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.
