Dalia Hatalova Core Post #5/5 Blog Post #15/15

The assigned texts for this week provided overviews of the impact that technology has had on the environment from theoretical standpoints that spoke of the broader implications that must be taken into consideration. The earlier of these two by Mél Hogan, Facebook Data Storage Centers as the Archive's Underbelly (2013), presented an earlier view that was complimented by Nathan Ensmenger's The Environmental History of Computing from 2018. However, these texts were sharply contrasted by the two that I selected from Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste (Towards Eco-friendly Database Management Systems by Willis Lang and Jignesh M. Patel (2009); The Green Grid Saga - A Green Initiative to Data Centers: A Review by Partha Pratim Ray (2010)). Due to having been written for a different field, these latter two texts came from strikingly different worldviews and were set apart by a decade, which likely further contributed to their approaches pertaining to data centers. In this response, I will examine the ways that these texts provide different perspectives that illustrate the issues of data centers and offer potentialities for viewing the issues through their combination. As a topic that has threaded through all of them, I will stick primarily to the concept of cooling. 

In Ray's work, the cooling of data centers is one of the areas that need to be optimized for smaller energy consumption. Articulating the role of the Green Grid, whose research this paper draws on, he writes that this "is a global consortium of companies, government agencies and educational institutions dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems (333). We see an articulation of the desire for greater efficiency, but by listing the corporate sector as a key figure in this research, we can assume that the primary desire for efficiency, which the industry apparently equates with a reduction of costs. Cooling, in particular, is mentioned when Ray describes a task force that is designed to "investigate and provide guidance on existing and emergent cooling technologies along with the deep understanding of data center layout and operation that can improve the efficiency of data center cooling architectures" (336). The impact on the environment is eschewed in favor of efficiency, which, however, focuses on the same goal of energy consumption reduction. In Lang and Patel's work, a similar throughline is apparent; these authors are willing to make sacrifices in speed and focus on optimization, but such optimization likewise appears more geared towards making the systems work better than demonstrating reflection on the physical impact of doing otherwise. While their ideas about finding ways for systems to combine queries in order to consume more energy or to reduce servers that are on without having a function are pertinent, Lang and Patel's remarks on cooling do not enter into what cooling entails beyond the data centers. They only argue that "changing and managing the cooling technology can also lead to dramatic savings in energy consumption" (3). 

Turning to work from a few years later, instead of focusing on what can make data more or less efficient within these abstracted terms, Hogan's work argues that "information online is not, in fact, green, weightless, and immaterial" (9) This is a shift from identifying a purely technical problem that exists in the isolated "rows of stacked servers inside stadium-like data centers" to examining how these centers fit into larger socio-geographical contexts. Looking at the earlier texts, we can see how the relative inaccessibility of the technically oriented texts' disembodiment lies in parallel to the "metaphorical distance" we afford to the digital realm (13). Hogan's work mentions the construction of Facebook's storage center in Lulea, Sweden, where "with arctic temperatures, the area has a natural way to cool servers" (12). The notion that servers, like all other physical elements, are affected by their surroundings is powerful in grounding efficiency to the earth's geography. The digital may appear in the intangible, but its bones feel the cold or warmth as we do. Ensmenger similarly remarks on the geographical preferences of tech companies, being driven in part by water resources needed for energy and cooling. Here, the practical details of the toll that data centers require of the external environment are more fully interrogated. Ensmenger describes that "cooling even a medium-sized high-density server farm can require as much as 360,000 gallons of clean, chilled water a day" and that "such consumption patterns stretch the limits of almost any municipal water supply, and given the looming global shortage of clean water, water scarcities represent one of the many unanticipated consequences of computing whose implications are only just beginning to be realized" (S20).  

The earlier two articles seem to implicitly presume that companies are seeking to reduce energy consumption. Yet, with the examination of companies, such as Facebook, that appear to be destroying the environment so mercilessly, such a presumption seems charitable at best. However, as both Hogan and Ensmenger remark, the demand for digital on the part of users is growing, as is likely their expectation of high internet speed, including the transmission of high-quality streaming (see my previous blog post on the Small File Media Festival). Companies should be held responsible for their practices, but the insatiable desire to make the malfunctions (inherent in any technology) invisible to users is likewise a culprit. In view of these elements, perhaps another article that would seek not only to examine the technological progress that can be made towards optimization and the environmental impact of data centers but the motivations behind the cultural desire to have a seamlessly fluid experience with technology would be interesting. How does slowness make us interact with the digital differently? Does a glitch in technology make us painfully aware of its unreality? Does malfunction break the unfettered sense of place that exists in the digital world when it is ruptured by the materiality of the spaces that allow it to function? (With glitches, I'm thinking of the work by Hito Steyerl on Poor Images and how art practices can help make us aware of the materiality of the digital; meanwhile, in terms of place and space, I take the anthropological distinctions that, when simplified, identify "place" as connected to emotion, while "space" is geographical and material.)