recycle the cloud

We all hear the story about how going paperless is greener, saves trees, etc. We also hear the story about how electronic isn't necessarily greener because our computers use energy, etc. Blah blah blah, the stories go, but it's ultimately a matter of trade-offs. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook, and other gargantuan server farmers give us ever-bigger quantities of space that we fill ever-less-important shit. So we migrate from paper to our drives to the cloud. Ah yes, the innocuous-sounding white, floaty, cloud. But just because the server farms aren't in our backyards doesn't mean they're not using lots and lots energy. So, I declare, recycle the data cloud! Crude possibilities:

>>Ritualistic webmail inbox cleansing parties.

>>Ritualistic burnings of unused alts in virtual worlds.

>>Recycler-magician-performers who transform your virtual shit first into something beautiful and then back into empty space.

>>If anti-file-swapping bots can recognize a song traveling through the network, can’t they recognize duplicates of other data, destroy them, and use pointers instead?

>>If authors just tagged their digital files with expiration dates, e.g. in the metadata.