and cybersecurity exploits on the dark web."