Your Cloud Is Drying My River
26 September 2024
We are standing in the centre of an open, gently sloping landscape. Our clothes are coated with thousands of droplets of water. Our shoes are soaking wet. We came here to experience the Cloud.
Not a naturally occurring one, like the ones hanging in the sky above and around us, but their imaginary namesake that underpins globally distributed processes of computation.
Documenting intricacies of the land
Labelling the digital “Cloud” imaginary might seem contradictory, since it is very real in its materiality and scope. It encompasses physical infrastructural nodes like data centres, internet exchanges and fibre optic cables, the labour of millions of workers around the globe, and the extraction of planetary resources to satisfy its hunger for energy and raw materials at a massive scale.
Despite its materiality, the “Cloud” remains first and foremost a narrative construct; one that is leveraged by tech companies and their investors to abstract and render invisible the real-world consequences of unfettered digital infrastructure expansion.
While the Metaverse and its legless vision for the future of humanity has quietly disappeared and cryptocurrency projects have mostly proven to be elaborate scams, the hype around so-called “artificial intelligence”, particularly its generative kind, is very much alive and kicking. With it, the demand to further expand “Cloud” computing infrastructures has grown exponentially.
The calculation machines – basically supercharged videogame processors – underpinning the mass rollout of this technology need to be housed somewhere, so Big Tech companies are now scrambling to construct new hyperscale data centres around the world.
Public transport to the private “Cloud”
As we continue to zigzag through the terrain, we cannot yet see, hear or smell the “Cloud”. Instead, we encounter a sophisticated ecosystem of plant and animal life, subterranean water flows interacting with remnants of surface-level bush fires and past and present human activity shaping this supposedly “empty” plot of land.
Driven by a continued hunger for profit, and assisted by local authorities desperately looking for ways out of economic decline, Facebook/Meta is preparing to transform this land into a giant computing factory as the newest member of its “European Data Centre Fleet”.
[This post marks the beginning of Papertrail’s first transnational research project. The title is inspired by the Spanish activist group Tu Nube Seca Mi Rio, whose founder Aurora Gómez has greatly supported this initial stage with her knowledge, creativity and kindness.]
Your Cloud Is Drying My River
26 September 2024
We are standing in the centre of an open, gently sloping landscape. Our clothes are coated with thousands of droplets of water. Our shoes are soaking wet. We came here to experience the Cloud.
Not a naturally occurring one, like the ones hanging in the sky above and around us, but their imaginary namesake that underpins globally distributed processes of computation.
Documenting intricacies of the land
Labelling the digital “Cloud” imaginary might seem contradictory, since it is very real in its materiality and scope. It encompasses physical infrastructural nodes like data centres, internet exchanges and fibre optic cables, the labour of millions of workers around the globe, and the extraction of planetary resources to satisfy its hunger for energy and raw materials at a massive scale.
Despite its materiality, the “Cloud” remains first and foremost a narrative construct; one that is leveraged by tech companies and their investors to abstract and render invisible the real-world consequences of unfettered digital infrastructure expansion.
While the Metaverse and its legless vision for the future of humanity has quietly disappeared and cryptocurrency projects have mostly proven to be elaborate scams, the hype around so-called “artificial intelligence”, particularly its generative kind, is very much alive and kicking. With it, the demand to further expand “Cloud” computing infrastructures has grown exponentially.
The calculation machines – basically supercharged videogame processors – underpinning the mass rollout of this technology need to be housed somewhere, so Big Tech companies are now scrambling to construct new hyperscale data centres around the world.
Public transport to the private “Cloud”
As we continue to zigzag through the terrain, we cannot yet see, hear or smell the “Cloud”. Instead, we encounter a sophisticated ecosystem of plant and animal life, subterranean water flows interacting with remnants of surface-level bush fires and past and present human activity shaping this supposedly “empty” plot of land.
Driven by a continued hunger for profit, and assisted by local authorities desperately looking for ways out of economic decline, Facebook/Meta is preparing to transform this land into a giant computing factory as the newest member of its “European Data Centre Fleet”.
[This post marks the beginning of Papertrail’s first transnational research project. The title is inspired by the Spanish activist group Tu Nube Seca Mi Rio, whose founder Aurora Gómez has greatly supported this initial stage with her knowledge, creativity and kindness.]