As far as the state of the art research for the Cloud Gaming Atlas goes, several articles on media studies exploring the environmental dimensions of cloud platforms and data centres have been reviewed. One of the pieces which really made an impact on my current project is Shane Brennan's Making Data Sustainable: Backup Culture and Risk Perception, an article which was published on Routledge's collection Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016). I highlighted some parts of the article and also made some comments, as you can read below:
«A culture of backup in which computer users everywhere are expected to copy all of their important files on a regular basis to multiple platforms, including online or “cloud” remote server–based storage. Only then, supposedly, will our precious data outlast a multitude of disasters--from fires and floods to errors both human and hardware—and we may achieve the common goal of digital continuity, regardless of the energy costs involved». 57 «As personal backup practices have shifted from more localized forms of data storage, such as the external hard drive, to cloud services, a different idea of backup as a risk-mitigation strategy has emerged. The geographic redundancy of the cloud—in which several copies of a file are spread to at least one, far-off data center—is seen as a way of making information more “sustainable,” in the sense of maintaining it over the long term against various kinds of disruption. But this digital “sustainability” is achieved by multiplying the amount of data stored in energy-consuming server farms». 57 «The cultural appeal of personal cloud backup over external hard drives is symptomatic of a broadening of risk perception in what Ulrich Beck has called the “risk society,” a moment in which we become aware of and must learn to manage a range of mostly intangible, human-caused dangers. The prevailing attitude in the risk society, Beck notes, is “negative and defensive . . . one is no longer concerned with attaining something ‘good’, but rather with preventing the worst.”» 58 «Answering these questions requires bringing together two different ideas of sustainability—digital and environmental—and asking what their surprising incompatibility can tell us about how to reconcile our digital preservation habits with the vital need to preserve our collective habitat». 59 «Concentrating in places where breakdowns are seen to be especially likely, undesirable, or both, backups mediate cultural understandings of risk and vulnerability, offering a way to study how these perceptions get materialized in various infrastructural systems». 60 «As Paul Edwards describes, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense infrastructures built by the US military in the 1950s combined redundant electrical generators and concrete enclosures—structures that echoed the Cold War’s “political architecture of the closed world”—with backup computers for analyzing radar data Each SAGE center, he explains, had “two identical computers operating in tandem, providing instantaneous backup should one machine fail.” In these systems, Cold War anxieties about national security and threats to human life became entangled with fears about the unreliability of computing and the vulnerability of digital information». 60-61 «Around the same time, data backup techniques responsive to Cold War anxieties were developing in the corporate sector. Iron Mountain Atomic Storage (founded in the early 1950s) harbored copies of sensitive business documents from nuclear threats inside a disused iron mine». 61 It might be interesting pointing out here that IRON MOUNTAIN is nowadays an important actor when it comes to providing data centre infrastructures. «While this idea of security has roots in the Cold War era and elsewhere, it continues—in some notably direct ways—in cloud infrastructure. As Hu explains, “many highly publicized data centers” repurpose old military bunkers: “Inside formerly shuttered blast doors meant for nuclear war, inside Cold War structures . . . and inside gigantic caverns that once served as vaults for storing bars of gold, we see the familiar nineteen-inch racks appear, bearing servers and hard drives by the thousands”.» 61 «Home broadband connections allowed companies to market remote online—rebranded as “cloud”—server based data storage and backup as a desirable commodity for individual users, not just corporations.19 “It used to be that we kept our data on our (actual) desks,” observes Andrew Blum. Now, “the ‘hard drive’—that most tangible of descriptors—has transformed into a ‘cloud,’ the catchall term for any data or service kept out there, somewhere on the Internet.”» 62 «In addition to being a matter of cost and convenience, the growing popularity of cloud backup reflects a collective sentiment that the cloud—and more precisely the dematerialized, geographic redundancy it represents—is a safer way to store information in the contemporary world. (...) The critical difference is WHERE those drivers are located from the perspective of the user.» 63 «By dispersing data copies to more than one “bunker,” cloud backup increases the odds that at least one copy will escape these network “contagions.”» 64 «The rhetoric of World Backup Day similarly frames data loss mitigation as a nearuniversal responsibility, departing from the top-down logic of older state- and corporate-led backup systems. Everyone is charged with protecting his or her own data, even though access to the cloud and digital backup, like many other kinds of security and technology, is far from universally distributed.» 64 «Part of the attraction of the cloud metaphor, in addition to making digital infrastructure seem magically “green” and virtual, is the image of airborne mobility that assuages fears about data impermanence.» 65 «At the same time, cloud storage can be used to subvert legal and territorial limits. In 2012, the peer-to-peer file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay (TPB), uploaded its entire operation to several commercial cloud-hosting providers, making it more resistant to, or backed-up against, the disruption of police raids. “Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime,” the group explained. Both in terms of where information is stored and how it moves across transnational networks, geopolitical conditions are still important to the conceptualization and implementation of backup in the cloud era, just as they were during the Cold War.» 65-66 «Backup is also no less material today than in previous decades. As Stephen Graham attests, digital media infrastructure remains absolutely reliant “on other less glamorous infrastructure systems—most notably, huge systems for the generation and distribution of electric power.” Moreover, the geographic spread of data centers may make it more difficult to pin down their energy use.» 66 And then Brannon lays out one of the most central arguments of the article: «Bradley defines the more recent formulation of “digital sustainability” as providing “the context for digital preservation by considering the overall life cycle, technical, and socio-technical issues associated with the creation and management of the digital item.” This approach recognizes that information can never be truly permanent but can only be sustained through an active process of building and continually maintaining costly, energy-intensive infrastructures that preserve “valuable data without significant loss or degradation.” A crucial paradox arises, however, since “digital sustainability” is essentially at odds with—and its implementation may very well undermine—environmental sustainability, which “creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony.” The adoption of “sustainability” by digital preservation discourse works to obscure this conflict, making it seem as if ensuring the “life cycles” of data is akin to, and in line with, protecting biological life and planetary ecosystems. Although some data centers are powered in significant ways by renewable energy like wind and solar, this does not account for the “embodied energy” that went into building these infrastructures and the electricity used to access remote servers on the user end, much of which still comes from the burning of fossil fuels. In addition, data centers rely on industrial backup systems such as massive arrays of polluting emergency generators, which must be tested regularly. These generators are designed to mitigate the risk of disruption from a power failure and meet clients’ demands for 24–7 access. Entire data centers are also “backed up” in the form of duplicate physical and digital architectures— known as disaster recovery sites—increasing energy costs even further.» 67 Disaster recovery sites and systems is an excellent theme related to my research which might be interestingly expanded towards a new project: Resource gaming. Mel Hogan also has an important contribution to the study of the environmental entanglements of data centres:«Mel Hogan examines “the potential environmental costs of our everyday obsession with selfarchiving” on Facebook as well as our expectation of instantaneous access. “The cost of such instantaneity,” she argues, “is that almost all the energy that goes toward preserving that ideal is, literally, wasted,” since most servers idle in standby mode— itself a form of backup—ready to meet sudden demand. Her analysis reveals Facebook to be a wasteful archive, a paradoxical system that consumes exorbitant amounts of energy in order to “sustain” information and our ability to access it.» 68 And here Brannon underlies an important statement considering the cultural implications of the data centre ecology. More importantly, he highlights how the study of cultural tropes is essential to understand the complex and paradoxical situation of how our dociety came to rely upon high energy-consuming data centres to sustain our mediatized daily routines: «Yes, a data center may be power-hungry and inefficient, but this is in part necessitated and justified by our unsustainable “digital demands.” The field of environmental media research, in other words, must address sustainable cultures of media use alongside and in dialogue with concerns including data center design, electronic waste, and the question of how media become tools for “environmental communication.”» 68 «It is difficult to know what constitutes acceptable versus excessive redundancy, in part because there is a lack of transparency about precisely how many times our files are replicated online and where they end up.» 69 «As a way of defining organizational relationships in response to perceived risks, backup is a historically specific concept and media practice. (...) The key paradox is this: to protect our data from the threats associated with climate change—such as storms, floods, and drought-induced wildfires—we multiply and distribute our data across a vast network of server farms.» 69 «Climate change and globalized risk perception have already radically expanded what is seen as requiring backup. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, for example, stores duplicate copies of crop seeds in a Norwegian Arctic mountainside in order to be able to “restart” agriculture after a large-scale disaster, recalling both Cold War bunkers and high-latitude data centers.66 The Atlantic called it “the world’s agricultural hard drive,” and, according to its director, “the seed vault is a kind of safety backup for existing seed banks and their collections.”67 But a group known as the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) takes this idea even further by proposing to back up the entirety of human civilization in a dedicated lunar facility. This backup would include a copy of “our cumulative scientific and cultural treasure chest” and “enough human beings (and supporting species) to repopulate Earth,” thus hedging against global disasters including climate change, nuclear war, and large asteroid impact, explain cofounders William E. Burrows and Robert Shapiro.» 70 «It urges us to reject the fantasy of a fully backup-able world, which can lull us into a false sense of security, promoting inaction. This imperative is represented in a graphic produced by the Climate Reality Project and shared on social media: superimposed on the “Blue Marble” Apollo 17 photograph—an icon of environmentalism made possible by the many backup systems of the Space Race—are the words “THERE IS NO EMERGENCY BACKUP PLANET”.» 72 «Just as the image of the cloud obfuscates the large-scale energy and carbon processes that, by fueling climate change, make the world gradually less safe for our information and for us, even the remote possibility of an emergency backup planet distracts from the irreversible mass extinction and ecological devastation already well underway. It deceives us into thinking there is a separation between Earth’s natural “hardware” and the cultural and biological “data” it supports, that one can be saved without the other.» 72
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AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
January 2024
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