ethereal ideas shimmering overhead

There was a short article in last month’s Harper’s (which I just found in my kitchen a few days ago) about a data center that Google is building in The Dalles, Oregon, a dessicated industrial town situated on the Columbia right around where the desert starts. (It’s kind of jarring to drive into it along the I-84: you go from majestic tree-lined hills to flat hot rolling nothingness and the skeletons of old factories.)

The energy consumption of the server farm will be approximately equal to the energy consumption of the city of Tacoma, and Google’s purchase of the property was contingent on an assurance of access to cheap hydroelectric power. The article also talks about how many other energy-intensive processing facilities like this are being built in countries with weak or non-existent environmental protections to keep energy costs down.

The title “keyword: evil” seems a tad hyperbolic here: although hydroelectric power is problematic in terms of its environmental impact, that’s true of pretty much every method of energy production, and although Google’s lobbying against energy privatization is self-interested, it’s not exactly sinister, either (since privatizing utilities actually is a terrible idea). Emphasizing Google’s behavior too much risks missing the point — it is true that Google’s actions will help set the bar for its competitors, but as I understand capitalist economics, it’s not really realistic to expect a market to fail to respond to financial incentives because of an individual company’s intent to be evil vs not be evil — a more systemic view is needed.

However, I really like the overarching point that the internet isn’t an “ethereal store of ideas shimmering overhead like the aurora borealis.” No one ever actually makes this argument explicitly (since it doesn’t cohere at all), but then again, people don’t often engage with the material substrates underlying their experience of the internet either, especially not when engaging in techno-utopian prognosticating.

This ties in with a broader conceptual shift in American discourses about goods and economies over the last half-century or so: a tendency to abstract away from the realities of manufacturing as much as possible in favor of focusing on emotional and cultural connotations of how consumers interact with commodities. You can see it very clearly in advertising — hype about how Product X is well-built and made to last has largely been replaced by elaborate appeals to how Product X is essential to a certain demographic’s sense of self-identity (broad overview here). Abstracting in this way is even easier when dealing with things like “the internet” which is already an abstraction, not an object with material heft that you can touch and hold in your hand.

..Although, the same issue definitely arises with tangible goods as well. Computers themselves are a prime example (along with basically everything else). The rapid spread of the computer as an essential household item has created a massive outflux of cast-off computer equipment that is full of hazardous toxins and becomes obsolete within a year or two of purchase. Computer parts are almost never recycled in environmentally sound ways even when they make it to ‘recyclers’ — instead they are shipped overseas and sold to raw-materials brokers who mine them for a single valuable component (e.g. copper) and then toss them in a landfill. Or, y’know, burned in irrigation canals.

(Freegeek is awesome because they attack this on two fronts — selling un-reusable parts to the most reputable recyclers they can find and selling/giving people refurbished computers made from the reusable parts and running Linux, which doesn’t get as bloated and bogged-down and thus makes computers seem to last longer.)

There’s a lot to say on this topic, but I have to leave work.

• What kinds of strategies address these issues best? I see a problem of transparency/information distribution and a problem of economics. People are not exposed to information about environmental realities underlying their stuff unless they actively seek it out, which makes it hard for them to “vote with their dollar.” Plus, there’s that pesky segment of the populace who can’t afford the luxury of voting with their dollar.
• Related: how green-ness has itself become a marketing strategy. I find this really interesting. For now I will just cite Exhibit A and Exhibit B.