World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet-and What We Can Do About It - Paperback

by Gerry McGovern (Author)

Speaking out when it's unpopular. Back in the day, Henry David Thoreau raged at the robber barons-the big shots of their age, despoiling the environment in the name of progress. Deep in the throes of the seemingly unstoppable growth of tech, a modern-day Thoreau has emerged in the guise of Gerry McGovern-decrying the massive, hidden negative impacts of tech on the environment. McGovern has thoroughly documented in World Wide Waste how tech damages the Earth-and what we should be doing about it. It is not just the acres of discarded computer hardware conveniently dumped in Third World countries. Every time an email is downloaded it contributes to global warming. Every tweet, search, check of a webpage creates pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They're on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It's not. Digital costs the Earth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gerry McGovern helps large organizations become more customer centric on the Web. His commercial clients include Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, VMware, and IBM. He has also consulted with the US, UK, Dutch, Canadian, Norwegian, and Irish governments. He is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, a company that has developed a set of tools and methods to help large organizations identify and optimize their customers’ top online tasks. He has written 6 books on how the Web has facilitated the rise of customer power. His latest is called Transform: A rebel’s Guide for Digital Transformation. It shows that digital transformation is far more about culture change than technology change. The Irish Times described Gerry as 1 of 5 visionaries who have had a major impact on the development of the Web.