The Freud in the machine
Recently, an Irish friend visiting me in Paris said that, though he enjoyed his time in the city, he could never live here. It’s too hectic, he said, two crowded, too cramped.
I often have similar thoughts when I return to Ireland. Not that it is hectic, but that I couldn’t live there anymore. On entering a métro station, seeing the dot matrix display telling me there won’t be a train for another three minutes unleashes in me a reflexive sinking feeling. Imagine how I would now respond to seeing a 20 minute wait for the next Dart. Or being in a part of Dublin without access to the Dart or Luas – which is to say most of it.
And as late as a Paris métro might be, at least it will never be as late as the Dublin metro, which, first announced in 2001 and becoming official policy in 2006, is now surely pushing on being a decade overdue.
I was reminded of all of this, oddly enough, by the data centre issue once again raising its head. For the last few years, data centres have been cast in the role of villains, giant electricity thieves stealing precious juice from the plain people of Ireland.
This week, Tánaiste Micheál Martin said that as a “technology-centred economy” Ireland could not afford a nationwide ban on the building of data centres. Cue another round of complaints that everything in Ireland is organised only in the service of foreign capital (not to mention the more vulgar and worrying online variant of the argument that drops the word ‘capital’ from that particular phrase).
What we say and what we mean
Martin’s comments did not come out of the blue. Figures recently published by the Central Statistics Office indicated that, in 2022, data centres consumed 18% of all electricity metered in Ireland.
Clearly, this is not ideal.
Of course, in reality the data centre power consumption problem, like so many problems in Ireland, is one of underdeveloped infrastructure. I do sometimes wonder if something else is going on, though. Something deeper and more primal. After all, the perennial response to any absent infrastructure in Ireland has been to deny that we ever needed it in the first place.
The author JG Ballard once noted that technology had a Freudian dimension in that we respond to it, and indeed use it, both in conscious and subconscious ways. Speaking to the gloomy but interesting philosopher John Gray, Ballard said that technology was “always a facilitator, not only of the manifest content – the obvious message when you pick up a telephone or use a fax machine or send an e-mail – but also of the latent message”.
Rather than the medium being the message, as Marshall McLuhan had it, then, the message contains, encoded within it, this latent message – and according to Ballard it was often a message of anxiety.
“On the superficial level, aircraft are crossing the skies taking tourists to holiday destinations, e-mails are sending messages all over the world, cars are rolling down superhighways. But there is a secret, latent world where all kinds of ancient human anxieties and dreams are stirring constantly and the danger is that we don’t recognise it,” he said.
As the gloss has come off of the shiny technoworld promised by the prophets of Silicon Valley and their courtiers in politics and think tanks, the very idea of liberation by technology has come to seem laughable. At the same time, Ireland has plunged itself in an entirely avoidable housing crisis that is transforming every disagreement in society into a zero sum game as if we are all sat at opposite ends of a see-saw.
The fact is that Ireland, like any country, is capable of building the infrastructure to generate and distribute the power necessary to meet all of our needs, including processing the data that we generate by communicating, working, posting on Twitter, streaming music, films and television programmes, and everything else that we do online. That data centres are using so much of our power speaks to a failure of planning and, frankly, political imagination. But that is not really my point here.
The rest of us, our own imaginations continue to run riot, as human imaginations always do. It’s little wonder that data centres are copping the blame, acting as giant signifiers of our very human hopes being dashed against the rock of banal reality and an uncaring universe.
In the meantime, these giant digital repositories of anxieties and dreams will be there, lying just below the surface of our words as we express, explicitly or implicitly, the breaking of those dreams into nightmares in the form of our anxiety-laden e-mails, instant messages and social media posts.
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