Data Centers

An Environmental History of Information 1850s – 1950s

Facing symmetrical pressures that threaten to disrupt its structural foundations, contemporary society is being fundamentally disrupted by the climate crisis and by the widespread anxiety over the centralised control of digital information. These two conditions would still seem to belong to separate domains. The climate crisis is most often treated as an exclusively natural phenomenon, while the centralised control of data is commonly portrayed as a purely technological issue. A new critical perspective is emerging in response to this division between environmental and informational concerns. This new perspective has been prompted by a growing awareness of the detrimental impact of mineral mining necessary for information technologies, not to mention the vast resources that server farms and data centres consume. As a matter of fact, the latter account for more than 4% of Switzerland’s electricity consumption, more than the entire farming sector and it is expected to double in the next five years. In contemporary debates, the environmental impact of information societies is often viewed as an external problem that can be resolved either through “mitigation” or further “innovation.” Critical of this view, our project proposes to examine the co-evolution of the modern ideas of environment and information. Rather than addressing environmental degradation as the collateral side effect of information societies, we focus instead on how ecological exploitation has been at the core of environmentally conscious information societies from their modern origins onward. The stakes of this focal shift from side effects to systemic causes proposed here are considerable, and the questions raised could not be more urgent, coming right at the moment when “tech giants” are assertively leading environmental discourse.

“Data Centers: An Environmental History of Information 1850s – 1950s,” investigates the political and economic motivations driving modern environmental consciousness, with specific focus on how these motivations coincide with, and facilitate, the rise of global information networks via specific technological expertise. Often conceived as purely immaterial, the collection, storage, process, and transmission of information have been anything but; there is always an in-between, a material substrate that forms and in-forms those regimented processes. This project addresses architecture as the in-between material substrate of those efforts to translate natural phenomena into quantifiable data. We contend that it is this mediating architecture—consisting of processes, relationships, and above all, immense amounts of buildings and material—that, during the 19th century, made the environment measurable, quantifiable, and ultimately predictable by leveraging the power intrinsic to harvesting and controlling flows of information. We investigate this architecture—this material in-between—to understand the agency of buildings and their operative role in the environmental history of information.

At the core of this modern condition is the unprecedented crisis of control brought on by new forms of energy production and consumption in the mid-19th century. Since the early stages of industrialisation, modern societies sought to anticipate, mitigate, and ultimately control otherwise unpredictable risks, with the gathering of information and statistical processing being the most prominent techniques used to do so. By collecting and disseminating large amounts of data, empires, liberal democracies, and corporations pledged to reduce the intrinsic dangers of modernity and create markets that could stabilise economic output amidst what had previously been volatile commercial sectors. Through comparative analyses that stretch over an extended period of history and across geographies near and far, this research aims to disclose the historical roots of today’s most urgent matters of concern – the climate crisis and the centralised control of information.