(00:01):
Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me Trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet. Oh, someone please save me. Trying to save the planet. Oh, is someone please save me?

(00:25):
Welcome to In Over My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today, it's Steven Gonzalez. Steven is a PhD candidate in the history, anthropology, Science Technology Society program at MIT. He has spent the past six years studying data centers in Iceland, Arizona, New England, and Puerto Rico, where he investigates the environmental impacts of data storage and the diverse workplace cultures of the cloud. His scholarship has been published in the MIT case studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of computing, anthropology and humanism and new media and society. His writing and commentary also appears in public venues including Aeon, Popular Science, Scientific American, the Wire, and ABC News. Welcome to In Over my Head Steven.

(01:06):
Thank you Michael. It's a pleasure to be here.

(01:09):
So in looking to our digital life and how this impacts the planet, I couldn't help but think about the cloud. Many people imagine it as a formless digital sphere somewhere in space. And like most digital things, it would be automated and hyperrational. As an anthropologist, you highlight the human aspects of the cloud, which I found fascinating. You spent five years doing ethnographic research and fieldwork at data centers, and I'm looking forward to discussing your findings and hearing some of the stories of the people you met along the way. So to start, let's look at the big picture. What is the carbon footprint of the cloud?

(01:38):
That's a great question, Michael. I think it's one that is challenging to answer given the enormity and complexity of the systems involved and the ways that we account for them. But the institution of engineering and technology in the United Kingdom, they say that the carbon footprint of our digital devices, the internet and the data storage systems like data centers collectively accounts for something like 3.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And just to give you kind of a sense of the scale of that, that's the equivalent of what the airline industry globally outputs.

(02:12):
Yeah, no, that's, that's quite a bit. So why does it use so much energy?

(02:16):
So the cloud is an enormous system of undersea fiberoptic cables, cellular towers, computer servers and data centers. And on the gadgets and devices that we use to connect to cloud services, it's enormous system and most of the energy that it draws on that feeds it is devoted to cooling. It. About 40% of the energy used in data centers is actually devoted to air conditioning or other kinds of cooling. The reason why the cloud is so energy hungry is because it's designed to be extremely redundant and resilient. What I mean by redundancy and resiliency here is, think of it this way. So if you have your email account somewhere in a data center and that data center explodes, and yes, this has happened recently. That data center explodes or there's a flood or there's some kind of calamity that destroys or makes unavailable the data, there are several backups in different data centers throughout the world and you as the user will probably not even know that this has happened because when you go to access your email or whatever it is, it will be seamless.

(03:26):
There'll be no interruption. And so the cloud is designed to be hyper-redundant. So there's a backup for a backup for a backup if the power goes out, they have diesel generators already running so that there's no service outage whatsoever. These chains of redundancy make it extremely energy intensive. So there's a lot of backups, there's a lot of servers that are sort of idling. One IT consultant by the name of Jonathan Koomey reported that something like one-quarter of servers in enterprise data centers are what they call zombie servers. Meaning that they're just sucking up power doing really nothing at all, just idling. They're there at the ready should they be needed, but they're not even being used. And so that just kind of gives you a sense of the scale of this system. But then you also have to think about things like machine learning and cryptocurrency.

(04:18):
So machine learning and cryptocurrency mining are computationally intensive activities. So they require a lot of energy to execute. So the maths involved in blockchain and in cryptocurrency are very taxing computationally. Anyone who's played video games can understand what happens. And in fact, cryptocurrency minors use GPUs, which are the same graphic cards that gamers use to have really high-performance gaming experiences and machine learning too. We're in a world where AI is ubiquitous, where people are turning to AI increasingly to do things like generate images to optimize workflows, all kinds of things. Things like digital twins, which are sort of like AI proxies for humans in the workforce. And so all these things consume an enormous amount of energy. And so that's why the cloud is so energy hungry.

(05:10):
So in talking about those data centers and the redundancies and there's I think a lot of stress involved with keeping things going, how does that impact people who are working at the data centers?

(05:21):
This is a really great question and I think it's a one that's not really asked enough. I think that so much of the emphasis is on technology is on, okay. The cloud is a system of systems. It's a set of systems, of infrastructures, of machines, of technologies and it consumes so much energy because it's not designed well enough. It always becomes a question of design and optimizing design. So little attention goes into thinking about the actual people that operate the machines, the people that take care of your data. These are in many cases, in my experience, they're men, overwhelmingly men. So these men that I've seen and I've been to data centers in Iceland and Puerto Rico and Arizona and New England and other parts of the United States, and I've seen time and time again the ways that these men are very stressed. They're under a lot of stress to maintain these facilities.

(06:14):
And many of their actions and experiences are motivated by fear. They're afraid that the computers will go down, that the servers will in some way not perform well, that they'll overheat, that they'll be a cyber security breach, that they'll be a fire. These are things that they're constantly thinking about and they take them home with them. I talked to one data center technician who told me that he takes his data center home with him at night. He has an app where he's constantly looking at it at the dinner table and he was recently diagnosed with hypertension and he's a young person in his mid-thirties and he's experiencing this level of stress. And so I think that it's really important to pay attention to the lives of these people because they're not always thinking about energy efficiency. What they're thinking about is making sure their data center doesn't explode or that it doesn't overheat so that you, the user can experience a seamless zoom call or a seamless Netflix stream or whatever it is that you're doing. They are the ones that are behind that. And their story is really important, especially when we think about the material and ecological consequences of computing in the cloud more broadly.

(07:22):
Yeah, and that's something that's good to highlight cuz we often don't think about that just using our devices. You talk about with those workers the role of hunches. It's not necessarily being hyper-rational. They're doing a lot of guesswork. Tell me about that.

(07:35):
Yeah, I think that's a really great point to bring up. So one data center manager who for the purposes of this podcast I will call Tom is somebody who in some ways he is ruled by the tried and the true what has worked will continue to work. And so why bring in new gadgets or why things scientifically about things like the movement of air in data centers, which is vital for cooling when you can just turn up the air conditioner, you can just crank it up more. Or why use these fancy sensors that he doesn't even know how to use and instruments to like measure these things when he is so good at feeling it with his body, Listening to the sounds of a server fan that is revving up really high has a high rpm, which is a sign of overheating. He uses his sense of smell to smell for bad cables that might cause a fire.

(08:29):
He uses his sense of touch even to feel the pull of air in front of servers and to get a sense of temperature. So it's really interesting how these men are actually themselves. They are part of the technological system, like their bodies are sensors in a way. And for them, as I said, they're motivated by fear. So they like to do what they know and what they trust and what's worked before. So rather than thinking about things like computational fluid dynamics or some kind of really sophisticated thermodynamic engineering toolkit, they think with the practical, pragmatic sense of things that they've learned from working there, from being in close contact with these technologies for a very long time, for years in many cases.

(09:11):
Yeah, sounds more like, a craft or an art form than this analytical thing. So I find that so fascinating. And you talk about how the data centers use a lot of water as well and how does that affect the communities around those areas?

(09:24):
That's a really great point to bring up Michael. I think a lot about water lately and one of the things that I hope that people take away from this is that it's not just carbon. The cloud is a water-hungry machine. There's a data center in Utah that the NSA runs that consumes about 7 million gallons of water a day. These things are monsters, and why they use water as water is a good alternative to air conditioning. So their carbon footprint will decrease if they use water because water is a fluid like air that can cool things. And you can even think back to the time of the Islamic empires and their use of water and fountains and other kinds of canals to cool buildings. And that same principle applies, but there's obviously a problem here, right? So some of these data centers, they put in places like Arizona, places like Mesa, Arizona that is experiencing a drought that they haven't felt for over 126 years.

(10:24):
And so they're building data centers that consume millions of gallons of water a day when there's barely enough water for people to drink. And in many cases, especially in the desert ecology, it's not possible or practical to recycle the water as one might think because of the ambient sediments and corrosive elements that are part of just living in a desert landscape with a lot of dust. So they might be able to recycle the water for a few days, but then they have to jettison it into the atmosphere and there's no guarantee that that will then go back to the water table. So it is a problem and there are people who are increasingly vocal. I know that there's activists in Utah who are protesting the Anese data center because of water issues that it's causing nearby communities. The vice mayor of Mesa Jen Duff has expressed her concern and condemnation for the city's renewal of data center contracts and approval of building more of these things in the area. And so I think water is a big issue and it's one that we really have to think about as consumers and as concerned public.

(11:26):
Absolutely. And I think it's good that you are bringing awareness to this and, and other people are bringing awareness to that problem. Cause that's something I hadn't considered when I thought of the cloud or data centers in our discussing this, you're naming some very like warm places in the southern United States. Is there a reason why they're there and they're not in places like here in Canada where the winter can be very cold or further up north, Wouldn't it make more sense to be in cooler areas where you'd have to do less cooling?

(11:49):
Yeah, Michael, that's such a great question and it's something that I think about a lot, right? So is there a logic to where these things are cited? And the short answer is no , but the long answer is also yes. So, but I I will just kind of say that it does make sense to put data centers in cold places. And in fact, Iceland and Nordic countries have been attracting data center builders and service providers because they can actually just cycle the ambient air instead of doing air conditioning. It's cold enough year-round that you can just use the atmosphere as your air conditioner. So in an ideal world, we put all of the cloud there and we would use geothermal energy, which they use and there's a hundred percent renewable. But the problem is we have a desire to have things instantly. And the cloud is built in such a way that if you go to watch something on Netflix and there's like a very long buffering, you might get upset as a consumer.

(12:42):
The companies that provide these services have conditioned us to be impatient and to want things instantaneously. And so oftentimes depending on the computing application, the data center has to be close to you. It has to be relatively close to you so that you do not experience a latency in signal. And so that means that data centers are in every biome that you can imagine. But also there are other things in Arizona's case, there's a huge tax incentive that these data center companies enjoy legislation that has attracted them to a place that seems so counterintuitive. And so just Ill-suited to what they do, a place that is hot, a place that is water scarce. So the sighting of data centers is really an interesting question. And the other thing is there is a bias in the way that these things are designed because they're designed for cooler climates. They're not designed for hot deserts or the tropics for that matter where humidity is also a factor that they have to control for humidity can actually damage electronics at certain thresholds. And so in places like Singapore where there is a data center hub, they are exploring ways to just run data centers differently to do what they call a tropical data center to change the paradigm so that we can have a more sustainable future and includes everyone. The cloud is for everyone and everyone relies on it.

(13:58):
And so what sort of changes are they making for this tropical data center?

(14:02):
So here's another thing about the cloud and its waste. So the servers in the data centers have a lifespan. They're not immortal. After three or four years they're warranty expires in some case even sooner than that. And not only the servers, the air conditioners, the power distribution units, some of the cables. So there is a revolving door of electronic waste that's just coming out of these places. Tons and tons of e-waste 45 million metric tons of e-waste are produced annually. And data centers are a good part of that story. So one of the things that the Singapore data centers are entertaining, the tropical data center project in particular is what happens if we run data centers in high heat and humidity conditions. We know that they will expire sooner so that their lifespan will be shorter, but the amount of energy that we use to cool them will be less. And so these are the kinds of things that they're exploring. How can we mitigate the carbon impact? How can we mitigate some of the electricity requirements by just thinking differently?

(15:04):
Another part of data centers in the cloud that I learned about from you was that there is noise pollution that's submitted. Tell me about that.

(15:11):
Yeah, that is another issue that is I think for a lot of people, nebulous, mysterious, a lot of folks don't know about it. I think it's going to be a problem that will be more visible soon as more and more of these facilities are constructed. We're expecting something like a tenfold growth and data center infrastructure by the year 2030. So there will be more of them and more people will complain about noise. But noise pollution is part of the story because the computers, they need to be cold. When we talked about air conditioners and air handlers, these things, these chiller units are on the tops of buildings and depending on how the building is constructed, they make a lot of noise. They rattle, they make a hum. In addition to that, the data centers, as I said earlier, their redundant system. So they have diesel generators running outside as well.

(15:58):
And so the combined racket of the diesel generators and the air chillers and the air handlers can really be a problem for people. In the case of Chandler, Arizona, which I spend a lot of time in as an ethnographer, this data center is located in a park called Chuparosa Park where all the families and kids go to play and play basketball and have picnics and their homes are very close, they're blocks away. And so this data center is located in the heart of several communities. There are other data centers in the area as well. This one is run by CyrusOne, but the noise has created severe problems for people. There are some who report that they have migraine headaches constantly. They're losing sleep, their doctors are reporting things like hypertension. They're having serious mental issues from the annoying, persistent shrill noise. But this isn't just happening in Arizona and it's happening in places like Printers Row in Chicago where a data center is located next door to a residential complex.

(17:01):
And there was recently a hearing with the public board of health there regarding this issue, but it's also happening in Appalachia. There's a small town in Tennessee. They're experiencing noise pollution from cryptocurrency mining that is happening there. So yes, I think this is a problem that we should all be concerned about based on my research of data centers and the time I've spent in them. There are some data centers who are located right where people live, but because they take that into account and they're willing to invest in what can be millions of dollars to attenuate the noise, to put these special noise attenuating blankets over chillers for instance, or building walls that reflect the sound waves back, there are a lot of things that can be done to minimize the noise. But if nobody is complaining about it, why would the company be motivated to spend millions of dollars? And this is sort of the problem that we face, is that this industry is not very regulated. And I think part of that is because so few people really understand it, it's so complex.

(18:01):
Yeah. And you talked about tax incentives and that doesn't sound like they would be consulting the local communities about this and making them aware of how that might change their community. They probably just put it in because it, makes the money I would assume.

(18:14):
Absolutely. I mean the cloud is a heterogeneous thing, right? So the data centers, many of them are what we call co-location data centers. So think of them as a, there is a company that runs them and it's almost like they have space for rent, apartments for rent and the apartments are servers are real estate for servers. So that any company can just, Hey, I have data that I need to store, can you just take care of it? Cause I don't wanna deal with it. That is what we call cloud co-location services. We have Amazon web services, we have CyrusOne, we have many different companies. That's a whole business model where the entire business model about expanding the amount of clients that they have, the amount of data that's stored there. But then you also have smaller scale operations like enterprise level where a company might build a data center and then years later it's obsolete and falling apart, but they still run it. And there are many data centers like that that I've been to that are not stated the art. And then you have the data centers of the future, as we call them, run by places like Google, we call those hyperscalers. They're super optimized to be energy efficient and to be able to deliver service with like zero incidences of downtime as they call it. There's all these different scales of operation. That's an important part of the story as well.

(19:26):
And so with these bigger centers, like are they the majority of the data that we're using or what's the proportion with the smaller centers versus the big ones?

(19:36):
So an article that came out in the scientific journal, nature said that roughly a third of the data centers that exist in the world today are hyperscalers. And this is an always an, an evolving number. And the little under a third are like these really, really small or run down in some ways obsolete energy and efficient sites that might even be in like basements of old buildings. You have something in between, which is mostly the co-location providers that I described, which some of them are more conscientious about their energy output and others are not. Amazon web services is one of the biggest defenders when it comes to carbon and it's huge.

(20:14):
Yeah. And those bigger centers obviously have more money to invest in those things. So that would make sense. And if I remember correctly, you touched on some of those places even investing in renewable energy. Is that correct?

(20:24):
Yes. So one of the ways that Google and some of the big tech players are sort of thinking ahead to the future is how can we minimize our carbon footprint? So one of the ways is, well, we're not gonna minimize the amount of carbon that we emit very much, but what we will do is invest in renewable energy infrastructure and through those investments, which I have my doubts about, this is called carbon offset. So by investing in renewable energy, I'm cancelling all the carbon that I'm creating. And it's, you know, is it a bad thing? No, I think it's great that they're investing in renewable energy, but I think it needs to go a step further. I think they need to power their data centers with renewable energy. Some of them are doing that, but I think that if you look at the claims that they're making versus their actions in the case of Amazon, there is a gap there. And so it's worth looking at.

(21:13):
And you talked about how it's also an unregulated industry, so I feel like that would also hinder progress when it comes to powering and these data centers from renewable energy.

(21:23):
Yeah, I think that for me the question of regulation is an important one because there is nobody really who has the power. We the consumers of cloud services, sure we could demand things of our service providers, but the people who have the power at the scale to really make a difference are governments because they're the only ones that can regulate what these data center companies are doing. They're buying contracts to land to usage of utilities like power and water and other things. And so the only actors who have that scale of influence are, you know, are governments. That's why I think it's really crucial. But that being said, I think there are some really good examples of folks who are trying to do what is right. In Europe, there's a climate-neutral data center pack where they're thinking not only about carbon but water and other environmental impacts and they're trying to pledge that their cloud will have no impact by the year 2050 and they have incremental goals until then. And I think that that's a great kind of model.

(22:24):
For sure. At the end of your publication, you had a speculative fiction piece about what the cloud might look like in the future, which I really enjoyed reading. What is the role of fiction in changing how the cloud operates?

(22:36):
Thank you. As a scholar and as a fan of science fiction, I think that in order to change things today, we need to have a clear vision of the kinds of changes that we wanna bring about one of my favourite science fiction authors, Malka Older. She writes that we need to think of speculative practices as a form of resistance and we need to take seriously speculative fiction as a resource for imagining the future. She calls it evidence-based creativity. Ruha Benjamin and others in science and technology studies field have also written about this ways that science fiction and speculation can be in a way what saves us, because the facts alone won't save us as Ruha Benjamin says. We have to imagine the future that we wanna bring about. I do try to imagine the way out of this trap that we find ourselves in with digital capitalism, right?

(23:29):
That it has a very profound and staggering ecological impact. So how do we change that? And for me that means we need to kind of rethink the paradigm of what data storage is and what it means. Why do we need to have everything on the cloud available at all times instantaneously? Is that a privilege, sustainable? Is it necessary? And those are sort of the questions that I think through in that example that you're talking about a world where data bandwidth is rationed, where storage capacity is finite, not infinite as we have come to be accustomed to. But there are other kinds of ways to think about this problem. There's a movement called solar punk, which is an emerging sort of genre of art futurism, science fiction, and other kinds of creative practices that's trying to really reimagine the world that we're in. It's sort of centered on radical hope, right?

(24:23):
So what would it mean to bring about a world that is sustainable? What does that look like? So the artists are drawing up visions of what this might look like. The writers are trying to imagine what that might look like. And there are emerging technologies on the horizon that I think really complement this. Things like DNA as a data storage medium, ceramic-based data storage, not unlike the cuneiform tablets of the Sumerians for what we call cold storage, things that don't need to be accessed so readily. And I could go on, there's a lot of different things on the horizon that are really exciting for thinking about data storage.

(24:57):
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's so powerful using storytelling in order to make that positive change. Yeah. So Steven, I think one thing that I really appreciate about your work is that the cloud is so much more than just data centers and wires and microchips and stuff. It's about people and places and cultures. And so you talk about the cloud being a social and cultural formation. Tell me about that.

(25:21):
Thank you Michael, for asking that question. It's one of my favourite questions to answer because I think a lot of people don't realize that the world of tech can be very rich and cultural in its own way. And as an anthropologist, one of the things that I do is I pay attention to things like language. I pay attention to symbols, I pay attention to all of those kinds of behaviours, those meaning-making behaviours that are a part of everyday life in different communities and in this community, the community of data centers, there is so much going on. There's such a rich kind of culture. And one of the things that I find very interesting are the ways that these men have a certain way of identifying specific servers. They have nicknames for specific servers. One of them referred to a blade server, a specific one.

(26:14):
It had a really long boring numerical designation, but they referred to it as hoth because it was white, which is a reference to a Star Wars ice planet. So there are things like that, but also the servers are gendered. I've helped install servers. And they're like, okay, just you need to push her in the gender, the server. And they even describe the behaviours of the server using very anthropomorphic words. So I've seen entire racks of servers described as those are particularly thirsty or hungry or fickle or fussy. These are words that they use. And so for them, these servers are not just things, there's a certain liveliness that they ascribe to them. In addition to that, I've learned some of the lingo of some of their practices. Like whenever you have to untangle mess of wires or cable, they refer to a messy server rack as a, a racks nest.

(27:04):
And there's all these best practices that one can avoid to prevent this racks nest from forming. So there's a certain aesthetic that they aspire to, an aesthetic of simplicity, of elegance. There's so much more going on than just punching numbers and making sure that temperatures are good and installing and decommissioning assets. There's a whole world and metaphors, so many metaphors. One man described the thermal problem using the metaphors of pests in the industry. They're called hotspots when there's like a specific area where heat seems to just recur and and that heat coheres around a specific rack or area of the data center where air is not flowing properly and they call him hotspots. And so this one person, I'll call Eric, he referred to himself as a hotspot hunter and he was really good at hunting these down and figuring out why they were happening and swatting them by switching out a perforated tile so that more airflow can come in by cranking up the temperature or by sleuthing various other kinds of diagnostic methods to identify the source of the anomaly.

(28:10):
So yeah, the world of servers and computers is a really interesting story filled with metaphors of living things. And there's so much masculinity in there as well. I've been part of trainings and have watched this sort of transmission of knowledge from one generation of technicians to the next. So much of that is the technical stuff, how to lift things properly or how to seed cables in the right way, but also it's about a certain attitude. Cultivating a certain disposition of manliness that you know, is, is part of our, our digital world and we don't even realize it.

(28:43):
Thank you for bringing the world of the data center to life for me. That was really beautiful. So this show is about empowering citizens to take action on the climate crisis when it comes to our digital life and the cloud. What can people do?

(28:56):
I think that's, a really fantastic question and a very important one and one that I get a lot. I think it's on a lot of people's minds, probably the people listening, What can I do to minimize my footprint? And I think that there are a lot of tools out there that people do use to track their environmental footprint online. And what I will say is I think that although those things are admirable and a laudable in some ways, our digital abstinence on an individual level is not going to make a significant impact. I don't think that promoting digital abstinence is going to be what solves this issue because as I said earlier, this is an issue of scale. It's an issue wherein corporations and companies are the ones that hold all the cards here. We as consumers, by shutting down our accounts or limiting the amount of movies that we stream or whatever, we're going to make so little of an impact compared to what the companies can do.

(30:01):
And I think that what we need to do as concerned citizens and informed consumers is to demand that these companies do what is right. That they rethink the amounts of redundancies that they have in these facilities, that they start to entertain the idea of cold storage versus hot storage. Things that are not always online. Things that are not being used all the time can be put away in a shelf. And then if you need to go get them, it might take a little bit longer. As a culture, we have to be ready for that. We have to accept that not everything should be instant, but at the same time, the responsibility falls on the companies that run these infrastructures. They have to figure out a way to do this with more energy efficiency, with less environmental impact. And part of that is, as I said before, they need to be regulated because they can pledge all they want.

(30:49):
They'll be carbon neutral by 2030 or whatever they're pledging, but there's no enforcement mechanism for that. The only enforcement mechanism is their goodwill and their image as a corporation, as a, as an entity that wants to do good in the world. And that is not enough. We have seen in this industry, if you follow the work of Greenpeace, you can see that many promises and pledges have been made. And seldom are those promises and pledges realized. And oftentimes the claims that they make about their environmental sustainability are misleading, if not downright inaccurate. So I think that it's really important that we start to get involved in our digital infrastructure, that we start to think about why aren't our politicians talking about this? Why aren't lawmakers looking at this? Or why aren't we as consumers putting more pressure on our service providers? And so for me that I think is more important than amending your ways to be more digitally ascetic. I don't think that's the answer.

(31:47):
Great. Thanks so much for that and this has been a very insightful conversation overall. So thanks so much for coming on the show, Steven.

(31:54):
My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

(31:57):
Well, that was my conversation with Steven. I loved how he brought out the human aspect of the cloud and data centers. That's something that I think we never think about when we're downloading something or streaming something or anytime we're using technology, there's people behind that technology working hard and we need to keep them in mind when we're looking at making a positive change for the environment and for those communities. Well that's all for me. I'm Michael Barts. Here's a feeling a little less in over our heads when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again soon. In over My Head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us, email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible.

(32:39):
I'm trying to save the planet. Oh, will someone please save me?