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Bratton","content":"sector ’ s total footprint by 2020, while telecoms infrastructure, PCs and peripherals, will represent much more. While the shift toward Cloud platforms represents efficiencies over “ dead tree media ” and perhaps will ultimately reduce reliance on air travel, it also enables an exponential growth in data flotsam, such as search histories, redundant personal media, legally mandated trails of sales receipts, unfiltered spam, backups of the trails of spam and search, and so on, all of which need to be stored somewhere, and it is now stored online in various databases here and there. Sometime in the future, this Cloud landfill of postcontemporary data junk may provide new insights for digital humanities as to the real nature of global discourse (or existential clues for a future artificial intelligence, itself born of spam perhaps, <sup>55</sup> seeking out the meaning of its origin), but until then, it is just more carbon debt. It is estimated that the electricity required to send the trillions of spam e-mails worldwide each year is equivalent to powering 2 million American homes and generates the same amount of greenhouse gases as 3 million cars. But the Cloud layer is not uniform, and how it affects the Earth layer depends on where it is buried. It matters where data centers are located because the available energy mix ranges from dirty fossil fuels to robust renewables sources (Hong Kong hosts one of the dirtiest clouds, while Iceland and Sweden are among the cleanest, and so Iceland has made Cloud hosting a key part of its national industrial strategy). In the United States, many of the largest data centers (such as Google ’ s in Lenoir, North Carolina, Yahoo ’ s in La Vista, Nebraska, Microsoft ’ s in Chicago and Apple ’ s in Apple, North Carolina) are, as of this writing, all at least 50 percent coal powered. <sup>56</sup> The incentives to introduce greater energy efficiencies in data centers and to reduce operating costs thereby are considerable, and they represent critical competitive advantages for different Cloud platform players, as will be discussed further in the following chapter. Nevertheless, without significant gains in energy and carbon efficiency (and cost), it may be too expensive for the Cloud to “ grow ” beyond certain thresholds. If so, then less assured paths of innovation will ensue, many of which may further distort infrastructural access between the global North and South.\n\nEven if all goes well, the emergent mega-infrastructure of The Stack is, as a whole, perhaps the hungriest thing in the world, and the consequences of its realization may destroy its own foundation. If growth estimates are correct (or, worse, if they are too modest), then the collective project of constructing The Stack may tip toward an equally comprehensive and self-amplifying exhaustion of resources and systemic collapse. That is the bad scenario, but it is not the only one. The Stack not only consumes energy; it also mediates it and rationalizes its metabolic distribution. As said, energy is not just the driver of The Stack; it is also one of the things that The Stack computes. Energy, regardless of its source, is not likely consumed at the site of its capture, but is instead shuttled around a regional-scale network of production, storage, transmission, distribution, and metering, and in many cases this network is startlingly inefficient.\n\n94\n\nEarth Layer","previous_page":93,"next_page":95}