The public fascination with the possibilities of a better tomorrow animates domains of inquiry within the technological realm, opening up spaces of debate and discussions. They praise planetary scale computation for its ease of use, but convenience comes with a lot of issues we don’t want to face.

Like all mediations, the Cloud suffers from an inner dialectic. The visual symbolism of the cloud pushes us to think about something lightweight, an innocuous phenomenon moderating the relation between ourselves and our digital production. However, the power used to process all this information leaves behind huge markings on the our surroundings. Indeed intense power and cooling demands of the hardware are serious issues so many organisations have to coping with in order to stay up with the competition.

A revision of all the physical infrastructure that bares the imprint of CC would uncover the vast dichotomy of the new local/global dialectics. Vast data centres will become mammoth facilities on the surface of the earth and not only, using as much electricity as a small town. These farms are part of a world-wide-chain of accidents, all concealed by the promise of commodity.