What Instagram looks like after an eco-friendly makeover

What we call ‘the cloud’ is anything but insubstantial: it is a machine of an unfathomable amount of cables, rooms, servers, generators, coolants and fans. (See Timo Arnall’s ‘Internet Machine’ to get a sense of even a fraction of what lies behind our phone screens.)

Using a tool called Carbonalyser, designer Tom Jarrett discovered that his weekly internet consumption emitted the same amount of CO2 as taking a flight from London to Zurich, and a third of those emissions came from social media.

He was inspired to experiment with what an eco-friendly version of Instagram could look like. You can check it out here.

This piece reminded me how a simple visualisation can reveal so much about the things we take at face value and how important it is to interrogate what’s in front of us, especially as we start to use these amazing interfaces more than ever before.