October | 2026 | branchlines

It’s probably as telling of our general predicament that we’re still in drought, and may be for some time despite the storms and weather we’ve just had. Nonetheless, the sun drops warm and welcome here today, the days are marked with beauty and with grace. Autumn lends a particular charm. But the memory of the summer heat is never far away and we know the recent warmth wasn’t quite right though we tried not to think about it. It comes as no surprise these past three months have been the dryest on record for the South East and for much of the rest of the country.

In a similar sense then, there may be an air of disquiet about this industrial ship we are all travelling in, this strange voyage we are on of modern homo sapiens where things in many ways have never been so good. And yet we know we are collectively consuming too much, that we are outstripping the planet’s carrying capacity. The water is lovely while we’re in and yet we know we cannot stay in it forever or that ecological realities are due to catch up as we hit the buffers of just how much pollution the atmosphere can take.

You’d think then, at such a time, we might collectively take stock, that someone, somewhere, might try to call time on all this, that we might awaken from our slumber. You’d think there’d be some appetite for greater behavioural change above and beyond switching our cars to electric in denial of the energy their manufacture still consumes, or quite how we’ll balance the ledgers when we know we are living in a dream of two hundred years of cheap fuel, where nearly every practical facet of our lives is built upon such abundance and we need a radical reordering – a paradigm shift in what and how we consume.

You’d think there might be some potential then, if governments are cumbersome and vested interests predictably obstructive, in alterations towards how we lead our lives. You’d think there might be some potential for recovering the hope that we wake up one day with a newfound sense of some kind of appetite for change. Change in how we go about our lives, a kind of coda for our times where we strive to take responsibility, where we audit our excesses and seek to live as simply as we can.

That is a dream then if not exactly our reality right now. Right now, so many of us are transfixed in technological chimeras – addiction tripped deliberately by those who seek to keep us sucking at the algorithmic teat. Quite apart from what that does to our psychologies, such uses have their own systemic costs. Take videos for just one thing – the amount of energy and data they require so we can be kept supplicated with images of kittens or a thousand talking heads. We take it all for granted, do not see or are conditioned to ignore the gruelling costs of energy such seemingly innocuous preoccupations require. Just think of the numbers, when most people’s weekly online activity equates to the same amount of CO2 use as a flight from London to Edinburgh; some 8.64kg with some 864g of that spent on social media alone.

If we are compliant then, what will it take for us to wake up? Where does our awareness of the road we are on with our ecology meet our day-to-day realities, where aspirations of another way of doing things bump up against the daily choices we face in how we spend our time, in how many of us are caught in pixelated fixations? But perhaps, through all of this, through the mist of myths of liberty, through the chimera of apparent free will where we are subject to insidious manipulation, some kind of sense may eventually loom. The question perhaps is not whether we can wake up but whether we can head off various prospects by doing so in time.

It is in just such a context then that we can view the data centres looming. If our problems – be they atmospheric crises or addiction to our screens – seem in any way hypothetical, remote or at one remove in terms of their impact then here perhaps we can see a face of new reality.

At least some 100 data centres are planned for the UK, to add to more than 450 already existing, with the size of the largest proposed coming in at 540,000 square metres and with a consumption of water that is hard to comprehend, even without the added pressure of the drought or demands for new houses.

The logic of course is that there is a kind of digital arms race unfolding, that the country does not want to be left behind in this bold new era, that we must compete, make the most of this new opportunity, rush headlong into brave new worlds where time and impetus is everything simply never question the imperative. I’m writing of the internet in general here and its systemic costs. But AI only ups the ante, renders choices and priorities all the starker.

It’s symptomatic of the wider dilemma. If there is a place for some data centres then the frenzied pace and scale of what is being wheeled out, aided and abetted by a post-Brexit bonfire of environmental planning regulations speaks not of judiciousness, some weighing up of merits and the cost but a kind of dizzy free-for-all. It speaks of a loosening of sense, of a rejection of all sound priorities. It speaks out in ways that a thousand spreadsheets on atmospheric CO2 or the loss of untold hours to scrolling socials can never do as to how our current preoccupations and dependencies are cruelly out of sync with what is needed. It speaks in volumes as top heavy as on online cloud as to how we are losing our way when we cannot seem able to calibrate the value of water supplies even as the milder days of wintertime and summer heat point sorely to our hubris.

It oughtn’t to need saying we have choices and that here, in acres of concrete burning through untold amounts of energy, threatening to suck the aquifers dry, we are faced with their consequences. The fight against data centres then, or certainly for their greater regulation, may yet define who we are. As ever, in the times we find ourselves in, we are faced with decisions that reflect on what it means to be human. Can we remember other ways of doing things? Can we reject the technological fix?

Perhaps one day we can all step out free and unencumbered. Not giving in to black and whites or kneejerk Luddism, we can at least work our way towards a greater sense of synthesis. No one, or very few, seek an end to the internet. But there is always room for improvement in how relate to our tech, it can make all the difference between beneficial and dystopian realities. And this – this era of addiction, collective oblivion paid for in ecological carnage only spells out how far we have to go, how much we need to rein in. Perhaps the stark necessities can still bring us to some restoration of not simply sense but what it can look like to be truly free, unrestrained by chains of dopamine, stepping into better versions of true humans.

The last days of summer stretch themselves out, give way to eventual autumn. Children pick their way into new terms, the conference season ends and all around there is a sense of settling in, of returning to some kind of application. The sun still graces every other day at least and it’s easy to feel that we can put away our fears, even when we know what we must deal with; that here is an antidote in the air even now, to believe in the things placed before us, the immanence of a degree of settled order, like the sun implies a promise that all we want is with us here and now.

It’s probably all just as well. Beyond the immediate grace of given days we know there is so much to be addressed. That what can lend a sense of some security also underlines what has to change – that, even though the weather has a mercy with the season we know it’s probably that much too warm, that the memory of the maelstrom of the heatwaves is not far away, that Russia is pounding Kyiv, that America has taken to public executions, that the oil prices are still high, that in fact for anyone paying attention, the Autumn is a kind of antidote asking somehow we rise above it all or simply face it, do what we can with the day like some kind of collective will can serve to keep us together.

Salutatory or symptomatic of our woes is the grim reminder of that other war, distressing for so long, positively screaming from our screens as the milestone of the last three years since October 7^th comes around and we contemplate again that the ceasefire has not stopped bombardment outright, that children are literally starving, often wishing they were with their families in Heaven where there is food and water, little children dying from their wounds without sedation.

In the face of all this, while we can take some thin if still welcome comfort with the change of face from our new government; the sanctions and apologies for former policy not least, we know too there is much more that can and must be done – the stopping of all arms to Israel, the lifting of the ridiculous, sinister ban on supporting Palestine Action, raising again a general outcry that has to continue loud and clear in the face of the ongoing attrition of an effective state of siege.

As with the climate crisis and acting upon it, perhaps it’s as indicative as anything else of a crisis of humanity or simply crystallises how we should respond. So many looked away after last year’s ceasefire, not least as the media machine itself moved on to other areas. So many were understandably relieved to feel that here was a job done, a point of stress and distress they could now turn away from, one less thing to think about in a world crying on its knees for better days.

It’s not enough to bear in mind that many cannot bear to follow the news or simply tune out from it as a kind of lifestyle choice. Or that arguments against ethnic cleansing are not helped by black and white simplicities, failure to acknowledge the whole picture as the recent vote at the Green conference only so depressingly spells out. Even in the heat of mass death there are bedrocks that ought to be common ground – the honouring of the 1967 borders and the principle, subscribed to by many Palestinians themselves, of the Two-state solution. With that, there must be an acknowledgement that there are those, even if few and overplayed, who seek the destruction of Israel as a state. They must be pushed back against and called out in the knowledge that it ultimately serves the Palestinian people to do so.

Without denigrating the Greens – everyone I know involved in the party is incredibly hardworking, capable and decent – easy ambiguities such as creeping anti-Semitism, coloured by ignorance and simplistic thinking as much as anything else, are a thing we must all guard against. This is made all the more important as, while such ambiguities are bad enough in themselves, they give all the more justification to Netanyahu and his cabal. We have to remember that, while Zionism goes back to at least the 1800’s and has carried within it all kinds of factions, colours and stripes, the state of Israel was ultimately founded after the horrors of the Holocaust.

That does not make the Nakba any less horrific, or wash our British hands clean of the Balfour Declaration, that unparalleled piece of ambiguity and conflicting promises, of which Arthur Koestler famously said “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third” (the declaration also originally stated “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”). But the Israeli state now homes some 10 million souls (over 7 million of them Jewish, with more than 2 million Arabs). We can all wish some elements of history may have been done differently. But things are as they are and we should not acquiesce to a blunt idealism potentially as bloody as the thing that it purports to stand against.

None of this in any way negates the harsh reality that we are living through the attempted extermination of a whole people, that what we have been witnessing is not some aberration or blip but a sustained, planned, cold and brutal ruthlessness that shames Israel, shames us, shames the international mechanisms that ought to facilitate restraint.

Living through such a time asks of us some very particular questions. Can we do more than only endure or even find some degree of peace in our cloistered and distant safe havens? Can we do more than simply cling to the things that can carry us through? However hard it may be, however distressing or depressing, we have to bear witness in the knowledge that this is the first step to any meaningful change, that it is the precondition that all other demands depend upon.

That does not mean we can necessarily expect Netanyahu to somehow change his spots or Trump to throw his hands up in remorse. But we have to accept we face a choice in our morality, in how we choose to respond in the knowledge it shapes who we are as a people, it shapes what it means to be human – not simply in how we will be remembered, if any of us will be remembered at all, but the very nature at its core of who and what we are.

Life will go on here. The kids will make their way to school. Workers collectively clock on. The panoply of politics will play out in our papers, on our screens. We will see to what extent the winter and the rising prices bite. We will try not to be consumed with the news of the day or any other distractions. But far away, men, women and children are facing a fight for simple survival. Is it too much to hope the world can find its voice, that there are still so many we can save?

branchlines

Month: October 2026

True Humans

Survival