by Janet Ullman
Highland Community Waste Partnership on Skye
For many of us in the south Skye and Lochalsh area, we were incredibly depressed by a letter from the Bank of Scotland, where we were told that our branch in Kyle of Lochalsh was to close in January next year. It was a statement of fact as the bank saw it, with no possible community reaction to counter it. This paper information then went on to cheerfully state that we had other options such as the long drive to Portree or to give in and accept banking apps and e-banking as our new normal. I know many have made the switch and swear by it, but can I take you through why I still resist the cloud and all things ‘e simple’?
I am no technical genius and I depend on clear and concise reports targeted to engage the non-IT person. Anthropologists are often the ones who see things most clearly and thanks to the great work of Steven Gonzalez Monserrate and others I have learnt a few facts I’d like to share with you now.
People think of the cloud where most of our data is stored as something ethereal, that is perhaps fluffy like a cumulus cloud floating above us in a way that could be depicted on the Sistine Chapel. Here magically everything that is precious to us is stored, our photos, videos, games, insurance, pensions, money, holiday bookings, in fact everything. How far from the truth this picture is of a charming, benign airy being? Instead, I’d like you to envision a huge concrete monolith, with floors upon floors of towering computer servers, coils of coaxial cables, fibre optic tubes, cellular towers springing up like spines of a hedgehog, air conditioners chugging away, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes and enormous moist sponge-like units called ‘the mouths’. This beast drones incessantly, never sleeps and winks with red eyes. It is not alone as there are hundreds of monsters acting as the cloud. Servers are now across the World as ‘progress’ drives us forwards.
These monsters pulse with the flow of electricity, water, air and heat. They feast on metals, minerals and rare earth elements that underscore our digital lives. Engineers, technicians and executives behind the cloud are fighting to maintain them, supporting the juggernaut scale of the servers’ infrastructure, coupled with the balance between profitability and sustainability. When I say sustainability, I do not mean it in terms of the environment, I mean it in terms of the struggle to prevent a total black out and data loss.
Every circuit board in the server has a heat sink component, but this cannot deal with the enormous heat produced alone. Only the endless recycling of pressurised cold air can keep the server going. One slight fault, one interruption of the cooling mechanism is enough to cause an automatic shut down to try and save data, but this simple act – even for a couple of minutes – can cost companies millions; this is how precarious our world has become. Data centre technicians refer to this as a ‘thermal runaway event’, a cascading loss of cooling mechanisms which interrupts the function of the servers that now process everything from your birthday pictures to your bank details and the world economy and security.
Today more than 40% of electrical usage is tied up in burning carbon to maintain servers’ cooling units and serving the cloud, with only 6 to 12% of that energy used for data processing. The cloud has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry, with one data centre using the same amount of electricity as 50,000 houses. The big companies have pledged to offset their carbon footprint and to invest in renewable energy sources, but the smaller-scale centres have no incentives to do so as there are no global regulations to enforce server impacts.
Sustainability speaking, it would make more sense not to have any small data centres and to house them all in one large facility. This would increase energy efficiency. Another idea is to relocate servers to the Arctic Circle and colder countries and make use of the natural temperature, but unfortunately the technological revolution happened in Silicon Valley and across the world in more temperate climes. The Northern nations have a lag in infrastructure and cannot yet support large servers.
Some large servers are turning to water cooling as a solution, where the water is chilled in evaporation rooms called ‘the mouths’ – a lattice of moist honeycombs. In the US, one government server uses seven million gallons of water a day, stealing water from the local environment and from farmers already facing droughts due to climate change. This just makes the whole situation more ironic.
Server centres are not silent, they produce a constant background hum, like that of a boom box on a continuous steady beat. For communities next to these complexes their lives are plagued by a background thumping, worse than tinnitus, and inescapable. This causes long-term symptoms of hypertension, anxiety and insomnia. In the US there are no state regulations for this kind of noise pollution, and we must see in Europe and the rest of the World whether any government is fit to solve all the regulation problems of the cloud as we become ever more dependent and slaves to it.
Therefore, I will try and resist the cloud as much as I can, but in the end I feel our future is one of the rise of constant background noise, a negative impact on climate change, water stress and the fear of data losses becoming more frequent as the reality of cooling these giants cannot be sustained.