Computing (Data Centers) / °CryoCultures

Case Study: Computing

Data and a transition to digitalization is often imagined to be an ecological triumph, but it relies upon data centers. Every bit of immaterial data computed produces heat: cooling is up to 40% of the electricity costs. The digital is cryogenic.

Digitalization is often appealed to as a tool to meet sustainability goals, via solutions such as remote working or optimizing global logistics. It also dramatically increases energy demands due to cooling requirements, especially in big data centers where around 30 percent of the energy used is for cooling. Demand for such data centers skyrocketed in recent years due to the rapid growth of cloud computing and machine learning. While data centers are perceived as a key technology for ensuring our digital future, they are also increasingly contested sites of environmental injustice and struggles.

We map the historical spread of data centers, reconstructing the history of their cooling demand and their projected growth.

A strong focus lies on critically examining how attempts to optimize cooling technology create new cooling demands and it questions the sustainability of these approaches. From a philosophy of technology perspective, we ask how such cooled infrastructures relate to cultural expectations and desires of constant availability of information and data as well as goods and services in general.

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Beef has been a paradigmatic cryogenic object since at least the late 19th century cold storages and meatpacking industry of Chicago. Today, beef is global, relying on resource-intensive cold chains that make this once rare commodity into a regular part of diets in almost every country in the world.

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Space Cooling Air-conditioning units

Air-conditioning is an unevenly distributed resource of comfort. Whether in an overload of air-conditioning units exasperating heat island effects in cities, or the transformation of normative ideas around freshness or productivity, our planet is increasingly engineered around thermal comfort.

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Biomedicine Cryobanks

Cryobanks store bioresources at temperatures that are cool and constant. From human oocytes to bull semen, from vaccines to viruses, a complex logistical infrastructure of cold underpins our food supply, medical services and biotechnical research.

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