In Nepal, Indigenous peoples have ongoing struggles against dams. Lakpa Angjuk Bhote, secretary of Chyamtang-Kathmandu Welfare Society, told their story to Mongabay.

“The rivers, lakes and forests are at the center of many people’s faith and folklore stories and therefore sacred to locals. The destruction of untouched sacred forest around the project area is desecration of our sacred spaces, deities and our communal faith.”

The contractors came at night with big diggers and ripped up the land, destroying habitat for the red panda, blue sheep, Asiatic black bear, Himalayan goral, snow leopard, musk deer, Himalayan monal. The plan was that they would destroy so much land that it wouldn’t be worth regenerating, and the courts would then accept things as a fait accompli. “Having been with and spoken to many such people, e.g. in the Narmada Valley where dams have displaced tens of thousands, I can attest to the deep emotional and psychological trauma, which no amount of cash compensation can make up for,” Ashish Kothari, co-founder of the environmental non-profit Kalpavriksh, in Pune, India, told journalist Christopher Ketcham.

In 2024, Tessa Wong reported for the BBC how, “For years, Chinese authorities have been planning to build the massive Gangtuo dam and hydropower plant, also known as Kamtok in Tibetan, in the valley straddling the Dege (Derge) and Jiangda (Jomda) counties.” This would submerge monasteries and other holy places, displacing thousands of people. In the ruthless police state that Tibet has been turned into, protest is rare. Even so, the great loss of their holy places and homes forced people out onto the streets where they were met with severe beatings and arrests for protesting against progress.

This sort of ecocide and Indigenous genocide has happened—and is happening—all over the world in order to build dams which have long been heralded as the number one ‘renewable’, ‘green’ and ‘clean’ energy source. They cleared the forests to build dams in the northern Yoro province in Honduras, the home of the Indigenous Tolupan. They tore the Indigenous people of the Volta Grande do Xingu in Pará, Brazil, away from their homes to build the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. On the Xingu and Tucuruí rivers in Brazil, dams devastated the nature, the homes and the livelihoods of the Indigenous people. The Balbina hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon caused the local extinction of several endemic fish species in the Uatumã River.

It’s worth it, we’re told, because hydropower is ‘net zero’ and ‘carbon free’. The Hoover Dam in the United States required 3.4 million cubic meters of concrete and 20,000 tons of reinforcing steel, not to mention all the electrical infrastructure. The Three Gorges Dam in China, the world’s largest, required about 28 million cubic meters of concrete and 256,000 tons of steel. Concrete is the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, with the impact of one cubic meter of concrete potentially reaching 400 kgs of CO2. And these dams won’t last. In time, their concrete begins to crumble.

Dams cause multiple other harms to our environment. They kill rivers, devastate freshwater ecosystems, destroy riparian zones, increase the temperature of the water, prevent fish from swimming upstream, and stop sediment reaching the coasts. “Sediments are something we have deprived coastal systems of because of our upstream dams,” Erica Gies, author of the book Water Always Wins, explained. Without sediment, coastal systems become weaker and less able to cope with normal coastal erosion, let alone that driven by global warming. But they say that’s worth it for the War on CO2.

Dams deprive water of oxygen. According to the University of Utrecht:

“Oxygen is not only essential for aquatic life, it also plays a key role in critical nutrient cycles like carbon and nitrogen. When oxygen levels drop too low, a condition known as hypoxia, ecosystems begin to unravel. Fish die, food webs collapse, water quality declines.”

Oxygen in freshwater is being rapidly depleted because of two key drivers. The first is Green Revolution agriculture and its overuse of fertilizers. The second driver is dams. University of Utrecht researchers explained that “The longer travel time of freshwater to the sea through the construction of dams and reservoirs has proven to be just as important” in depleting oxygen supplies as fertilizer pollution.

In 1979, representatives of the Indigenous Sámi people went on hunger strike to protest a decision by the Norwegian government to build a dam at Áltá. Land Sámi lived on for untold generations was expected to become a Green Sacrifice Zone for hydroelectricity, like so much other land, from Mexico to the Philippines, from Australia to Brazil, from Nepal to Honduras. Dams have always been environmentally and socially devastating. They have often been used as acts of war, either to deny people access to water or to flood their lands. Dina Gilio-Whitaker, an Indigenous researcher, activist and journalist, wrote about how dams were used in the extermination of Native Americans:

“The building of dams has historically delivered some of the most devastating blows to Native communities. Flooding caused by dams dislocated entire towns and destroyed fishing sites, contributing to starvation and poverty inflicted by US policies.”

Sámi visual artist and poet, Synnøve Persen took part in the Áltá hunger strike. “The protests in Áltá gathered people from around the country,” she told Gabriel Kuhn for his book, Liberating Sápmi. “The fight for Sámi rights was part of it, but the movement was bigger than that. Environmentalists, farmers, salmon fishers—many were involved.” The slogan that united everyone was “Elva skal leve” (Let the river live). “The words for earth, mother and river are all closely connected in the Sámi language: eana, eadni, eatnu,” Harald Gaski, a professor of Sámi literature, told Gabriel Kuhn. The Sámi understand that everything is connected, and everything must be in balance. In a modern society these sorts of arguments hold little water. The government brought in a shipload of police to crush the protest.

Dams have taken half the water from Australia’s second largest river, the Murrumbidgee, leaving wetlands and floodplains drying up and wildlife devastated. For tens of thousands of years, the Nari Nari people have lived on the floodplains of the Murrumbidgee. To them, water is sacred. Like it is sacred to Joan Carling, who is from the Kankanaey Indigenous community in the Cordillera region of the northern Philippines’ Mountain Province. She came of age as an environmental protector in the 1980s (around the same time as the Sámi were opposing the Áltá dam) as her people opposed mega dam projects in the Cordillera region. She told Mongabay about their struggles:

“The Chico dam project was a World Bank-funded project of four dams along the Chico River. So it’s in the tribal areas of Kalinga and Mountain Province. When I spent my summertime there, I saw that the people there were willing to give up their lives … to defend the Chico River, which is providing them not only their livelihood but their culture, their cohesion as community, as tribal people.”

“They only wanted to live a simple life, but they were being pushed aside [and their lands taken away]. I was inspired by their resolve, their strength and their collective action. They were able to stop the dams. But we also saw how they were heavily discriminated [against].”

Yet we can’t escape the hype. It seems like almost every day we hear a story about how ‘cheap’ hydro, wind, solar and biomass have delivered 50%, 70%, 100% of electricity demand. It sounds amazing, like the energy problem is almost solved if we only believe a little more in these new magic technologies. There’s a part to this story that gets conveniently left out. Electricity generation meets roughly 20% of total power requirements. All those mines, factories, farms, trucks, buses, ships—they’re still running on coal, oil, gas. If you’re meeting 50% of electricity demand with ‘renewables’, therefore, you are meeting roughly 10% of total energy demand. So, still a very long way to go on an impossible road of the Growth Death Cult, where these new energy sources cannot even keep up with all the new demand that’s emerging because of the explosive growth of AI and data centers.

Global demand for fossil fuels reached record levels as the 2020s progressed. Even coal demand was growing to historic highs. Many august institutions claimed that fossil fuels would ‘peak’ or ‘plateau’ by 2030. Others estimated that even by 2050, fossil fuels would be meeting anywhere from 40% to 60% of total global energy demand, which would mean the same—or even more—oil, coal and gas by volume as was produced in the 2020s because of overall growth in demand. It’s a scam. There is no transition when we live in a world of enormous energy demands, and every year, those energy demands grow. Life is being devoured by the Growth Death Cult.

Mining is not the only impact hydro, wind, solar and biomass have on land. These technologies take up huge areas of land. “Replacing conventional fuels like-for-like with renewables could require a global area three orders of magnitude larger than currently used for energy,” Dr Sebastian Dunnett, a nature scientist and biodiversity expert, has written. “At the same time, conservationists call for 30%—or even 50%—of the earth to be set aside for nature.” Three times more land for solar and wind machines when we need twice as much land for wild nature. It doesn’t add up. “We’re going to do what we’ve always done with our environmental problems, push one on to the other,” Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San José State University, told National Geographic. “We’re moving our climate problem onto our biodiversity crisis. It’s just more of the same.”

One small example of mining devastation for ‘green’ metals is in the Philippines, where the race for copper and nickel to support “the global shift to renewable energy is already harming the lives and natural environment that communities rely on, placing them in increasing danger,” a Global Witness report found:

“The military has been linked to the highest number of documented killings and detentions of land and environmental defenders in the Philippines over the past decade. These abuses have gone unchecked by President Marcos Jr as he oversees the militarisation of ‘green energy’ infrastructure and increased targeting of human rights defenders and mining critics using anti-terror legislation.”

Indigenous people of the Philippines made a Declaration of Unity for the Defense of the Environment, Ancestral Lands, and Indigenous People’s Rights:

“We are in the midst of a climate emergency that must be immediately confronted. Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of resisting the worsening climate crisis. We must fight the deceptive energy transition that serves only the interests of capitalist countries and corporations, seizing ancestral lands and wealth through destructive mining and energy projects – such as hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar power projects.”

Diné Navajo environmental protector, Klee Benally, summed things up well:

“From deadly nuclear power to lithium and rare earth mining, and the privatisation of water, the greening of the economy is still a war against Mother Earth and all existence.”

“The proposition of unplugging from a ‘dirty’ power source and plugging into a ‘green’ one does nothing to address the underlying power relations. It reinforces them. ‘Green Energy’ sustaining a Green Economy still demands resource colonialism.”

‘Renewable’ energy has another trick up its sleeve. It has become a key weapon in the War on CO2. ‘Renewable’ energy reduces CO2, therefore renewable energy is untouchable, holy, irreproachable. That other stuff—overconsumption, mining, manufacturing, recycling, biodiversity, soil, vegetation, water, air, animals, life, etc.—it’s important, sure. We’ll get to that later. No we won’t because we’re already long down the road in the Sixth Mass Extinction. In the 50 years from 1970 to 2020, as the Growth Death Cult revved into overdrive, there was a:

• 73% collapse in wildlife
• 49% decline in marine life
• 50% decline in insects
• 69% decline in vertebrates
• 83% decline in freshwater species

The ‘renewable’ energy ‘green’ mining boom accelerates all these collapses—and more—so that the Sixth Mass Extinction will be even more devastating than it would have been had we not chosen acceleration, and rather chosen to radically slow down. Instead, we are being sold the absolute lie that you can use as much energy as you want, once it’s ‘renewable’. It’s ecocide.

We cannot escape the fact that all energy production and use changes our environment, whether it’s oil or solar, coal or wind, gas or hydro. We must massively reduce the amount of energy and materials we use—75% or more—to have any hope of preserving enough of our environment to give life a decent chance post-collapse. Energy use reduction is a crucial step in the long retreat from a collapsing civilization, as we seek to protect the land and the life on it.

Instead, wind, solar, hydro, biomass are voraciously demanding land and materials. “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant,” the International Energy Association reported. Tom Murphy, a professor emeritus of the departments of Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, explained that:

“Renewable energy requires an order-of-magnitude more material per unit of electrical energy delivered than does fossil fuel combustion. This translates to never-ending mining, manufacturing, pollution, and all the associated ecological costs. It’s not a build-it-once-and-done game. Renewable energy is therefore not actually renewable, since it depends crucially on non-renewable materials.”

Tom Murphy is not some ‘renewable’ energy denier. He laughed when I told him that I was once a solar panel booster. He was too. He tried to make solar energy work:

“Besides knowing the semiconductor physics inside out, as a hands-on guy I have experimented with various off-grid configurations of panels, built my own curve-tracer to explore partial shade effects, tried different battery chemistries, learned the ins and outs of four different charge controllers, tried different inverter types, performed extensive monitoring and analysis, etc. Plus, living an off-grid lifestyle connected me more viscerally to weather trends, and my energy haul (and expenditure) becomes more personal. I wrote a Physics Today article in 2008 on getting started.”

When I asked Tom about the fossil fuels versus ‘renewable’ energy debate, his response was simple: “In a sense, to me, the question is similar to: which is worse—death by decapitation or bullet through the head? What we do with the energy in either form is leading to a sixth mass extinction.”

‘Renewable’ energy is not renewable. It’s a Big Lie that’s helping accelerate environmental collapse by encouraging overconsumption. It externalizes and makes invisible the materials. ‘Renewables’ can only become renewable by a magic trick: Look! Look over here! The renewable wind. The renewable sun. Don’t look over there at the non-renewable materials, the mining, the ecocide, the Indigenous genocide, the manufacturing, the awful recyclability.

Even if ‘renewables’ were to magically become genuinely renewable, our environment would continue its collapse. Because the most environmentally destructive force on earth today is not the form of energy we use but how much we use energy and what we use energy for. Because we don’t have an energy production problem. We do have an energy consumption problem. We consume vastly too much energy and materials. With ‘renewable’ energy, we are accelerating a mining boom, a manufacturing boom, installation boom, land change boom, e-waste boom, but—most of all—an overconsumption boom. Right at the moment when we need to radically slow down, we are accelerating. We need to build brakes. With ‘renewable’ energy, we’re fast-tracking accelerator factories.

There is no Energy Transition. The history of energy is the history of addition. As coal took off in 19th-century UK, more wood was used as timber supports in coal mines than was burned for fuel in the country during the entire 18th century, historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explained to Nate Hagens. You need materials and energy to produce energy. Coal production depends on wood, oil and steel. Wood demand is driven by oil and coal and silicon. Oil depends on coal, steel and concrete. Solar panels cannot be made without oil, coal and wood. In China, it takes two to three tons of coal to make one electric car. That’s why electric cars are ‘cheap’ because coal is ‘cheap’. While over in Europe, the UK is shutting down coal plants and setting up ‘green’ biomass plants where it burns old-growth forests from Canada—producing even more CO2 than if they had simply burned coal. Why? So, they can greenwash that they no longer burn coal. It’s a scam.

I was a true believer. I installed solar on our roof in rainy Ireland in 2010. The same year I also installed a heat pump—one of the first in the country. The sales pitch from the solar man was that I’d have ‘free’ hot water. All I needed to do to get this ‘free’ hot water was to pay €3,500. It was a magic trick. After you pay €3,500, it’s free, because the materials—after you pay for them—magically become ‘free’. Except they don’t. It’s small leaps of logic from ‘renewable’ to ‘cheap’ to ‘free’. It is such a dangerous cultural message during a time when we must convince people to conserve and consume less. And this is perhaps the most insidious part of the ‘renewable’ energy scam. In order to support the Growth Death Cult, it encourages a culture of ‘cost-free’ energy consumption. Burn as much energy as you want, once it’s ‘renewable’. At least once a week, I get into an argument with some tech bro who says that AI and data centers are fine once they use ‘renewable’ energy.

“We walk for the water we need,” Juan, a middle-aged man born in the Indigenous rural community of Maconí, Mexico, explained. “If we don’t walk, who will give it to us? It’s a four-hour journey each day to fetch water … Since last year, there hasn’t been rain, and this year it’s the same.” The bean crop had withered and there was no corn to make tortillas, he told Ana Valdivia, a lecturer in AI at the Oxford Internet Institute. Valdivia had met Juan during a protest organized by his community in front of the city hall of Querétaro, the capital of a state lying to the north of Mexico City. The community was demanding the fundamental right to access water. With Mexico parched and Mexico city sinking and running dry, Querétaro was in an even more precarious situation. It was the only Mexican state whose entirety had a high-risk drought rating. Despite all this, Querétaro had plans to be a water-guzzling data center hub for Big Tech. “The geographical placement of Mexico is strategical for the data centre industry because it connects Canada and the US, with Central and South America through submarine cables,” Valdivia explained.

As Big Tech sucked up all the available electricity and water in its home countries, it greedily eyed the water and electricity of poorer countries. It was already doing this with the materials needed to manufacture its computer servers, with the metals sourced in the Global South, its products assembled in Global South sweatshops, and then later these same products dumped back as toxic e-waste in the Global South. Why not do the same with data? Why not store the data of rich people in poor places so that the water and electricity of poor people would get used, instead of the water and electricity of rich people?

“It’s turned into extractivism,” said Tania Rodríguez, a member of the Chilean Socio Environmental Community Movement for Land and Water, who were protesting the explosion in data center building in their country. “We end up being everybody’s backyard.” Exactly that. Water and electricity is expensive to transport over long distances. Data is light. Let the data suck up the water and electricity in a poor neighborhood in the Global South and then get used by some bored middle class rich kids in the Global North.

It’s not simply the poorest countries. It’s also poor parts of rich countries. When the Institute for Local Self-Reliance did a study of AI and data center expansion in the USA, it found that nine out of the top 10 counties most affected were low-income communities, with predominantly Black populations.

Ireland likes to jump from one colonial master to another. First, we jumped out of the British Empire and jumped into the Roman Catholic Empire. Then, we jumped from there into the Big Tech Empire. Ireland has long sold its environment for a few dollars more. Do you think that the gigantic quantities of data that were consuming over 20% of Irish electricity by the mid-2020s was all Irish data for Irish people? You’d be lucky if 1% of it was. Big Tech was doing the same too in the poorer, drought-stricken regions of Spain, and anywhere else they could get their tax breaks and cheap water and electricity, and where they thought they could bully and intimidate the local community.

The data from a colonizing country colonizes the land, water and energy of a poor country. It is stored there in a physical building that can be the size of multiple football fields. It is fed and processed using cheap local electricity. It is kept cool using cheap local water. Though this data uses these colonized local resources, that data itself is used in the colonizing country by the citizens of the colonizer. Of course, 90% of this data is not even used. It is data waste, and like e-waste, it is stored far away from the source that made it. This is all possible because of the nature of the distributed network that is the Internet.

At a larger level, all our data is colonized by Big Tech. Every day we are online we help rear a data doppelganger. It’s a version of us made of data. That data is ours but does not belong to us. Because of our addiction to ‘free’ services, we have signed away our data rights to Big Tech. Big Tech owns us because it owns our digital doppelganger and is mining us for our data wealth. Mining us and controlling us. Big Tech has colonized our raw data, processed and organized it and then sells it on for a hefty profit to advertisers and propagandists. We have been data colonized and we don’t even know it.

Soon, we will be producing thousands of zettabytes a year. It’s a tsunami of data every day, every hour of every day, every minute of every hour, every second of every minute. As a result, important data that definitely does need storing is getting lost. In relation to academic research, for example, we are flooding our research environments with low-quality—often AI-produced—research paper garbage. It is becoming more and more expensive to store all this stuff. Research repositories are thus disappearing and lots of good research is being lost. In a thousand years, there may be more quality data artifacts on the Maya and Inca than on our digital generation. Digital is fragile, transient, and it will sink in its own crap.

We’ve never had more data and yet we’ve never had fewer information architecture skill. That’s because organizations don’t want to invest in the hard and vital work of professionally organizing and managing data. AI is making things much worse because it is feeding the idea that humans no longer need to worry about how we create and organize our data—that AI will look after all that. It won’t. AI is a great big lying, great big crap-producing machine.

Teachers are finding that students, brought up on Google search, don’t even know what a file is, let alone where it is saved or how to organize it in a classification hierarchy with other files. For the Google generation, “the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students,” one professor said.

Archiving data can significantly reduce overall data pollution because the most important decision in archiving is what to delete. Bob Clark, director of archives at the US Rockefeller Archive Center, said that less than 5% of stuff is worth saving in any situation, while a representative from Library and Archives Canada told me that only 1% to 3% of information in any department has archival or historical value.

“Don’t make me think” has long been a mantra of modern design and user experience. It’s a wonderful idea in the right context of helping people navigate complex environments. However, when used to do the design work itself, it is deeply flawed. Buy this technology and software, the pitch goes: it does the thinking for you, it does the data organizing for you. And it’s always on, always available. Store everything and no matter what time of day or night it is, you can get exactly what you want instantly. In the data center industry, they call it 99.99% uptime. It comes at the same cost to the environment as making silicon 99.99% pure. This whole technology-first approach simply doesn’t work because no matter what the tech bros say, quality data management requires human skill and years of human experience—knowing what to delete and how to organize and classify what is left.

Instead, we treat the problem as one of storage and access. In a typical data center, “only 6 to 12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes,” data expert Steven Gonzalez has estimated. “The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.” Perhaps this has changed somewhat because of the voracious processing demand from AI. However, the basic point remains true. Guaranteeing our convenience, and our access to all that badly organized crap data we’re never going to look at again, costs 90% more mining, 90% more materials, 90% more electricity, 90% more water, 90% more waste. All so that we can ‘potentially’ access that photo or file that there is a 99.99% chance we will never access. A data center is like before the start of a Formula 1 race. All these high-performance, energy-intense cars revving and revving for a race most of them will never run. Here we are. This is us. This is civilization, modernity, progress, innovation. Spending so much energy to create and store crap we’ll never use again.

It’s not simply crap content. Computer code bloat is everywhere. For starters, most software, most features, serve no useful function. A pile of crap software is launched and then either it dies a death, or else for years badly designed fixes are made to try to get it to work in the most basic manner, while making it even more complex and bloated. It’s hard to comprehend the appalling quality of most enterprise systems, while most consumer software apps hardly even get downloaded. Those that do, hardly ever get used. Thirty days after news apps, shopping apps, entertainment apps, education apps have been downloaded, most will have lost over 90% of their users. A typical webpage can easily weigh 4 MB. If it was properly coded, that weight could be brought down to 200 KB, a 95% reduction. 95% crap.

Big Tech laughs about all this crap production. This is how Big Tech makes so much money in its data centers. It sells them as plush five-star hotels for superior VIP data, when in reality it’s running a datafill, a data dump. If most of the data stored in a typical data center was processed and accessed every day, then everything would explode, the servers would fry. The demand would crash everything. The data center business case is dependent on most people never accessing the data they’ve stored. You’re paying for a data dump.

To protect their profits, Big Tech has historically made it very hard for you to delete. Artist Honor Ash observed:

“Initially, Gmail didn’t even include a delete button. Not only was it no longer necessary to delete emails regularly to make space in your inbox, but it was actually not even possible. This shift broke everyone’s deletion habit—it ended the ritualistic appraisal of what should be kept, and ushered in a default in which literally everything should.”

While the good habits of deletion ended with the Cloud, they were replaced by the very bad habits of keeping everything. How often I’ve heard the argument that we have to keep everything because you never know what will be important in the future. This was executives in charge of intranets, websites and computer systems, where nobody could find anything because of the terrible search design and because of the awful information architecture. And what they did find was usually some sort of dodgy draft, some copy of a copy, or something that was way out of date, inaccurate or useless. Keeping all this junk data does not simply reduce the chances of findability, it also increases cybersecurity risk. Huge quantities of poorly structured and badly maintained data and software are an invitation to hacking and other risks.

Even if we could put a data center in every town and village in the world, we couldn’t keep everything anyway. There is simply too much data being produced, vastly too much, so that in any one year we’re lucky if we have the space to store about 10% of the total data produced. We are now into the era of zettabytes. As my previous book, World Wide Waste, explained:

“A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000? MB or one quadrillion MB. If a zettabyte was printed out in 100,000-word books, with a few images thrown in, then we would have one quadrillion books. It would take 20,000,000,000,000 (20 trillion) trees’ worth of paper to print these books. It is estimated that there are currently three trillion trees on the planet. To print a zettabyte of data would thus require almost seven times the number of trees that currently exist to be cut down and turned into paper.”

We need to talk about the data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, never-to-be-read-again reports, files and drawings from cancelled projects, drafts of drafts of drafts, out of date, inaccurate and plain wrong information, and gigabytes and gigabytes of poorly written, meandering content.

We’re destroying our environment to store copies of copies of copies of stuff we have no intention of ever looking at again. We’re destroying our environment to take 1.9 trillion photos every year. That’s more photos taken in one single year in the 2020s than were taken in the entire 20th century. That more than 200 photos taken for every child, woman and man alive. Every year. 12 trillion photos and growing, stored in the Cloud, the vast majority of which will never be viewed again. Mind boggling and exactly how Big Tech wants it.

I have spent almost 30 years working with hundreds of the largest organizations in the world in some 40 countries, trying to help them to better manage their content and data. Here’s what I’ve learned. 90% plus of commercial or government data is crap, total absolute crap. Period. It should never have been created. It certainly should never have been stored. The rise of digital saw the explosion of data crap production. Content management systems were like giving staff diesel-fueled diggers, whereas before they only had data shovels. I remember around 2010 being in conversation with a Microsoft manager, who estimated that there were then about 14 million pages on Microsoft.com, and that four million of them had never been visited. Four million, I thought. That’s basically the population of the Republic of Ireland of pages that nobody has ever visited. Why were they created? All the time and effort and energy and waste that went into all these pages that nobody had ever read. We are destroying our environment to create and store crap. And nobody cares.

Everywhere I went it was nothing but the same old story. Data crap everywhere. Distributed publishing that allowed basically anyone to publish anything they wanted on the intranet. And nobody maintains anything. When Kyndryl, the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services, was spun off by its parent, IBM, they found they had data scattered over 100 disparate data warehouses. Multiple teams had multiple copies of the same data. After cleanup, they had deleted 90% of the data. There are 10 million stories like this.

Scottish Enterprise had 753 pages on its website, with 47 pages getting 80% of visits. A large organization I worked for had 100 million visits a year to its website, with 5% of pages getting 80% of visits. 100,000 of its pages had not been reviewed in 10 years. “A huge percentage of the data that gets processed is less than 24 hours old,” computer engineer, Jordan Tigani, explained. “By the time data gets to be a week old, it is probably 20 times less likely to be queried than from the most recent day. After a month, data mostly just sits there.” The Southampton University public website found that 0.2% of pages got 90% of visits. Only 4% of its pages were ever visited. So, 96% of the roughly four million pages were not visited. One organization I knew of had 1,500 terabytes of data, with less than 2% ever having been accessed after it was first stored. There are 20 million more stories like these.

Most organizations have no clue what content they have. It’s worse. Most organizations don’t even know where all their data is stored. It’s even worse. Most organizations don’t even know how many computers they have. At least 50% of data in a particular organization is sitting on some server somewhere and nobody in management knows if it even exists; nor do they care. The average organization has hundreds of unsanctioned third-party app subscriptions being paid for by some manager’s credit card, storing everything from project chats to draft reports to product prototypes.

The Cloud made the crap data problem infinitely worse. The Cloud is what happens when the cost of storing data is less than the cost of figuring out what to do with the crap. One study found that data stored by UK engineering and construction industry firms had risen from an average of three terabytes in 2018 to 26 terabytes in 2023. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 50%! That sort of crap data explosion happened—and is happening—everywhere. And nobody in management cares because it’s so ‘cheap’ to store data. And this is what AI is being trained on. And we wonder why AI gets stuff wrong so often? Crap data in. Crap data out. And nobody cares. Particularly at a senior management level, nobody cares. Senior management is full to overflowing with Big Tech groupies chanting about the latest tech miracle that’s going to magically transform and supercharge their careers. Having to deal with senior managers has always been the most unsavory part of my job, because when it comes to technology, these managers exist on a whole other level of stupid vanity and narcissistic pursuit of their own selfish agendas.

As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker wrote for Wired. The security guards for data centers are specially trained to be aggressive and confrontational, so as to reinforce the air of secrecy and alienness of a data center in a local community. Ruiter, a Dutch local councilor, had parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that was rising out of flat North Holland farmland. The guard was not willing to listen to any local councilor expounding on the democratic rights of transparency and before Ruiter knew it, this data center security guard had his hands around the councilor’s throat.

Is there a more secretive empire in the world than Big Tech and its data centers? Big Tech realizes the power of data, the power it has over us when it has our data. It knows that if we knew about it even half of what it knows about us, then we would control Big Tech a lot more strictly than we do today.

There’s a common mantra in Big Tech when it has to respond to people who worry about all the data that it is sucking up about them: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” It’s such a disarming and innocent-sounding phrase. So comforting. However, does this mean that Big Tech, which hides its own data with fanatical religiosity, has something very big to hide? Yes, of course it does. Big Tech has an awful lot to hide.

Big Tech makes huge efforts to deny academic institutions or other research bodies access to data that would help highlight the harm it does. “Without better transparency and more reporting on the issue, it’s impossible to track the real environmental impacts of AI models,” Kate Crawford, a research professor at USC Annenberg, who specializes in the societal impacts of AI, told the Financial Times. According to Julia Velkova, an associate professor at the University of Helsinki, “These companies are unapproachable and largely disconnected from the places in which they are built. They refuse to talk to researchers or the public but instead communicate through press releases and YouTube videos, through the platforms that they own.”

Data center secrecy is rampant, deliberate and consistent. “When it comes to Google, what’s really striking is the lack of transparency and information when it comes to these projects,” said Sebastián Lehuedé, an expert in AI. How much water do US data centers use? “We don’t really know,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research scientist Dr. Arman Shehabi explained. “I never thought it could be worse transparency than on the energy side, but we actually know less.” And Philip Boucher-Hayes, a journalist with RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, said: “We have been really bad at reporting data centres accurately, largely because the data centres refuse to be transparent. I spent months trying to get interviews with some of the hyperscale operators here. They refused.”