Created by Joel Gladd
My name is Joel Gladd, and I initially built this site to help with difficult conversations about AI and the environment. The Digital Life Calculator is my attempt to bring some clarity to how our digital habits—most of which rely on cloud-based technologies—relate to water and energy use. I don’t have a particular policy or political agenda here. I just noticed that a lot of people in education and professional settings crave clarity around this topic. Hopefully this site helps with that.
The Sources & Method page gives more detail about the research and methodology behind the site. Researching this topic is challenging, and I invite others to improve on what’s here.
Credit and lineage
I owe an explicit debt to Jon Ippolito’s What Uses More?, licensed under CC BY 4.0. His site was an early blueprint for the comparison frame used here. Your Digital Life uses a separate codebase, independently maintained data, and its own methodology, although Jon’s work has also served as a valuable secondary comparator during source review.
Jon’s public note on reuse is a good model. He marks his app as shareable and adaptable, gives a preferred citation, and points readers back to the underlying source sheet. I’m trying to follow the same basic posture here. The calculator is for orientation. When a claim matters, the better move is to trace it back to the linked studies and source pages.
License and reuse
This is a multi-license project:
- Original project prose and methodology are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. When adapting that material, credit Your Digital Life and Joel Gladd, link to the license and source, and identify your changes.
- Project-created structured data and schemas are offered under CC0 1.0 Universal, so they can be copied, combined, and redistributed without an attribution requirement. Keeping record IDs and source citations is still strongly encouraged because they make the values auditable.
- Website code is licensed under the MIT License.
- Third-party quotations, source works, charts, photographs, logos, trademarks, and other externally created material are not relicensed. Their original terms apply. A source link documents evidence; it does not grant permission to copy the source.
Some research and calculator records mix structured values, original explanation, and short third-party quotations. The license above applies only to the parts this project has the right to license.
I also want the lineage to stay visible. That’s why What Uses More? is named here as an inspiration and early blueprint for the calculator frame.