I Went Looking For Files To Delete And Found Something Else Instead

One of the books that’s been rattling around in my head lately is World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet—and What We Can Do About It by Gerry McGovern.

If the phrase “killing our planet” immediately caused you to mutter something about alarmists, hang with me for a minute.

Patrick Bosek and I invited Gerry to be a guest on our talk show, Coffee and Content, in 2023 to discuss digital waste, content management, and the hidden environmental costs of the information organizations create and store. Gerry isn’t interested in scoring political points. He’s interested in waste, and he makes his case with research.

As it turns out, unused slide deck presentations don’t care who you voted for. 😎

One statistic in this book stopped me. McGovern argues that as much as 90 percent of digital data is never used. In an interview with Nexer Digital, his advice was simple:

“If you have data that you no longer need that is stored on your phone or laptop, get rid of it.”

In a separate conversation with Silicon Republic, he put the underlying problem more bluntly:

“Digital is not green. Digital is electrical, meaning that everything we do in digital consumes energy and creates pollution.”

I remember nodding along when Gerry talked about this during our interview. Then I spent the next couple of years faithfully preserving slide deck presentations I hadn’t opened since before the Obama administration.

The Cleanup

Eventually I decided Gerry deserved at least one obedient reader. 😎 So I started cleaning: old hard drives, cloud folders, archived conference materials, photographs, music, presentation decks I’d accumulated over the better part of three decades. My goal was simple — delete the ones nobody would ever miss and stop contributing quite so enthusiastically to the digital landfill.

Like most cleanup projects, this one wandered off the original assignment.

I found a 2013 talk from tcworld India called “It’s All About Structure,” a September 2015 Content Marketing World session in Cleveland called “Creating a Digital Content Factory: Getting Started with Intelligent Content,” and a 2017 Meetup talk in San Francisco I delivered called “The Cognitive Era and the Future of Content.”

Different years, different audiences, different vocabulary. Opened side-by-side, none of them were about content, really. They were about whether an organization could keep making sense of what it knew as the volume of what it knew kept growing.

The Scalability Problem

One of the oldest presentations took me back to work I did with the “mother of content strategy,” Ann Rockley, at a pharmaceutical company. For years I’ve described that project as documentation work. Looking at those old