tech
Yelling at clouds
In Volume 1, Chapter 1 of Capital, Marx describes how commodities appear on the shelves as if by magic, obscuring the underlying material realities of the production — who made them, under what conditions, using what technologies, and why are they priced that way. Here in the 21st century, there is another kind of product Marx could never have foreseen that masks its material nature even more. A traditional commodity at least has an obvious material form. But our digital devices increasingly depend on something we don’t see: “the cloud”. Even its very name suggests immateriality.
Our devices gain new computational powers in a way that seems magical, but this is an illusion. The “magic” happens on a machine in a hyperscale data centre on the other side of the world, one with a very real material footprint. These massive facilities contain tens of thousands of computers, and consume vast amounts of energy and water. They have real impacts on the people working and living near them.
It may be tempting to say that this model is more efficient than having many small data centres, which is true, but also potentially misleading. First of all, the overall energy and water needs may be overall lower per gigaflop of computation in hyperscale data centres. But the impacts of the hyperscale data centres accumulate in concentrated areas. Meanwhile, distributing the energy and water needs across small data centres over a larger area may cause less harm by not putting any one locality at risk of blackouts or water shortage.
But moreover, in condensing into fewer hyperscale data centres, we’re talking about concentration of capital (specifically cloud capital, as Yanis Varoufakis calls it in Technofeudalism). This gives the owners of the data centre power over others. Local and national governments are bending over backwards to appease the big three cloud companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) and allowing the expansion of data centres, often against the wishes of local citizens. Because cloud capital acts as essential infrastructure, companies and institutions all over the world are increasingly dependent on three massive American tech companies (a significant advantage to the US geopolitically).
This concentration of cloud capital gives tech companies the power to increase demand for cloud computation. The AI craze is the latest frontier here: Microsoft, Amazon and Google are quite happy to invest heavily in AI R&D in part because it increases demand for data centres. By aggressively integrating computationally-intensive AI into consumer applications and the backend services they offer companies, demand for cloud capital grows.
The growth in demand has significant climate impacts. Growth in cloud computing is offsetting progress on renewable energy. Data centres are either sucking up all the newly commissioned renewables that could be used to power homes and businesses, or their presence is preventing the decommissioning of fossil fuel infrastructure. Google and Microsoft have essentially abandoned their emissions ambitions in pursuit of AI.
Data centres may well become a frontier of anti-capitalist and environmentalist struggle in the years ahead. Ultimately, we need to have a conversation about the rapidly growing demands of highly centralised large-scale cloud computing, and the underlying models and assumptions that create demand for them. AI is one obvious technology that must be reckoned with, but the data-hungry “surveillance capitalism” business model has been with us for a long time. Storing and processing large amounts of data has become so cheap that little thought is given to it in the design of applications and platforms. And yet it all has an impact.
Anyway, this post is really preamble to a podcast recommendation: Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us podcast is doing an excellent 4-part series of 30 minutes each on data centres and their impacts called Data Vampires. Start listening here or in your podcast app. The two other materialist anti-tech podcasts I recommended in a previous post — Trashfuture and This Machine Kills — have both had interesting and entertaining discussions with Marx about the new series, with TMK taking an interesting anti-imperialist angle.