A Modest Proposal: Start Taxing Digital Photo Storage
There are many things in this world that feel normal and cheap to us, but are in fact totally bizarre, unnecessary, and environmentally expensive. Today, I want to highlight one: digital photos.
We don’t think about photos at all. They’re just there. We’ve become accustomed to carrying around a device that can take high-resolution photos of anything, anytime.
The resolution is excessive at least 99.99% of the time. Chances are, you’re going to share the photo online, where screen resolution is many times lower than that of the original photo. The high resolution gives you the option of zooming in many times over or blowing the photo up, but what are the odds you’re taking a snap that will wind up on a billboard?
Yet the resolution on camera phones keeps going up — Samsung has a 64-megapixel camera on its latest phone. In the hands of a professional photographer doing a shoot for a Times Square banner, such a thing has value. For the average person, it’s just a waste, but the cost of cramming more pixels onto a sensor is vastly outweighed by the sublime allure of a big number to a consumer considering a phone purchase.
Then you add live motion to the photo. More bytes of data. You enable burst photos, so a user can take 20 photos of the same thing without realizing they’re doing it. It all adds up.
These photos are then backed up, often twice over as companies compete for the right to be the steward of your data. If you have an iPhone with the Google Photos app, you might very well back up the same photo to iCloud and Google One. They’ll both let you do it for free on the chance that they can get you to upgrade later. I’m sure there are spreadsheets with simple math: __ accounts * __ data usage = __ conversion rate. Conversion rate * price= $____. For the phone manufacturers who are also the storage merchants, there’s every incentive to make the photo files bigger and bigger to push you to the limit of your storage sooner. You could just delete photos, but 1.) who’s got time for that and 2.) who’s honest enough to admit their photos aren’t the most important thing in the world?
No one and no one. Even if we had any spare time, we’re each a precious flower, and everything we do must be memorialized for all time. No deleting.
To make plain the lunacy of this situation:
- Give billions of the world’s shittiest photographers pro-level capabilities in their hardware.
- Trick them into taking unnecessarily large photo formats in unnecessary amounts.
- Create two redundant online copies of those files.
We pretend there’s no cost to this, but there is. Why do we wring our hands over the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies and turn a blind eye to all the wasted megapixels driving up demand for more data centers in the desert? There is an incremental cost to every single shitty photo that gets taken and uploaded to the cloud, but we pretend that it’s normal to let people back them up for free.
We shouldn’t, but good luck putting that genie back in the bottle. People will stand by and let a lot of shitty things happen in this world, but take away their unfettered right to upload selfies to the cloud and you will see mass protests in the street. It’s the one thing that will get anyone besides angry white people to try to overthrow our government.
The solution is simple, but we won’t do it. Tax the source. Take away the easy profits to be had by bloating file sizes and luring people into artificially cheap storage plans. Digital data storage is artificially subsidized by deceptively cheap energy. Google, Apple, and all the other companies building storage capacity that lets them offer consumers free and ludicrously cheap backup are benefitting from a false economy.
Pass along the true costs, and their incentives change in a way that will transfer all the way down the chain to consumers, who will then do the sensible thing.
Take fewer, smaller photos.
