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Imagine taking a hammer to your laptop. You smash it apart and shards of plastic, batteries and circuit board go flying. It would be an act of vandalism, a shocking waste of money and resources, so much so that it sounds absurd. But the truth is that, every time we use a computer, we are dealing with a machine that is, at the fundamental level, even more wasteful than this.

It all goes back to a decision made decades ago about the deep workings of computer logic and how these machines delete data, a process that inevitably produces a large…