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- Convenor:
-
Gunes Tavmen
(King's College London)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how digital and AI technologies, often promoted as efficient and sustainable, generate material, economic, and ecological waste. By examining global inequalities, political economy and creative reuse practices, we rethink “waste” in the context of digital technologies and AI.
Description
Digital technologies and AI entered our lives under the banner of efficiency, productivity, and environmental sustainability. However, thanks to a growing body of research on the environmental impacts of AI, we now have a clearer understanding of the ecological costs these technologies. Beyond their ever-increasing energy demands, the perpetual upgrading of systems (i.e., planned obsolescence) and the appetite for data generation result in unprecedented levels of waste. Much of this waste is exported to less affluent regions of the world for processing—what Bell (2018) calls “garbage imperialism”—rather than being managed where these technologies are primarily developed and deployed. This dynamic reproduces colonial hierarchies, which Sultana (2022) called “climate colonialism,” whereby the lands and ecologies of already disadvantaged communities are polluted in the name of creating sustainable and efficient systems elsewhere.
In this panel, however, we aim to broaden the notion of waste challenging essentialist approaches. In non-Western context, discard can also be a source of ‘making-do’ like in the case of so-called ‘frugal innovation’ that underpins Jugaad culture in India. In addition to the material waste disposed as a result of redundant infrastructures and hardware, we will also consider other forms of waste generated by the political economy of AI itself. For instance, the vast sums of venture capital invested in AI start-ups may represent not only financial waste but also the waste of time, labour, and resources, as a significant proportion of these ventures ultimately fail. In other words, such wasteful speculations end up ‘putting our economic/ecological’ future to waste. In summary, this panel seeks to consider digital (data) technologies from the perspective of waste in the pursuit of challenging dominant notions around it while also aiming to contribute to a roadmap for resilient futures. As well as traditional paper contributions, alternative formats of presentations are particularly welcome.
Accepted contributions
Short abstract
This paper frames mass-produced low-quality AI-generated content, known as AI slop, as digital excess, contributing to critical debates on AI’s environmental costs and highlighting how platform capitalism amplifies wasteful forms of digitalisation that intensify ecological harm.
Long abstract
The low-quality, repetitive, and, at times, dubious AI-generated text, images, videos, and music, known as AI slop, is increasingly spreading on online platforms. On YouTube, nearly one in ten of the fastest-growing channels publishes exclusively AI-generated content (Bharadia, 2025). In publishing, Amazon’s response to mass AI-generated submissions has been setting a limit of three self-published Kindle books per author per day (Brodsky, 2024). Spotify removed 75 million spam tracks in 2025 after a surge of AI-generated music (Milmo, 2025), while on platforms such as Pinterest, the flood of AI-generated imagery has led to users questioning whether it remains usable (Rowe, 2025).
This paper conceptualises AI slop as a form of digital excess, amounting to something more than necessary, wasteful, and superfluous (Olsson et al., 2023; Vigren et al., 2026). While debates on AI’s environmental footprint often focus on energy-intensive model training and data centers, this paper shifts attention to the mass generation of AI content, driving greater storage, processing, and distribution demands and increasing energy and water consumption. Crucially, this excess is deeply embedded in the political economy of platform ecosystems. Rather than tackling content overload, major platforms encourage rapid, high-volume production, with algorithmic visibility and monetisation models that reward scale rather than quality, effectively institutionalising digital waste. By framing AI slop as digital excess, the paper contributes to critical debates on AI’s environmental costs and highlights how platform capitalism amplifies wasteful forms of digitalisation that intensify ecological harm.
AI slop; digital excess; generative AI; environmental costs; platform capitalism
Short abstract
Based on empirical research with families using YouTube Kids, this paper explores digital noise as informational waste. Repetitive, low-value videos generated by recommendation systems create a noisy media environment that families must constantly navigate and filter in everyday viewing practices.
Long abstract
This paper examines digital noise as a form of informational waste through ethnographic observations of everyday engagements with YouTube Kids. Although the platform is designed as a curated and safe environment for children, parents frequently describe encountering streams of repetitive, low-value videos that feel overwhelming and difficult to filter. During interviews and observation sessions conducted with families using YouTube Kids in domestic settings, participants repeatedly referred to this content as “noise”: videos that constantly demand attention yet provide little narrative or educational substance. The study combines ethnographic interviews with parents, observation of children’s viewing practices, and discussions with small-scale content creators who produce videos for the platform. These encounters reveal how families actively navigate algorithmically generated streams like skipping, blocking, or redirecting content, while creators describe experimenting with small variations of similar videos in response to shifting recommendation metrics.
Rather than treating digital waste as a downstream effect of discarded devices or obsolete infrastructures, the paper shows how informational waste emerges upstream through algorithmic systems that incentivise continuous production and micro-variation. The resulting accumulation of repetitive videos produces a noisy viewing environment that families must constantly manage.
Keywords
digital noise, informational waste, algorithmic recommendation, platform economies, attention economies
Short abstract
Drawing on the case automated river navigation, I reconceptualise waste not as a material residual but as a necessary temporal-discursive construct for automation. Reading automation through the lens of waste elucidates why so many speculative technologies create the problems they profess to solve.
Long abstract
This paper draws on the case of Rhine river navigation to examine how efficiency discourses are bound up in particular spatio-temporal constructs of ‘waste’. While 19th century river engineers saw as their economic and moral mission to tame the unruly river through rectification projects that rationalized space, the contemporary development of remote navigation is similarly couched in twin discourses of productivity and environmental sustainability but seeks instead a rationalization of time. My paper departs from dominant notions of waste as material residual downstream from production to instead conceptualise waste as a temporal construct that forms the discursive starting point for automation technology. The very idea of remote navigation, I argue, arises from – and only makes sense through - a particular construction of the shipping labour process as wasteful. Remote navigation envisions screen-mediation as an abstraction technology to make skippers’ labour power spatio-temporally interchangeable and distributable across fleets, allowing a recuperation of ‘wasted’ labour power through digital re-embodiment. Automation in this sense seeks not to eliminate labour but to recuperate labour time perceived as wasted. Drawing on three months of ethnographic field work at a remote navigation center, I then show how the attempt to abstract a collective labour process creates new forms of compensatory labour as remote skippers negotiate the reconfigured sociality required from the spatial severance of the ship as a social body. Ultimately, I argue that reading automation through the lens of waste helps elucidate why so many speculative technologies create the problems they profess to solve.
Short abstract
How do Silicon Valley VCs make sense of failure? Through the case of recent investment in precision fermentation and bioeconomy startups, we show how “waste” functions as a cultural category that allows venture capitalism to reframe its speculation as innovation and legitimate its expansion.
Long abstract
Decades of STS scholarship on digital waste has highlighted the immense material and environmental costs of computing infrastructure– from resource extractivism and environmental racism to data centers and their immense water costs (Gabrys 2011, Hogan 2022). Less attention has been paid to how the concept of waste functions as a generative cultural category within the political economy of Silicon Valley itself. This paper examines venture capital's conceptualizations of waste through the case of its investment in alternative protein and bioeconomy startups.
Since 2021, various media outlets have declared that the alt-protein bubble– at least, the high-tech, Silicon-Valley-funded version– had burst. In the years since, however, venture capitalists have reinvested, under a paradigm of “deep tech.”
Drawing on interviews with Silicon Valley workers, content analysis of industry literature and media coverage, and archival research, we found that industry actors drew on AI and software analogies to make sense of alt protein’s failed prophecies. They have framed this era as an “alt protein winter,” repositioning failure as an opportunity to refocus on “hard tech” and basic research. This reframing has contemporaneous analogs across the tech industry and has shaped a new cohort of funded startups whose explicit mission is to transform waste into productive inputs. Some are developing technologies to extract nutritional value from industrial byproducts, fungi, or even air; others sell nature-based solutions to cut cattle’s methane while boosting beef yield. Historicizing these cases within imperial histories, we demonstrate that waste figures centrally in how venture capital speculation reproduces itself.
Short abstract
This paper examines AI data center complexes as new ecological and aesthetic wastelands. By attending to the resilient, often invasive plant species inhabiting these environments, I argue for data center landscapes as expanding wastelands harboring relentlessly vital life on a transformed Earth.
Long abstract
This paper chronicles encounters with ruderal plant species (weeds) growing in and around data center campuses. The analysis draws on field observation and site documentation conducted in northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” and at massive new construction projects on former mining sites in rural Appalachia. I situate these resilient plants’ lives within the wider context of data centers’ effects on soil contamination and groundwater levels and within the region’s history of ongoing extraction. I argue that the data center campus, as a site of intensive energy consumption and waste production, presents an exemplary late Anthropocene wasteland. The data center campus and its spontaneous, often invasive vegetation emerge here as successors to earlier industrial wasteland landscapes, provoking similar aesthetic negativity or indifference. In attending to the lives finding their way in these expanding wastelands, this paper asks how we might begin to reconcile ourselves to the new landscapes of a transformed Earth. It further asks whether an unchecked data center construction boom and a possible AI bubble might instead leave us with future weedy landscapes surrounding abandoned, half-built, or repurposed data centers. The presentation will include a visual element in the form of a weed herbarium containing specimens collected from data center research sites.
Short abstract
This proposal forwards a novel understanding of 'data waste' through the lens of political ecology. This is achieved through a literature review of the convergent definitions of 'data waste', while leveraging Ireland as a 'waste frontier', and proposing a new field of 'Critical Data Waste Studies'.
Long abstract
In academic literature, the concept of data/digital waste has a wide-ranging understanding dependent on the fields in which it is leveraged. Convergent terms such as 'digital pollution', 'data emissions', 'data exhaust', 'data spills', 'AI Fumes', 'digital smog', etc. (Hasselbalch, 2022, Hogan, 2024), represent the emergence of a necessary evolution of the field of 'Critical Data Studies' (Edwards et al., 2024), to capture the environmental dimension of data materiality, that has yet to coherently or formally coalesce into a field in of itself. While efforts have been made to unify and coherently marry these convergent conceptualisations (Lucivero et al., 2020; Hasselbalch, 2022), these are often wedded to the limiting frames of 'sustainability' and policy solutionism, which often neglect a comprehensive interrogation of the unequal systems and exchanges, such as Ecological Imperialism (Pedregal and Lukić, 2024), that underpin the environmental harms of the production, storage and management of data waste writ large. Therefore, this proposal offers three novel contributions: One, a literature review of the convergent definitions of 'data waste' through the theoretical lens of political ecology. Two, the exploration of Ireland as a 'waste frontier' (Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022; Bresnihan and Brodie, 2023) to understand this unified configuration of 'digital waste', namely through the proliferation of data centres and associated infrastructures. And three, the proposal of a new field of 'Critical Data Waste Studies' to properly account for and interrogate the environmental harms of digital infrastructures and the political economy that deems this waste necessary for capital accumulation.
Short abstract
For this panel I propose a lecture summarising artist projects that explore digital waste and re-use and lead a Walkshop on the life cycles of minerals in consumer electronics to foster non-human perspectives towards ecologies of electronic waste.
Long abstract
It is predicted that demand for critical minerals will grow four-fold by 2030 and discarded electronics (known as e-Waste) is one of the fastest waste streams in the world. The UK government has published a critical minerals strategy focused on increasing skills and literacy around critical minerals and improving circular economies through re-use, repair and recycling initiatives. This paper will illustrate how media artists have pioneered methodologies that have contributed towards government sustainability agendas on e-Waste and speculate on how artists are re-imagining how digital waste will be regarded in future ecologies.
For the Walkshop I will specifically focus on narrating the lifecycles of minerals through ecological centred and more-than-human perspectives. Using walking as practice based methodology I propose a re-interpretation of e-Waste by looking for traces of digital debris in urban environments to consider the lifecycle of minerals through site based ecological field study. Informed by artist use of walking to map technical infrastructures and the practice of 'Data Walking', we will produce ethnographic data by walking as a participatory methodology for producing reflections on the ecologies of e-Waste urban environments.
Short abstract
Automation in Hamburg’s port relies on simulation and data systems that frame humans as “sources of disturbance.” This paper argues automation produces “wasted” human capacity by rendering some skills superfluous while requiring new ones, generating compensatory labour to stabilise its limits.
Long abstract
Each year, around eight million containers pass through the Port of Hamburg, a key node in global supply chain capitalism. Their circulation is coordinated through sociotechnical infrastructures that are still in the process of undergoing digital transformations that promise efficiency and seamlessness. Central to these developments are simulation models and data-driven training environments designed to anticipate and optimise logistical futures. This paper draws on the case of container terminal automation in Hamburg to examine how discourses of efficiency are bound up with particular constructions of the human body as something that “wastes” time and space due to its discursively produced “inferiority” compared to technology. The very project of automation, I argue, arises from, and is rendered intelligible through, a particular construction of human labour as inefficient and excessive. In industry discourse, the human appears as a “source of disturbance”, positioned as friction within data-driven systems. Certain skills are rendered superfluous while others are newly required, producing “wasted” human capacity alongside new dependencies. Drawing on empirical research at the Container Terminal Altenwerder, and through the perspective of “waste”, I show how digitalisation-driven automation reconfigures the labouring body and generates forms of compensatory labour required to stabilise its own limits.