The Pulse of the Data Centre: AI, Emotions, and Planetary Destruction by Mél Hogan When I began researching and writing about data centres in 2012, I did so because they seemed like a good space to continue my thinking about memory and archives – two themes I’d explored in grad school. After all, data centres are huge warehouses that hold data, so whether as a ‘medium’, or as a problematic conceptualization of ‘the archive’, they compelled me. But it was also a perhaps-unconscious move away from the kind of archival work I’d been, which was personal, queerly-oriented, and emotionally draining because of its social justice components. The data centre, in contrast, seemed affectless – I thought it wouldn’t ask too much of me. I was wrong. A decade into this project, the data centre remains an uncomfortable site of research – not affectless as I’d hoped but rather frightening in scale and significance. Research into data centres requires a constant sense of adventure, to get inside, to understand first-hand the spaces that house data, and to grapple with the overwhelming momentum they create for thinking about the future of humans (and humanity) in relation to the data we generate. Ten years ago, there were news stories about internet infrastructure, covering both the economic promise of data centers and concerns in how they were replacing other types of industry. But it took almost a decade for these stories to make headlines and ignite public concern about their role in radically transforming political, societal, and environmental spheres. Today, it’s not uncommon to overhear casual discussions about the political and environmental impacts of technology, of the internet specifically, while we rely on it more than ever. As with most technology, the discursive unearthing of the data centre serves as a kind of focal point for expressing both societal hype and anxiety through the various meanings everyday people make of it. What does the data centre mean to the masses? How do we imagine the data centre and the role it plays in society? In this sense, the data centre isn’t just a repository of data that makes a globally wired planet possible, it’s also a social infrastructure that takes on new significance, especially in times of political unrest and climate catastrophe. In mainstream media and popular representations, more computational power generally gets equated with visions of progress for humanity. With this kind of reasoning, we might think that technology is our best bet for fixing problems, such as salvaging the environment or fighting fascism. But the opposite is proving to be truer. If we counter the idea that the data centre is a kind of hopeful technological object, we see that it enables and exacerbates what is already here and evidences the dramatic splintering between those in control of the industry and the rest of us, subject to its consequences. Specifically, as the imaginary of the internet moves from already-complex forms of communication (social media, financial trading, genomics, 1