In some ways, a data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Super-high security, ugly warehouse buildings. In other ways, a data center is much worse than a prison. A prison will bring some jobs; data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center will consume massively more water and electricity than a prison, while also causing far more toxic e-waste.

Data centers are the new mines. They’re here to mine our data, to mines us, to make us data slaves, imprisoned and exploited by our own data. We are the new mines that the old imperialists and colonizers have come to extract from and then discard. For most data is not for the common good. It is for the sale of goods. Particularly for the sale of goods we don’t need and that are bad for the environment, for from these types of goods and services are the maximum profits made. Data centers are the hubs of surveillance capitalist planned obsolescence.

Data is physical. It exists on a machine in a building. A typical data center might be around 9,000 square meters (about 100,000 square feet). That’s about the size of a large supermarket. At about 1.6 million square meters, the CITADEL, in Nevada, USA, is one of the largest. So, that’s about 175 supermarkets in size. Very physical.

We live off the evil twins of capitalism—cheap and sometimes “free” data storage. This cheap and free—as usual—comes at major environmental and social cost. You can’t have cheap data storage and processing if you don’t have cheap raw materials out of which to make the servers. You can’t have cheap servers if you don’t have a cheap workforce. You can’t have cheap data storage and processing if you don’t have cheap land to build the data center on, and cheap electricity and water to keep it running. You can’t have cheap data storage and processing if you don’t have small, cheap, disposable sub-contracted workforces. All of this stuff is cheap because we don’t calculate the true and total cost to the environment.

Data centers are nosy, noisy, kept cold because they get so hot, and increasingly automated and people-less. Vast areas of computer servers, empty of life, humming and whirring and belching heat. When the local utilities and councils look at the massive and soaring demand for water and electricity, they realize that whatever they do, they must hide these figures from the public. Some pretty robust greenwashing would be required to sell all this to the local population, particularly now that they’d be paying more for electricity and water to subsidize the huge discounts given to Big Tech, and the new infrastructure that must be built. Not to mention those huge sweetheart corporate welfare tax breaks they gave.