What is a possible equivalent for *not worth the paper it's written on*

What is a possible modern equivalent, in our internet, and supposedly paperless age, of the expression not worth the paper it's written on.

Solution 1:

The idiom is still valid and still in use.

I and many people I know will say an email is not worth the paper it is written on.
This the fact that there is no paper just emphasizes the worthlessness.

The obsolescence of the terms of an idiom don't render the idiom itself obsolete. For example, being hoist on your own petard doesn't happen literally often nowadays.

Solution 2:

"Not worth the pixels it's painted with" could be a direct translation.

A "waste of pixels" is an entry in the Urban Dictionary.

Or "it's garbage" for people who use GIGO as jargon.

Or "that's pretty random" -- because "random" implies that the signal-to-noise ratio is low (however, the Urban Dictionary claims that in teen-speak, "random" is the new "funny").

Or bogus implies that it's bad data.

Solution 3:

ChrisW’s answer referring to pixels is quite good and frequently used (waste of pixels especially). If we compare them as directly as possible, though, the pixels are what is used to make the visual representation of the contents, which in a print analogy would really be closer to ink than paper. There is a related idiom, “mere ink on paper”, which luckily means almost the same thing as “not worth the paper it’s written on”, so the transfer works quite well still.

A stricter parallel might perhaps be not worth the screen space, but that doesn’t appear to be in actual use, so while it’s arguably a more accurate analogy, it’s inferior to ChrisW’s suggestion.

Going a bit further in the analogy, however, you could say that paper is the medium on which the worthless content is stored, and also the resource that enables you to access the content. A digital counterpart to that would be bandwidth (on networks) or disk space (on local machines—and of course implicitly also on servers).

I’m not aware of “waste of disk space/not worth the disk space” being in use, but it is common enough to call something a waste of bandwidth, defined by Urban Dictionary as:

1. A page, picture, or document on the Internet that serves no purpose. = spam
2. A person who consumes resources in an office but does no actual work. = waste of skin; waste of carbon; lazy; worthless

   Frank gets a lot of credit around here, but he’s a Waste of Bandwidth.