good stuff from wired. it’s far too easy to forget that all of the data you send and receives goes somewhere—real tangible servers that people have to build and maintain, supported by both digital and physical infrastructure with not-at-all negligible financial and environmental costs—including the post you’re reading right now.
some highlights:
[The tech industry has] trained us to upload, download, stream, post, and share to infinitum. In turn, we have come to expect seamless and instant access to digital content anytime, anywhere, as if data were immaterial.
[…]
A typical data center spans about 100,000 square feet, but I have been inside of facilities that are the size of a small home or as large as a university campus. The average data center can consume as much electricity as a small city in order to power and cool its computing equipment, drawing energy from electrical grids that in many parts of the world are coal-fired. To maintain our expectations for constant availability without as much as a hiccup, data centers run diesel generators in a state of hot-standby to supply power in the event of an electrical grid failure.
[…]
The International Data Corporation, a “global provider of market intelligence” for IT professionals and executives, estimates that digital data storage capacity may have to double or triple by 2030 to meet rising global demands for data storage. By the end of this decade, some estimate that cloud infrastructures will gobble up 20 percent of the world’s energy resources. (These figures, however, are speculative, provisional, and reliant on quantification schemes that are themselves highly contested given the opacity of the privately owned infrastructures behind the cloud and the complexity of variables involved.)
[…]
The cloud, as I have seen it, is already broken, already breaking. There are no easy techno-fixes that can save us, because the problem we are facing is not an engineering problem, but a cultural one. We suffer from a deficit of imagination because capitalism has conditioned us to think of the digital as inexhaustive and instant, to think of ourselves as consumers rather than stewards, to think of the cloud as a service rather than a community.
