Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 129

goods to consumers is made less material, in part because an information
society requires fewer material products and also because the process of
getting things to consumers is made smarter and more eficient.
One can certainly understand why this view would receive support.
I wrote this topic putting practically no ink to paper because I used my
laptop and drew from the vast stores of online information for research.
To its credit, and unlike the many positive forecasts about green IT, the
1998 article also raises the risk that “positive environmental effects might
be overcome by the 'rebound effect' caused by excessive economic growth”
(ibid.). That success on the environmental front can encourage people
to consume more is not dissimilar from other counterintuitive effects,
such as the link between advanced braking systems and the number of
accidents. Trusting the brakes can lead to more reckless driving, just as
progress on environmental controls can encourage people to buy more,
especially more “green” products.
The counterintuitive effect embodies good dialectical thinking, but
it nevertheless retains the view that information technology is inherently
green. The consequences of using IT may indeed lead to greater consump-
tion and resource depletion; however, the thinking goes, this is due not to
the technology but rather to what we do with it. The expansion of cloud
computing demonstrates the limitations of this view, particularly when
one considers the genuine materiality of production that takes place in
the large data centers around the world. On the outside, they appear to
be enormous rectangular warehouses, perhaps distinguished by their lack
of unique identiication and minimal exposure to outside light. Inside,
they are far from the storage facilities that typically deine a warehouse.
Instead they are illed with active devices and systems, including rack upon
rack of servers processing data and multiple power and cooling sources.
According to a lawyer for Microsoft, “The heart of the cloud are these
data centers, and the data centers are really at the heart of Microsoft's
business” (Glanz 2012a).
We now have tens of thousands of data centers spanning the world,
permitting people to instantly download their Google mail, search on
Baidu, buy music and movies from iTunes, and purchase products of every
kind from Amazon. But all of these beneits come at the cost of increased
power use and more stress on the environment. Cloud data centers are illed
with thousands of servers, each comprising common and rare materials