Since the flip of the millennium, the tech trade has spent billions to conjure a seductive narrative that the cloud—a time period most nontechnical individuals use to imply every thing the web touches —is limitless and weightless, that it’s “greener,” extra sturdy, and securer than the analog data storage practices that preceded it. They have skilled us to add, obtain, stream, submit, and share to infinitum. In flip, we’ve got come to count on seamless and prompt entry to digital content material anytime, wherever, as if information have been immaterial. 

What precisely is the cloud? Where does it start or finish? Is it the fiber optic cables that transmit our information packets throughout oceans and continents? Is it mobile towers and cell phones? Is it servers whirring within the halls of knowledge facilities? Since 2015, I’ve been asking this query as an ethnographic researcher, shadowing technicians and interviewing executives and residents who stay close to digital infrastructure websites. I’ve discovered that the reply relies upon tremendously on who you’re asking. For the much less technically minded particular person, the cloud is everything of the data and communications know-how community (ICTs). In the info storage trade, the cloud refers to a selected class of ultra-efficient information facilities referred to as hyperscalers (which make up simply over a third of knowledge facilities in operation), run by a handful of corporations like Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Tencent, and Alibaba. In both case, the cloud is a metaphor we use to abbreviate the complexity of the infrastructures behind the digital sphere.

That so many laypeople wrestle to specify what the cloud is speaks to the dazzling success of Big Tech’s advertising and marketing, but in addition its cautious obfuscation of the cloud’s materials residues. In the wake of current megadroughts, gigafires, warmth domes, and hurricanes, nonetheless, this advertising and marketing phantasm of an immaterial cloud is evaporating earlier than our eyes. Thanks to the work of activists, students, and journalists, we all know now that the cloud warms our skies and drains our watersheds. It pollutes our communities with digital waste and harmful noise. It is an confederate to world heating, desertification, and the toxification of our surroundings, an epoch and power that I name nubecene (nubes is Latin for “cloud”). 

The cloud’s voracious enlargement has not been met with out resistance. In some communities, residents are organizing, citing air pollution, energy grid failures, extreme land use, or lack of job creation as causes to oppose the development of latest information facilities. Even so, the cloud’s exponential progress reveals little signal of ebbing, which raises the query: Is it too late to repair it? What reforms might be carried out to curb the cloud’s growing environmental impacts? Much of the work of activists has been dedicated to answering these questions, however fewer are asking this: Is the cloud an inherently unsustainable paradigm? Must the cloud as we all know it come to an finish, for our collective survival?

Enter the Nubecene

Data facilities are something however homogenous. The first information heart I visited was nothing just like the modern cyberpunk technoscape depicted in movies or Google’s advertising and marketing content material. Instead, I arrived in a crumbling shell of an workplace constructing, the place racks of blinking servers have been arrayed in opposing rows and columns, and chilly air was pumped up from an air-conditioned plenum beneath the ground. A typical information heart spans about 100,000 sq. toes, however I’ve been within services which might be the scale of a small dwelling or as massive as a college campus. The common information heart can devour as a lot electrical energy as a small metropolis in an effort to energy and funky its computing gear, drawing power from electrical grids that in lots of elements of the world are coal-fired. To preserve our expectations for fixed availability with out as a lot as a hiccup, information facilities run diesel mills in a state of hot-standby to provide energy within the occasion of {an electrical} grid failure. The carbon dioxide trail thickens if you happen to have a look at the footprint of facility building or the provision chains of servers, energy provides, and different gear that have to be repeatedly cycled by means of the glittering halls of those services.

In an effort to reduce operational prices and cut back their carbon footprints, information facilities are more and more turning away from typical pc room air conditioners (CRACs) as a cooling methodology. It takes a substantial amount of power to refrigerate air, so extra operators are resorting to a extra environment friendly fluid medium for cooling computer systems: freshwater. Like people, the thirst of servers might be quenched solely with handled water, as a result of corrosive results of sediments on delicate electronics. Few services recycle their water, consuming millions of gallons per day to maintain the cloud afloat. Others use chemicals to deal with the water they cycle by means of their services, dumping the ensuing wastewater into native watersheds with unknown results to native ecosystems, as has reportedly occurred in the Netherlands. In locations just like the American southwest, which is presently experiencing a megadrought spurred by local weather change, data centers are flocking to Arizona’s desert, lured by tax breaks and business-friendly laws and seemingly unhindered by the catastrophic risk they pose to native populations and ecosystems. There, information facilities are guzzling water to chill servers in pressured watersheds, whereas farmers are being requested to ration water. Arizona, the place I spent six months researching information facilities as an ethnographer, is just not an outlier however a part of a wider trend of data centers taking root close to vulnerable watersheds. 

As a part of my dissertation analysis on the cloud’s ecological footprint, I visited and labored inside information facilities in Iceland and, throughout the US, New England, Arizona, and Puerto Rico. Working as a novice technician, I helped decommission servers that reached the tip of their warrantied lifespans (a median of three years). I unplugged, unscrewed, and hauled cart upon teetering cart of cumbersome servers, magnetizing their drives to securely erase their contents earlier than stacking them in discard heaps. In the weeks earlier than the waste elimination subcontractor’s truck arrived to cart them away, I witnessed my colleagues pilfering invaluable chips or graphic playing cards from the husks of those condemned computer systems, a shadow salvage financial system that was actually unlawful however not penalized, given the destiny of the digital waste. The United Nations estimates that less than 20 percent of digital waste is recycled yearly. Millions of metric tons of expired electronics with poisonous parts are disposed informally in pc graveyards in locations like Ghana, Burundi, or China, the place salvagers (usually girls and kids) smelt them all the way down to retrieve uncommon metals, poisoning watersheds, soils, and their very own our bodies within the course of.