A data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Only worse. Super-high, aggressive security; ugly warehouse buildings. A prison will bring a decent quantity of 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… Read More »
Chips and storage would get cheaper, faster and more powerful forever, they said. No limits. Every couple of years, Santa would arrive with twice the power at half the price. They called it Moore’s Law. For what seemed like an eternity—from the 1960s—chips were getting faster and smaller and cheaper. Then in the 2010s, things… Read More »
What goes around does eventually come around. The outsourcing of harm and the pursuit of the very cheapest labor was too wildly successful for Silicon Valley. By the 2020s, China was rising and nearly all the best chips were made in Taiwan. Security and dominance fears grew and a major push began to bring back… Read More »
According to tech futurists like Gregory Stock, the only function biodiversity had was to entertain humans. “There is an immense roster of species,” he noted, “that neither affect nor interest the vast majority of humankind.” This was in 1999 and these tech bro views have only accelerated and hardened since then as, unsurprisingly, biodiversity has… Read More »
It worked, and like a magic trick, the digital warmonger was born and boomed as something greener, something softer. However, impressions cause reality distortions. By keeping things low and out of sight, urban sprawl spread faster than anywhere else in the United States. Those low-lying ‘campuses’ grew everywhere as the Valley experienced almost exponential growth,… Read More »
“A lot of that design was about deliberately placing industrial infrastructure out of sight,” scientist Josh Lepawsky explained to me. “Literally putting it underground. Things like chemical storage tanks needed to store the chemicals for the manufacturing process. So, it was a deliberate urban design process, and I think it has been with us since… Read More »
It wasn’t always known as the Valley of Pimps and Pushers. Once upon a time, they called it the Valley of Heart’s Delight. From far and near, families would come on Springtime pilgrimages to participate in the famed “blossom tours” in Santa Clara Valley, California. “Miles and miles of fragrant orchards, spreading in a vista… Read More »
That silicon stuff. Sand, right? Right. It takes coal and charcoal, multiple metals and materials, and over 400 toxic chemicals, to make a silicon chip—the foundation of everything that happens in clean tech. “The environmental impact of chip making is huge,” Ian Williams, professor of applied environmental science at the University of Southampton, told Mongabay.… Read More »
They like their chips well engineered in the USA. Long, straight and thin. Good looking. To get such handsome chips requires large, round, smooth potatoes, and to grow such potatoes requires soft, loamy, sandy soil. Such soil is thirsty. In such thirsty soil, water seeps through like a sieve. They could choose firmer soil and… Read More »
We’ve never had more data and yet we’ve never had less information architecture skill. Organizations don’t want to invest in the hard and vital work of professionally organizing and managing data. AI is making things worse because it is feeding the idea that humans no longer need to worry about how we create and organize… Read More »