The past two decades the digitization of anything from library archives to social media information has increased almost exponentially. Both physical objects as well as our own lives have been inescapably intertwined with digital terrains in the form of smart cities, quantified selves and digital infrastructures. For many, digitization is perceived as a never-ending process of accumulation. As a consequence, plains of data waste are emerging. Yet, datafication has also brought about new difficult questions about the political, environmental and cultural sustainability of such data wastelands. The concept of “data wastelands” pioneered by this project thus raise difficult questions about our love affair with digitization: what is the cultural logic of digital waste production? Who regulates data wastelands and how? And what is the political geography of data waste in the digital and physical infrastructure of the internet?