Data That Chills

by KENIA D. HALE 

I don’t remember life before the DataDucts. I remember staring into their vast openness as a kid, the day my cousins dared me to toss coins and paper clips down them to listen to the echoes below. We were fascinated by the incessant whirring, the blinking lights, the warm air that blew almost ceaselessly from their dark interiors. The duct in our home was inscribed with the DataCorp slogan: “Waste Nothing. Efficiency Always.”[1]

I stared into the vast darkness, the warm air drying my skin and blowing back the barrettes on my twists. And I dropped in two pennies, their plinks reverberating against the metal infrastructure below. I turned to look at my cousins, who stared back at me with wide eyes, a mix of awe and worry on their brows. We’d been forbidden to mess with the ducts by our parents, warned of consequences if we did.

But soon the worry passed, and we got back to running and playing around the house. Thus, when our front door was met with two short knocks, I didn’t think once about my earlier actions. But when my mom opened the door to two hulking Data Operators outside, my heart plunged to my stomach.[2] My mother shooed us into the nearby bedroom, whispering for me to lock the door behind us.

As kids, we used to speculate that Data Operators (aka Data Opps) were robots. The way we could never see their eyes through their blue tinted glasses, the way they always walked perfectly straight, always in pairs, always with guns.[3] “They ain’t robots—they’re just humans who feel like they’re better than us because they’re the only ones that get jobs from that DataCorp contract!” my grandma would yell from the other room. “They ain’t robots yet but trust—the moment DataCorp can figure out how to automate their jobs, they’ll be looking for work down that Data Hole like the rest of us.” That’s what my grandma calls the DataDucts, says they sucked the life out of our town, even though their only function is to blow warm air.

Now, my cousins and I pushed our ears against the door to listen—we’d never seen a Data Operator this close before, much less heard them speak. We heard their muffled monotone voices through the door: “We’ve received reports of foreign materials dropped into your DataDucts.”

Mama, her voice strong despite her nerves, responded, “Yes, that was me. I dropped a pin in there while sewing something, I’m sorry.”

“Hopefully we don’t need to remind you of the charges for tampering with a DataDuct. Vandalism, Public Health Endangerment, Child Abuse, the punishments for which are compounding and severe.”

My mother’s voice lowered in response, though I couldn’t hear her answer over the sound of my own heartbeat.

“Remember,” the Data Opps said, seemingly in departure, “Data keeps us safe. Data keeps us warm. We are nothing without data.” They repeated a common DataCorps saying in unison, no doubt having had practice from harassing other families.

I thought I could hear my mother’s sigh of relief when they closed the door behind them, only to realize the sigh was mine. After a beat, my mother’s voice sounded from the other room. “Y’all can come out,” she said through the door. My cousins and I made our way out of the room, eyes downcast. Wordlessly, my mom shuffled my cousins and I out of the heat of the apartment, down the stairs, and into our old truck. I watched my city fly by as we drove in silence. She parked in the DataMart parking lot, left the car running with us inside while she walked into the store. She came out with a bag and didn’t say a word as she drove my cousins home.

“Oooooh, you in troubleeee,” my cousin Cam whispered in my ear. I stuck my tongue out at her, but I felt the pit in my stomach deepen the longer my mother went without speaking. I’d never seen her so somber.

When we got home after dropping my cousins at their house, Mama sat me down in the living room. She revealed her new purchase to me—a DataCorp™ DataDuct Cover. It was nothing more than an overpriced and overhyped Tupperware top, but it was the only thing that could conform to the exact shape of the vent without blocking the airflow. I’d seen the commercials and knew how expensive these covers were, how much of a strain something like this must have put on our budget. “Kadijah,” she said to me, “You know better than to mess with the ducts.” I held the installation instructions, handed my mom the screwdriver and assorted parts when she asked for them. We said nothing more, working together silently over the soft sounds of my grandma’s Anita Baker record in the next room. Never again did I drop things into the ducts, and the heat reached into our home undisturbed.

My dad told me that Cleveland was one of the first pilot programs for the ducts outside of Northern Europe. There, they’d had such success in Stockholm and other places throughout Scandinavia, heating whole apartment complexes.[4] Cleveland had vied for and received the DataCorp contract, which promised to bring thousands of jobs by revitalizing Cleveland’s energy use. Downtown Cleveland, with its old steel mills, abandoned factories, and warehouses polluting Lake Erie seemed like the perfect place to build. They reused old buildings, converting them to data farms. The local energy worker unions protested the privatization of the utility, but to no avail. The DataCorp Cleveland Revitalization Plan was instituted, and those workers were laid off.

My dad had been a builder on the project, back when the DataCorp promised to create thousands of jobs throughout the city. Though his work had been mostly based on the structure of the buildings, he described to me how he’d snuck inside to explore the data centers on his break. “Imagine long rooms full of blinking lights, Ja,” he described to me when I was younger. “Imagine a huge maze full of rows and rows of tall bookshelves of blinking lights. It feels cool and dry, and it’s LOUD.”

When I tried to imagine it, the only image I could draw up was a storage unit, like the one my mom had at the time. I used to run around while my mom rifled through our unit, through the things we couldn’t fit into Grandma’s house once we moved into our shared bedroom. The hallways of the unit were motion-sensored, the corridors dark and silent while I rode my bike through the eerily empty building. The dark hallways were terrifying, and I shuddered at the thought that our heat came from such an eerie place. Did the blinking lights look like eyes in the darkness?

We’d been taught DataCorp history in school too. Data centers, where all of our streaming and computational data is fed through servers, get really hot from all that processing. Our teacher always joked at this part in the lesson. “Interestingly,” Mr. Johnson would say, “the ‘cloud’ really was creating weather—lots of hot air!” [5] Back in the day, the hot air was thrown out as waste, and the centers used even more energy using fans and cold water to cool the servers down. Meanwhile, the heat throughout our city was provided mostly through gas.

This was where DataDucts came in. When DataCorp figured out how to distribute waste heat through the DataDucts, they took down two birds with one stone. With Cleveland as a perfect test site, they could funnel in cool water from Lake Erie to cool the centers, then use that now-heated water to distribute heat throughout the city.[6] They could use less energy trying to cool the data centers down, and make money selling the heat while reducing waste.

After first installing DataDucts, DataCorp received huge wads of cash from the United Nations and the World Bank. Their CEOs were on the cover of Time, lauded as the new Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or some other rich white man I couldn’t remember the name of.

Through this model, the CEOs of DataCorp were lauded as heroes, philanthropists. This characterization has always been interesting to me considering how often they refuted this claim early on. In a research paper for history class, I found an interview that one of the CEOs did before the Cleveland deal. “It’s not philanthropic, we’re not running a charity here!” he says in the clip, slapping his knee while the other men in the interview laugh. “We’re processing people’s data and selling it back to them. It’s a business model, a compounding, infinitely growing income.”[7]

This infinite growth is created by our data quotas; to generate enough heat to run our homes, we have to stream and use our devices almost twenty-four hours a day.[8] Most people just leave their TVs on while they’re at work. Grandma Jewel and my mom are in constant battle over our household quota—every day, Mama turns on all the TVs in the house, and throughout the day, Grandma Jewel turns all of them off one by one. “Zero waste my ass,” my grandma begrudges. “In my day we could just turn our devices off, could put on a heater. The way they got us all connected, we got no option BUT to always stream more. How is that efficient? This is exactly what they wanted—to trap us in this cycle, make us all a part of this grid.”

Besides maintaining our quota, part of my chores also included maintaining the duct itself.[9] After school, I often found myself cleaning our duct, recalibrating it, or sending debug statistics to the DataCorp. Thankfully, my Uncle Man taught me the maintenance before he left for St. Louis. He’d been a data center technician when DataCorp first arrived, going from house to house checking on people’s ducts when requested, taking analytics back to the data centers or the DataCorp headquarters. But as more and more households installed the ducts, DataCorp decided that it would be more efficient to have users self-report instead of maintaining paid staff to do so.[10] So my uncle got laid off within the first two years of his position, could no longer afford to live in the city with the rising price of living. He comes to visit from St. Louis sometimes, but I can tell how much Grandma Jewel misses her son.

Grandma Jewel used to talk to me about these things a lot when she would watch me after school, though Mama implored me to never repeat what I heard at home back to my classmates. I knew my mom agreed with Grandma Jewel, but she did what she needed to do to keep us safe and warm. Their shared stubbornness sometimes seemed like the most similar thing about them. As for me, I usually just contributed by using social media and sometimes gaming with friends. I always wondered what this meant for people who didn’t have Internet connections, or TVs, or cell phones. Did they get access to the same heat we did? And how did they meet their data quotas?

There were some families who didn’t have DataDucts period—you could see them shivering in their homes, through grimy windows during harsh Lake Erie winters. My grandma used to watch the Willis kids down the street while their parents worked. When asked, she claimed the kids kept her active, but we knew she couldn’t stand to see those babies cold during snowy days. When DataCorp’s first DataDucts came out, many people tried to stick with space heaters or gas-powered radiators. But someone doxed a bunch of these families online, and some newer environmental groups (who list DataCorp as their top sponsors) protested outside these houses almost 24-7.[11] Data Opps didn’t participate in these protests, but they didn’t stop them either. They often stood right outside the protest, watching.[12]

DataCorp commercials always portrayed these families as backwards, accusing them of being ignorant climate change apologists.[13] They always forgot to mention the natural gas and coal shoveled in to power the DataCorp data centers in the first place.[14] The smell of the smog nestles itself into the sidewalks, and I’ve lost count of how many of my neighbors have asthma. Some nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I used to stay up listening to Grandma Jewel’s heavy breathing from the next room over, my heart jumping with every hitch in her breath. DataCorp always promised to make charitable donations to Cleveland, to support green energy initiatives, but I think it’s all for show. I heard the CEOs don’t even pay taxes, so I’m sure our breathing problems don’t matter to them.

Meanwhile, in the commercials, the DataDuct users were portrayed as sleek, modern, efficient.[15] One of the “real, satisfied customers” was always on there gushing. My friends and I loved to imitate the commercials with overexaggerated voices.

“It doesn’t make any noise like my old radiator! It’s completely silent!” My friend Devonté always did the voices perfectly, and we would all fall into a fit of giggles. “I’m so glad I’m not POOR like everyone originally from this city, that my DataDuct cleared my skin and that the government can listen to my conversations through the pipes! I think everyone could benefit from a DataDuct, no matter if you’re black, white, green, purple, or polka-dotted!” At this point we were usually rolling on the floor with laughter, and Devonté would bring it home. They would turn to us straight on, like the customers always did as the music swelled towards the end of the ad. Devonté would mimic throwing long hair behind their shoulder, and say, dead-eyed, “It’s our duty as good data citizens.”

This was one of DataCorp’s other favorite taglines: “Be a good data citizen.” The people from the testimonials—the good data citizens—always looked like one of those new transplant types, the ones that moved to the city after the tech boom. They probably never had old radiators like us—they probably lived in one of the new high-rises downtown, the expensive ones completely decked out with DataDucts.[16] Every once in a while, they would have a local politician or performer on the commercials—“Pandering!” Grandma Jewel always yelled at the TV. Sometimes, my friends and I would drive to Edgewater Park near downtown. From the highway, you could see the lights of all the new apartment buildings, in every window screens flashing with light. It reminded me of the way my dad described the Data Centers—long rows of flashing lights, processing constant flows of data.

Because DataCorp essentially chased all energy providers out of town, Data Opps had the power to determine which buildings to heat, and which to leave cold.[17] Mama’s fight to use DataDucts to heat the community greenhouse was an uphill battle, with DataCorp arguing that the garden’s business model wasn’t sustainable, that Mama wouldn’t gain enough profit for the garden to be a viable investment. Plus, they reasoned, the garden contributed to urban sprawl, thus contributing to climate change. This didn’t align with DataCorp’s good data citizen framework. They suggested Mama direct folks who depended upon that garden to shop at Data Foods, Data Corp’s grocery store chain, instead.[18]

My friend Kaya used to work there, complained about low pay and awful hours.[19] She held one meeting at her apartment with a few coworkers, the possibility of unionizing simply a whisper caught on lips.[20] The next day, all of them received a letter hand-delivered by Data Operators detailing their termination.

The day Kaya tells us she’s been fired, Devonté and I go to her apartment to cheer her up. When we arrive, movies and snacks in hand, we find her bundled in a pile of covers on her couch. She’s still pissed, a few tears staining her cheeks when we walk in. “I swear they must have been listening through these damn vents,” she sniffles in greeting. “Why else do they send damn Data Opps after us if we so much as breathe wrong in the direction of a DataDuct?”

“Well hello to you too, miss thing,” I respond, joining her on the couch and supplying tissues from my purse. “But forreal, I’m sorry about the job.” I put my arm around her, rubbing her back.

“Well you know what they say . . .” responds Devonté, putting on their best robotic Data Opps impression. “We are all important nodes in the DataCorp Network.”

“If we’re so important, then how come it feels like we don’t get shit in return? They say DataCorp belongs to the people—but then why do we pay for heat generated by data we create by streaming? Shit doesn’t make any sense.” Kaya slouches further into her couch in a huff.

“It’s like my grandma always says—DataCorp has us stuck in a loop—we keep producing and they keep getting the money.”

“Mama Jewel is always spitting facts,” Devonté shouts from the kitchen, bringing a bowl of popcorn into Kaya’s living room. “Plus, at the rate global warming is moving, we’re not gonna need their damn heat soon anyway.[21] That’s why I’m studying environmental studies at OSU next year—we need to get this shit under control, and these companies don’t give a fuck about us.”

“And the crazy thing is,” Kaya quips, feeding into Devonté’s sentence, “even if DataCorp didn’t burn all that coal on the West Side to keep those data centers running, even if they actually followed up on their promises to contribute to green infrastructure, that company STILL wouldn’t be shit.” She sat up a bit, her eyes on fire. “The way they treat us workers, long hours, little pay, no benefits. And they say it right there in the motto: ‘Waste Nothing. Efficiency Always.’ Shit is a scam.”

“It makes you wonder what they define as ‘waste,’ and who this ‘efficiency’ is meant to benefit. When my mom wants to use DataDucts for the community garden, she’s shut down. Never mind that Mrs. Johnson down the street doesn’t have a car to get to a damn Data Foods, or that the Williams family can’t afford it. Never mind that the garden collects compost from every house in this neighborhood.” I think about my mother’s struggle, my grandma’s wisdom, my uncle’s memory, my friend’s job. “The wellness of our community is wasteful and inefficient in their book. And that’s the shittiest truth of all.” My voice has risen to a shout.

We quiet for a moment, sitting in our collective rage. A tree outside Kaya’s window waves in the breeze, the snow on its branches dropping to the ground below. It feels good to hold this anger together, to release it into the room like breath. Funnily enough, I feel warmer for it, our connection warming a part of me the DataDucts will never reach.

I slip into a reverie. What could a future of actual collective data ownership look like? One that ensured my mom’s garden, my uncle’s and Kaya’s jobs, Grandma Jewel’s health? Where we weren’t just nodes on a distributed system, but an actual data community? Was such a thing even possible? Or, like Grandma Jewel said, would it be better to just shift the way we do things entirely, decrease our data use altogether?

Then suddenly, two sharp knocks at the door startle us from our peace. I look to Kaya and Devonté in alarm. Devonté looks at Kaya with a question mark on their face. Was she expecting anyone else? Kaya shakes her head, No. The knocks come again, sharper this time. A chill descends upon us, despite the incessant whirring of the heat. Kaya glances back at her DataDuct in apprehension. The lights on the duct blink back at us like eyes.

Works Cited

Biba, Erin. “The City Where the Internet Warms People’s Homes.” BBC Future, 17 Oct. 2017, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171013-where-data-centres-store-info---and-heat-homes.

Roberts, David. “Amazon’s Seattle Campus Is Using a Data Center Next Door as a Furnace. It’s Pretty Neat.” Vox, 22 Nov. 2017, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/22/16684102/amazon-data-center-district-heating.

Streitfeld, David. “How Amazon Crushes Unions.” The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html.

Velkova, Julia. “Data That Warms: Waste Heat, Infrastructural Convergence and the Computation Traffic Commodity.” Big Data & Society, Dec. 2016, doi:10.1177/2053951716684144.

Notes

[1] “Amazon was founded on notions of speed, efficiency and hard work—lots of hard work. Placing his first Help Wanted ad in 1994, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, said he wanted engineers who could do their job ‘in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.’” (Streitfeld)

[2] “In the case of waste heat, its conversion into a raw material of value could not happen at once. An important step in the process was the phase when data centre infrastructure operators constructed ‘the cloud’ and themselves as powerful nodes on which the digital economy depends.” (Velkova 5)

[3] “[Decentralizing and valorizing waste heat] introduces a new degree of ephemerality to ‘the cloud’. Its materiality and workings are veiled in a new degree of abstraction that is ever harder to locate. With materiality reconfigured data centre service workers redefined . . . the data centre rises in power and veils itself in deeper opacity.” (Velkova 7)

[4] “Various major Stockholm data centres take part, and the number is growing as more businesses look to bolster climate conscious reputations, and make money from a new business model.” (Biba)

[5] “While providing cloud services online, [data center company] Bahnhof also created a visible cloud of steam in central Stockholm, which for years was a cause of anxiety for citizens. In a 2015 press release, the company explained that the cloud of steam was generated by its underground servers. It also announced its new project to eliminate the visually disturbing sight of the steam cloud by routing heat into the pipes of the district heating system in this part of Stockholm (Bahnhof, 2015b).” (Velkova 5)

[6] “Here’s how it works most of the time in Stockholm: cold water feeds through pipes into the data centre, where it’s used to create the cold air they blow on their servers to keep them from overheating. The water, which has been heated by the cooling process, then runs back out of the pipes and into Fortum’s plants where it is distributed for heating.” (Biba)

[7] “‘It’s not philanthropic,’ says Mats Nilsson Hahne, the company’s head of business development. Quite the contrary, says Peder Bank, managing director of the company’s Nordic arm, ‘We’re trying to turn it into a secondary business.’” (Biba)

[8] “The production of content does not directly heat the living space, but it supplies the network with more data, a justification for such infrastructure to be built at the first place.” (Velkova 7)

[9] “More importantly though, the members of the household are made involuntarily into service staff that can observe and report the physical attributes of the heater, push buttons or carry out hard reboot of the server if requested, in the case of malfunction, or need of repair.” (Velkova 7)

[10] “These services are normally provided by dedicated staff at the data centre, but in Qarnot’s configuration there is no need for such paid labour. There is also no central space in which such labour could potentially work. Data furnaces installed in private living spaces fiscally devalue the work of data centre maintenance.” (Velkova 7)

[11] “Not least, it can help bring attention to a new commodity that the data industry creates, that of computation traffic, while neutralising external criticism by reframing data production as environmentally responsible and necessary for everyone’s well-being.” (Velkova 5)

[12] “Rather than an image of powerful actors who change our epistemological orientation in the world, the operators of data centres are redefined culturally into providers of desired infrastructures that are needed for a sustainable, fossil-free future.” (Velkova 7)

[13] “In effect, data production becomes connected with imaginaries of an environmentally responsible global citizenship and illustrates how infrastructures can produce specific citizens (Larkin, 2013; Von Schnitzler, 2008), who have to keep creating data for the improvement of everyone’s well-being.” (Velkova 8)

[14] “Valorising waste heat arguably integrates the data centre industry with the energy sector. Yet, this integration does not happen by generating truly green energy. Even if the data industry claims to be an active agent against global warming that reduces its carbon footprint by creating infrastructural loops of renewable heat, none of the approaches discussed in this article provide an actual alternative to polluting energy sources that power data centres with electricity, such as coal. Rather, the data centre industry relies on the existing sources of power available in each specific location, and these can differ substantially.” (Velkova 8)

[15] “Such an aestheticised waste heat can provide residents with a sense of pleasure and evoke feelings of progress, of belonging to the future and of giving meaning to what it is to be a responsible producer of big data.” (Velkova 7)

[16] “Stockholm Data Parks is expecting to generate enough heat to warm 2,500 residential apartments by 2018, but the long term goal is to meet 10% of the entire heating need of Stockholm by 2035.” (Biba)

[17] “The future of Bahnhof is one of intervening in the energy politics of the Swedish capital through computing data and providing heating with it, attempting to eliminate older forms of energy supply and convert the data centre into an essential energy provider.” (Velkova 6)

[18] “Whatever its other sins, Amazon has shown itself willing to make patient investments; that’s why it keeps growing but never makes much profit. It invests for the long term. Almost more than anything, it is that mentality—the willingness to sink upfront investment into long-term savings—that can move corporations (and society) toward sustainability. For that reason alone, I hope this project pays off for Amazon. And I hope Amazon carries the lesson over to its next headquarters.” (Roberts) Comments like these reify this image of companies like Amazon as being green and thus good for the future by uncritically supporting their hegemony and their right to exist, instead of questioning why we need more Amazon factories (and thus, more Amazon power) in the first place. By investing in green corporate infrastructure, like waste heat remediation, Amazon cements itself into a neoliberal eco-capitalist future.

[19] “Retail giant Amazon has a rather mixed reputation among progressives, to say the least. There are ongoing debates about its labor practices and its ruthless competitive tactics . . . Putting those broader disputes aside, there is one area where the company is making substantial and undeniable progress. . . . Amazon has recently moved aggressively toward corporate sustainability.” (Roberts)

[20] “Amazon managers openly warned recruits that if they liked things comfortable, this would be a difficult, perhaps impossible, job. For customer service representatives, it was difficult to keep up, according to media accounts and labor organizers. Overtime was mandatory. Supervisors sent emails with subject headings like ‘YOU CAN SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE DEAD.’” (Streitfeld)

[21] “But it shouldn’t be seen as a panacea either. Bo Normark, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and a smart grid advisor to a slew of green energy companies, cautions that he believes Sweden’s programme might not be infinitely scalable. Eventually the country won’t need more data centres to join in. ‘People are overestimating the need for heat. We will have a surplus of heat.’” (Biba)