Cultures of the Cryosphere – Our Complicated Relationship with Artificial Cold

Countries worldwide are experiencing record-breaking temperatures: while Europe is enduring its hottest summer on record in June 2026, India suffered through a severe heatwave with temperatures exceeding 48°C in May. The immediate response to sweltering heat in affected areas has been a rapidly rising demand for cooling technologies, especially air-conditioning.

Although this sudden upsurge in interest in air-conditioning and the normalisation of its adoption has attracted recent media attention, our dependency on cooling technologies has a much longer history, one characterised by continual and progressive uptake. There is now barely a single sector of the economy that does not rely on the application of cooling technologies: from medical services to food production, construction, transportation, and data management, to name but a few. The production and consumption of artificial cold has become a foundational cornerstone of every aspect of contemporary life, and therefore, we argue, of modernity itself.

This ever-growing demand for artificial cold has given rise to a complex, globally distributed, energy-intensive system of cold chains and conditioned environments. Together they constitute a critical infrastructure of our interconnected world – what we refer to as an artificial cryosphere: a temperature-controlled and distributed space without seasons, a “third pole”, as the journalist Nicola Twilley calls it. This globalised network of cooling technologies underpins our daily food supply; it enables us to live and work in hot climates, provides the high-tech materials and machinery for industry, and ensures our supply of medical goods, bio-technical products, and digital services. Despite its ubiquity, most people remain, curiously enough, almost entirely oblivious to its existence, extent, or mode of operation.

Despite its relative perceptual invisibility, artificial cold has changed our world fundamentally. The ability to generate low temperatures has enabled our ways of life to become increasingly independent of the rhythms of nature. Through fridges and freezers, supermarkets and air freight, we have largely deseasonalized our diets. Digital networks – run by huge data centres that consume massive amounts of cooling – have enabled instantaneous communication, the rapid acceleration of analytic computing, and the long-term storage of vast quantities of more or less valuable data. The cryopreservation of body parts and organic substances decouples processes of regeneration and reproduction from the biological time-frames conventionally associated with cell growth, body ageing and generational lineage.

This progressive, insidious reliance on artificial cooling has evolved in a surprisingly unremarked upon way. Cooling is, in many respects, the most taken for granted technology of our age, one that is understood, and not infrequently characterised, as a universal good. Certainly, in this age of increased global warming, many of us would not ever want to do without it again. The levels of comfort and convenience it brings provide too much comfort and pleasure, and our dependence on it runs too deep. Yet, our love affair with artificial cold is at grave risk of becoming a toxic romance, and a reckoning on the price of these cool affordances, it consequently now at hand.

Dangerous Dependences, Excessive Use and Thermal Divides

Some of the earliest indicators of the unsustainability of scaled artificial cold, and of our collective and growing dependence on it, emerged during moments of global crisis. These included unprecedented heatwaves, and catastrophic system failure events within the cryosphere that generated existential threats, including bio-hazards that severely endangered public health and safety.

In 2005, for example, Hurricane Katrina created a power outage in one of the world’s largest cooling centres, New Orleans. This resulted in the spoilage of millions pounds of meat left to warm in unpowered cold stores, a nauseating calamity that created unhygienic misery at an unprecedented scale. In 2011, the breakdown of the Fukushima atomic plant’s cooling systems led to a nuclear meltdown and the radioactive contamination of marine and terrestrial environments and their associated food chains. In the digital economy, business, industries, and finance depend heavily on the smooth functioning of IT ecosystems, which in turn depend to a large extent on uninterrupted cooling of data centres. The significant failure of Google and Oracle’s cloud servers in the London heat wave of 2024 was directly attributed to the malfunction of such cooling systems.

Our dependence on cold chains to provide vital logistical support for health care delivery was also bought into stark relief during the Covid-19 pandemic, when we were reminded that most vaccines require stable cooling. This demonstrated, all too cogently, that the availability, or non-availability, of cooling infrastructure equally determines differential health outcomes for populations around the world, creating very uneven landscapes of care. The availability of cooled spaces and refrigeration technologies is inequitably distributed and highly contested, especially in the global South. Populations here routinely experience ‘thermal violence’ and extreme health risks from global warming. The recent record-breaking heatwave in India and Europe also bought into sharp focus how differential access to space cooling systems can mean the difference between life and death and therefore underpin significant distinctions in related death tolls within, and between, such localities.

Privileged populations have come to perceive the use of artificial cold as essential to the maintenance of their desired ways of life. This, combined with a general lack of awareness of the cost of cold, has contributed to the consumption of cold becoming increasingly mindless and excessive. So obsessed have we become with the urge to cool things that we even chill products that, although promoted as being ‘fresh’ and in need of refrigeration, are in fact, already fully of preservative and shelf-stable. The refrigerated sections of supermarkets have consequently become progressively larger, and are sometimes cooled to such a degree that employees are provided with fleece jackets to decrease workplace discomfort and protect their health, while the general public find them almost intolerable to experience without. The ability to store food using domestic refrigeration has dramatically increased the use of artificial cold over the past century, but has also led to both over-consumption of food and food waste. Moreover, our increasing capacity to datafy all aspects of human life has created an exponential demand for data storage and circulation, giving rise to a massive growth in worldwide data centres over the past decade.

A Chilling Feedback-Loop: The Increasingly Vicious Thermal Cycle

The biggest problem, however, is that this excessive use has led us, unwittingly, into a vicious cycle of cooling and heating. Meeting our increased demands for the cooling of food, space, data and biomedicines, drives up carbon consumption, warms the atmosphere and multiplies further existing cooling needs. For example, while air-conditioning devices cool down the buildings and cars of the affluent, they do so by pumping indoor heat outside, making cities even hotter for everyone not in possession of such devices. As AC devices rely largely on fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses as coolants, their use drives global warming through their additional CO2 emissions. Thus, the more we cool ourselves, the more we heat up our world, the more severe the heat waves, the more global demand for cooling increases.

The impact of this self-reinforcing cycle on energy demand is quite astonishing. Global cooling already accounts for 20 percent of total global energy consumption. Providing cooling for all humans equally would increase demand for cooling five-fold as calculated by the Birmingham Energy Institute already in 2018. This scenario would completely exceed any existing, let alone sustainable, global energy budget. The International Energy Agency warns of an impending global “cold crunch” with potentially cataclysmic consequences.

In a world of rapid and sustained warming, artificial cold makes life on earth tenable. However, it is our very dependency on cooling that poses an equally significant, indeed existential, threat to life – particularly for those least able to protect themselves against the heat. But how can it be that something of such extraordinary significance to all our lives, and with the clear capacity to fatally destabilise our fragile global environment, could have emerged without ever really impinging on human consciousness in a significant way?

Cooling is largely unnoticed… and under-researched

It must be noted that in all of the technological realm, cooling occupies a very curious place. Most of the technologies that have dramatically re-organised human life – from the printing press to automobiles, nuclear power to the internet – have been the subject of sustained social attention, including public debates and controversies. The same cannot be said of the cryosphere. Artificial cooling has somehow crept into our social practices almost without awareness and certainly with little resistance. It has become, since the early 20th century, one of the most pervasive of all modern technologies, it has transformed our relationship to the environment in fundamental and profound ways, yet remains, nevertheless, largely unnoticed, undocumented, under-researched, and certainly under-theorised.

The intellectual lacuna around the key role that cooling technologies play in contemporary life is particularly striking. Most people remain, at least, ‘subconsciously’ aware of our dependence on electricity and water infrastructures, yet cooling seems barely to impinge on human consciousness. In everyday terms, cooling is simultaneously both everywhere, and no-where, all at once. It has become a technology so interwoven with our life-worlds that we barely recognise its presence, functionality, artificiality or our increasing dependency on it. It has simply become part of what we take for granted, our second nature.

Yet, there seems no objective reason why artificial cooling should not be given the same scholarly attention that the introduction of electricity, modern transportation systems, digital technologies, or military-industrial complex have received. Scholars of the social studies of science, technology, social science and the humanities have rightfully contributed considerable attention to theorising the globally extensive cultural revolutions induced by the emergence of nuclear energy in the 1950s and 60s: ‘the atomic age’. Scholars also intensively studied the ‘information society’ brought about by digital networks, and the emergence of the ‘Anthropocene’ – the epoch in which human activity has become the dominant driver of changes to the Earth’s ecosystems. However, so far, we have collectively developed no comprehensive conceptual framework for studying ‘Cultures of Artificial Cold’ or the ‘Age of Cryogenic Cultures’.

What are Cryogenic Cultures?

Building on approaches that emphasise and reflect the diversity of cultural formations and which, more specifically, highlight the interplay between culture and technology, we propose the concept of “cryogenic cultures” as a framework for analysis. While the term ‘cryogenic’ is normally related to the field of low-temperature physics, we deploy the term in the broader sense of its Greek origin (κρύος, ‘cold’). Cryogenic cultures, we suggest, are comprised of the diverse socio-technical ensembles of practices, concepts, values and regulations that deploy cold to maintain life, foster prosperity and growth. Such practices and ideas are simultaneously shaped by, and dependent upon, the use of artificial cold.

Investigating these diverse cultural formations will allow us to establish how, and in what ways, the dissemination of cooling technologies has transformed everyday practices, social orders, normative epistemologies and even the understanding and value of ‘life’ itself; and how, in turn, these cultural conditions continue to orient our global use of cooling technologies.

As the artificial cryosphere is necessarily now a globally expansive phenomenon, its topology is inevitably heterogeneous and splintered, full of “thermal divides”. Historically and geographically differentiated patterns of artificial cold use have created an uneven landscape of cooling, full of holes, fringes and frontiers. Without a thorough understanding of how and why we have differentially adopted cooling technologies, it will prove very difficult, if not impossible, to change our behaviours in relation to them. This lack of homogeneity generates complexity but also provides entry points through which to question the normativity of our embrace of cold, and, more importantly, to identify opportunities through which to imagine how, and in what ways, our future use of cold might be reformulated.

If our relationship with cold is to be re-envisaged, undertaking a comprehensive analysis of the cultural dynamics driving our unsustainable use of artificial cooling is vital. We begin by posing a number of core questions: Why is our consumption of cold increasing as rapidly as it is? How is this consumption distributed globally? Do we need to cool everything as excessively as we do? Why and how did our collective love affair with cold turn into a toxic romance that threatens our very existence? And what possible alternatives to the overuse of artificial cooling should we (re)consider? Might we keep ourselves cool, but differently?

From Technological Fix to Cultural Transformation

To avert the emerging cooling crisis, we will need technological innovations and improvements for sure. But these alone will not suffice. As we were reminded during the Covid-19 pandemic, social solutions to material problems can be adopted in different ways – or not at all. While the desire to respond affirmatively to the call for better cooling technologies and fairer access to them is understandable, this simple technical fix will lead only to tragedy on a collective level if we mobilise it unthinkingly.

Addressing, and ideally remedying, our over-consumption of cold is a complex task that closely parallels the challenges we face as a planetary collective in tackling global warming. The solution to global warming is not shrouded in mystery: massively reducing global use of technologies that run on carbon. And yet, even though such technological fixes were long ago identified, millions of the world’s inhabitants remain deeply resistant to their implementation. Just as vaccines present safe solutions to exposure to some of the world’s deadliest pathogens, their use is still rejected by those who remain sceptical about their derivation or effects.

Understanding and managing our relationship with cooling technologies presents similar challenges. Changing lifestyles that depend on constant, ubiquitous availability—whether digital or material—will prove difficult. Transforming our built environment to reduce cooling demands will prove even more challenging. We need architectural forms and urban designs that enable liveable temperatures without air conditioning. Humanity has developed such solutions over millennia, yet we have abandoned, forgotten, or suppressed them as unmodern. Many may prove prescient (again).

It would be sensible however, to expect strong cultural resistance to the changes in lifestyle necessary to reduce our dependence on carbon dependent forms of artificial cold. Reorienting urban planning, food systems, and utility infrastructure requires substantial investments as well. Beyond funding, psychological and cultural barriers may arise and persist. Our attachment to cooling may intensify as the planet heats up. The excessiveness of cooling suggests here an even deeper cultural pattern: using artificial cold to insulate ourselves—both literally and figuratively—from the looming global crisis.

An Invitation to Cryocultural Studies

Under the pressure of a running heatwave, it seems, we become gradually more aware of what our embrace of cold technologies will likely mean. In view of the impending economic, ecological and social problems that will – and already do – arise in relation to their use, it is becoming a practical and political imperative to both acknowledge identify and disrupt our increasing dependency on artificial cold and its ever-accelerating demand for carbon dependent energy supplies.

We believe that a new field of Cryocultural Studies can break new scientific ground by integrating different disciplinary approaches, new research perspectives and methods, and applying them to the study of this emergent field of research, that is clearly of critical planetary importance.

Luckily, recent years have seen increased scholarly interest in several specific aspects of hot and cold. Studies in the ice humanties explore humanity’s relationship with natural formations of frozen water. Largely focussing on heat, emerging fields such as Critical Heat Studies or Critical Temperature Studies elucidate how thermal processes shape societal dynamics. Studies on cryopolitics conceptualize cold as a biopolitical means for governing populations and life processes. These studies and research strands provide invaluable, and detailed insights into particular aspects of cold. An overarching account of the social and cultural contours of artificial cooling as a now globally extensive phenomenon is still missing.

Establishing this field of research will provide novel insights into a hitherto under-researched problem of increasing social and ecological significance. We envision that the knowledge gathered here will serve as the basis for future re-orientations of our relationship with artificial cold and better inform decision making regarding the use of cooling technologies across the globe.

We invite all researchers who find this call resonant to work with us to define and cultivate this new field of inquiry. We hope that together, we can provide not only a first theorization of a key 21st century phenomenon and a new field of knowledge, but also potential answers to this emergent global crisis – the unsustainable use of artificial cold.

—

Alexander Friedrich (Technical University of Darmstadt, Corresponding Principal Investigator)

Stefan Höhne (KWI – Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen, Principal Investigator, )

Bronwyn Parry (Australian National University, Canberra, Principal Investigator,

Suzana Alpsancar (Paderborn University, Principal Investigator)