Authors:
Melissa Gregg
I started a new job in a new country since writing my last column. There is much to digest returning to a university after many years. Computer monitors now come with cameras embedded, and Microsoft Teams has replaced the bulk of face-to-face interactions. Academics appear convinced that AI will replace their jobs, and students love the fact that they can use their phones to translate lectures in real time. Attending lectures in person is increasingly optional in order to appease the market.
This fraught scene has me pondering the fact that, if you are using enterprise software to teach or conduct research, your job has already changed due to AI. As a product user you are both a test bed and supply chain for the creation of features that would not exist without the training data gleaned from digital exhaust. As participants in online platforms, students and professional researchers are raw material for the AI economy, which is by now a history of unpaid labor. Every essay you write on proprietary software, every video you make and upload to a cloud, every security test you pass to prove your humanity is grist to the mill for an automated future built by just a few companies.
From an environmental perspective, it's worth contemplating the connection between the data extraction arising from our online activity and the extraction of natural assets and commodities for digital infrastructure. The amount of energy needed to enable complex computation tasks like generative AI, the water tables that are drained and replenished after cooling the data centers' processing queries, and the concrete laid to build fabs and warehouses are just some of the heavy consequences of lightweight user interactions. Even with the most efficient software running every workload, the news on carbon emissions is dire [1], and one reason we aren't thinking about it is because we find ourselves caught in a feedback loop of activity, anxiety, and comfort enabled by the very tools of our digital enslavement [2].
Naomi Klein makes the analogy between personal and planetary resource extraction in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (the book she wrote before her most recent, the phenomenal Doppelganger). She sees a relationship between digital platforms' addictive dopamine rush and the collective amnesia that threatens our awareness of environmental dangers. In her words, virtual preoccupations "have particular relevance to the way we relate to the climate challenge. Because this is a crisis that is, by its nature, slow moving and intensely place based."
Just when we needed to slow down and notice the subtle changes in the natural world that are telling us that something is seriously amiss, we have sped up; just when we needed longer time horizons to see how the actions of our past impact the prospects for our future, we entered into the never-ending feed of the perpetual now, slicing and dicing our attention spans as never before.
The infinite scroll of online platforms compounds the problem of time perception already present in certain kinds of knowledge economy jobs, as I have written elsewhere [3,4]. The pressure to be productive among upwardly mobile professionals is reflected in superficial aspirations to achieve inbox zero as a measure of virtue. When I studied this in the past, it was because the uptick in digital labor was still quite new, defying our ability to quantify and describe these new obligations as a form of work. More than a decade later, the introduction of Zoom and Teams has happened in organizations still struggling with the workload explosion caused by email. These are the very vulnerabilities at the intersection of IT support and employee well-being that software companies attempt to exploit by selling AI solutions.
UX is assessed in isolation rather than in aggregate, in software or hardware but rarely both.
In sustainability circles, the idea of planetary boundaries [5] is increasingly used to convey the stakes of a dwindling supply of material resources over time. The framework helps explain that Earth has finite capacities to maintain a livable atmosphere and biosphere, and we are already beyond several of these limits. In human-centered design, a natural extension to this approach would be to ask, what is peak capacity for users? With the introduction of AI, much depends on the irony that we now need help to navigate an already complicated ecosystem of apps, hardware, and OS preferences. This is not just a question of human factors—how ordinary people cope with, if they indeed adopt, a multitude of new interaction modes. The kind of cumulative UX assessment we lack is any way to prioritize features that would be most critical to individuals given the computing ecologies they already have. To bring experience assessment and questions of planetary health together in a more comprehensive notion of digital sustainability means pushing the field of user research to be more historically informed and contextually specific at the same time.
UX research typically has two functions. One is to inform the design of apps, products, and services where the overriding objective is to maximize adoption and ease of use. In academia and the dwindling number of corporate research labs, UX takes a more exploratory mode, testing bigger picture changes and objectives. In every case, whatever lessons may come from long-term observation—across organizations or cultures, across devices or services, in combination, or over time—falls to the wayside. Perhaps longitudinal studies survive in conference annals and test of time awards in specialist communities. More often, solitary studies reside in zombie folders and password-protected files abandoned in the fray of employee turnover and corporate restructuring.
The amount of wasted user research in companies has further implications. It makes the work of sustainability teams harder, as there is no connection between products under development and their ongoing viability at scale. Sustainability professionals in tech have neither time nor training to consider platform-level user experience, even though core problems they are trying to address, such as energy consumption, are the result of in-house design and engineering decisions. Focusing on the supply side of operations, net-zero advocates are condemned to ameliorate rather than reduce resource throughout, since business success is tied to increasing demand. Active users are sought through the introduction of ever more features, which in turn drives the energy extraction of both people and planet.
By definition, UX research attends to the well-being aspects of new technology to offset harms arising from cognitive overload, inefficiencies, nausea, and impairment. Building on these investments, a more integrative suite of methods could synthesize insights across products to understand the full user journey (and detours). This work is critical right now to ensure that new AI experiences do not overwhelm a user base already struggling with the adoption of new ways of working, particularly in the wake of Covid-19's enduring traumas.
Combined and sequential platform analysis could extend to cataloging hardware products adopted over time to reveal the physical impacts and injuries [6] that a life of computation brings. Today, UX is assessed in isolation rather than in aggregate, in software or hardware but rarely both. Language eludes us as we try to express the cognitive and corporeal weight that a digital work and home life requires us to carry. Deeper understanding of user engagement across devices and time spans would give designers the grounds to recommend withdrawal, repair, and nonuse as healthy options in an extremely online environment. The benefits of the right to rest are not just for individuals but for the world we want to continue to thrive around us as we click.
Addressing the intersection of human and resource sustainability is existential for a tech industry determined to promote energy-intensive interaction modes as destiny. Given what we already know about user well-being on digital platforms, now is the time to debate key assumptions. Is AI really a companion, a copilot for users? Or is it a vampiric threat to attention reserves already depleted by previous waves of computing? Is AI necessary for all interactions? What percentage will be enough? Could there be another means of measuring success for shareholders than retaining active users?
When linked, user experience and sustainability questions like these can inform the outlook of companies and products in a way that is more deserving of our precious energies.
References
1. Rockström, J. The tipping points of climate change—and where we stand. TED Talks. Aug. 15, 2024; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl6VhCAeEfQ
2. Qiu, J.L. Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition. University of Illinois Press, 2017.
3. Gregg, M. Work's Intimacy. Polity Press, 2011.
4. Gregg, M. Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy, Duke University Press, 2018.
5. Stockholm Resilience Centre. Planetary boundaries. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
6. Jain, L. Injury: The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States. Princeton University Press, 2006.
Author
Melissa Gregg is a writer, ethnographer, and sustainability strategist to the tech industry, as well as a professor of digital futures at the University of Bristol. [email protected]
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The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2025 ACM, Inc.
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