The Arrow of Innovation and the Wheel of Human Response
A cloud is light and fluffy and beautiful, it can be lonesome in the sky or a totalizing pale expanse. When you approach a cloud it dematerializes, its many tiny water molecules might dampen your skin but you can see and walk directly through it. A data cloud operates in the inverse: when we picture the cloud, we never imagine a physical object, but a collection of messages or fragments of information. It’s only when you approach the cloud, that the material consequences of our ever-expanding digital lives become apparent.
Data centers are the very definition of ‘material’. Thick concrete and steel shells protect arrays of hissing beeping heavy-metal blocks whose boulder-like compositions not only require violent industrial extraction of precious minerals but also immense quantities of water for cooling. They’re often in locations which require being intentionally approached, either in an industrial park or some far-out quasi-arctic location whose general coldness and access to glacial meltwater is optimal for the constant heat and energy expenditure of our growing AI addictions.
It so happens that in day-to-day life, you are likely not to face the cloud as it exits tangibly. Instead, it lives predominantly in our imaginations as a new ‘machine’, far away, in the junkyard we used to call a ‘garden’. Leo Marx describes the pastoral ‘middle landscape’ as a reaction to the emerging technologies of the industrial age; therefore, having since entered the information age, we might consider a new pastoral. While the pastoral of the industrial age materialized in a new set of standard built environments which became conduits or ‘stages’ for corporate control and the capitalist shepherd, in today’s information age, emerging technologies deployed within our existing environments now have the capacity to be the ‘pastor’.
In 2014 the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands in collaboration with the TU/e Intelligent Lighting Institute won the Don Berguijs Award (or national safety prize) for a project deployed on the Stratumseind called ‘De-escalate’. Eindhoven tactically embeds interactive AI lighting within street-lights and hitched to telephone poles and store-fronts. Operating as an implanted urban regulator in a sense, this system of intelligent camera and lighting nodes surveils behavior on the street, and reacts accordingly by dimming, brightening, changing color or temperature to ‘reduce aggression and manage the atmosphere’. This system is presented as ‘depoliticised’; intended to reduce the need and frequency of police intervention. However, it is exactly this design intent which necessitates inherent programmatic bias and is therefore an illusion of neutrality.
In this case, obedience and conformity to norms of ideal behavior are not merely encouraged but decided by the environment. In “Smart Cities and the Architecture of Security”, Marc Schuilenburg and Rik Peeters describe that “the pastor must really take charge of and observe daily life in order to form a never-ending knowledge of the behaviour of the flock”, something which has only become possible in today’s age of data collection and surveillance. While traditionally the boundaries of what is allowed and desirable are written and advised, here the conduct of individuals is actively managed within those boundaries. The question is then, as put by Foucault: “who will be the pastor – in what form, with what rights, and in order to do what?”
Perhaps then our erroneous primary conception of the cloud as immaterial is not so misguided – it’s quite difficult to point to and identify a cloud that you are actively enveloped by. If the pastoral was an aesthetic reaction to machines in the garden where industrial development was reframed as natural and harmonious, what will be our reaction to AI and surveillance in the city? And how might we be manipulated by an illusion of free will?
