38. Cloud Ecologies with Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
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Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:00:00]:
Both Google and Microsoft have documented a significant increase in water usage. So Microsoft case it's 34%. In Google's case, it's 20%. And this is incredibly concerning because in the US, about 20% of data centers are located in water stressed or water distressed locations. And so what comes to be important for me is this question of what is important to us? What is more important to us? Water for crops for raising food, or water to cool tech.
Mizter Rad [00:00:38]:
Welcome to the Mister Rat show, where I talk to the most interesting global personalities about the future of humanity. Hello, beautiful humans. This is your host, Mister Rad. And today we have a truly fascinating guest joining us. Our guest today is Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, who is renown for his work on the environmental impact of data centers and his innovative approaches and ideas to eco friendly data management. Now, the problem Steven is tackling is one of immense significance. The rapidly growing ecological footprint of our digital infrastructure. And today, Steven will shed light on the cutting edge technologies and policies that can transform data management as we know it, making it more sustainable and less harmful for our planet.
Mizter Rad [00:01:41]:
I find it crazy that still in the second decade of the 21st century, we still think that using a tablet over a piece of paper is always more eco friendly, when in reality, it may be the other way around. Stephen, how are you doing?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:02:03]:
I'm great. I'm great. It's such a pleasure to be on the show, mister. Thank you so much for having me. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation, which I think touches a lot of people's lives, whether they are aware or not.
Mizter Rad [00:02:18]:
Absolutely. By the way, Steven received his PhD from MIT and now is doing his postdoc research at the Fixing Futures Institute from the Gothe university. Is that right, Stephen?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:02:31]:
That's correct.
Mizter Rad [00:02:31]:
And how is your German so far?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:02:33]:
Very bad.
Mizter Rad [00:02:39]:
Okay. That's how you start. It's pretty hard, the language, I have to say, I've been here seven years. I still have trouble. All right, Stephen, when I was preparing for the interview and I was reading about your work and learning about your vision, many times the concept of cloud ecologies came up. What do you mean with cloud ecologies?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:03:01]:
That's a great question. So I think that within this industry of big tech and people who are plugged into data centers and know what they are, and in this whole world, the cloud means a really specific thing. It means a specific scale of technology, a specific scale of infrastructure. But for the everyday person, for people who aren't tech savvy, cloud is kind of a metaphor that refers to our entire information ecology. So when people say they upload something into the cloud, they might think of their files living inside of a server, inside of a data center. But for them, the cloud is also the cables that send the signals under the ocean, the undersea fiber optic network. The cloud might also be the devices themselves that are receiving and transmitting. The clouds might be the cellular towers.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:03:59]:
And so the cloud becomes this vast metaphor that is really hard to pin down where it begins and ends, and that's why it's such a useful metaphor. But contrary to the kind of benign image of a cloud that just is this beautiful thing above us, the information ecology, as I refer to it, is actually very terrestrial and it's very material. So most of these signals are hardwired under the ocean in cables. The data itself lives inside of servers, and there's almost a metabolism to making this all happen, the circulation of energy and water and all these resources to make computation possible. So for me, yes, it's an ecology in that sense. It's an ecology in two senses. It's this vast system that we can't see, that we touch every day, that we interact with, of many different technologies and infrastructures, working together to make the magic of your online experience happen so seamlessly. But it's also this material reality.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:05:07]:
I mean, data seems immaterial, but it's incredibly material in terms of what it's made up of and the kinds of resources that it draws upon every single day.
Mizter Rad [00:05:17]:
And why in the first place, why did you get interested in the topic? Why do you think it's important for humanity to look into this?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:05:28]:
So it occurs to me, being a millennial and kind of being raised in the generation that became associated with things like smartphones and AOL instant messenger and Facebook and the rise of social media and all of this, there was a lot of hope about the future that I grew up kind of really buying into this hope that technology will save us or technology will improve our lives. Technology will level the playing field, and in some ways, it has, right? In some ways, because of this thing called the cloud, people have access to information in a way that they've never had access to. And some of the educational disparities and informational disparities that exist in the world have been significantly addressed. And a lot of people now have a voice or a platform that they can share in communities and networks that they can build. But so it occurred to me as, where is all of this stuff? This was the kind of the question. I was always fascinated with computers as a kid. I used to play with computers and kind of help my father build them. He was one of these eccentric computer nerds in a time when computers were kind of a niche thing that only some hobbyists enjoyed doing.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:06:52]:
And so that really got me really attending to the physical stuff of computers. And so later on, I started to wonder, once these things scaled up, like all of the energy, what is the cost of all of this magical connection that we seem to take for granted, and where is that future from science fiction, that utopic future? Where are we in terms of realizing that? And that was sort of the question that I started to ask, but I was also just kind of generally interested in the human story, because as much as we like the technology, the computers, all of the applications that make our lives so much easier, I was really curious as an anthropologist, because that's what I'm trained as. Who are the people who actually tend to this thing called the cloud? What are they like? What is their day to day life like? That was the other question that animated this interest.
Mizter Rad [00:07:50]:
Why did it become important for you when you started researching on this and trying to find out who were the people working in the cloud? Why did it become, in your mind, an important thing to dig into for.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:08:04]:
Me as an anthropologist, the way that I was trained to think about the world as a kind of, as a plural place, right? And so that, so that we all live in our own worlds, and we have our own set of interests and priorities that are really shaped by the way that we're raised, by what languages we speak, where we're from. But that also is on a micro level, too. You can think of communities, of technicians having a shared culture, and that was something that really fascinated me, being myself somewhat geeky, and then finding in data centers this whole world of symbols and all these behaviors that you might associate not with people who are technicians, but they have superstitions, they have rituals, they have things that they do that they share language, all these terms that they use to refer to tech related phenomenon. So I thought that was really interesting, and that drove me to follow them and try to track and map and understand their world and their point of view, and to understand the pressure that they're under to maintain cloud services, because I think many of us might take for granted how seamless and how well functioning the cloud is. Yes, we sometimes get this message called server unavailable or downtime or something, but it's exceedingly rare, especially today. I think that's not only a testament to the technologies, but it's a testament to the invisible labor of these technicians who are in these data centers day to day, messing with servers, working with air conditioners, crawling into the underfloor of plenums to untangle cables or correct airflows. They're doing all this labor to make this magic of the black box of the cloud happen. I thought it was incredibly important to track that and to tell their story.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:10:03]:
But in so doing, I also learned a lot about the material cost to computation at the scale that we have today.
Mizter Rad [00:10:13]:
Okay, so you talk about computation. When people think about the cloud, I think the general person would think of storage or, you know, Google Drive. Yes, whatever, wherever you store your data on the Internet. But they don't talk about. They don't think about computation. So for you, cloud also is computation. Can you build up on that a bit like, what exactly is the cloud.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:10:41]:
That is so important? The cloud is doing two things for us. When I say cloud, I'm mostly referring to data centers, which are warehouses filled with computers that we are remotely accessing data on a daily basis, and we're remotely accessing them to store information, but also to process information to perform computational work. And that is why today, there is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and its footprint. But artificial intelligence is in the same ecology as data storage. They're all one thing. These are computers that are being used to do things. One of those things, storing information, is less computationally intensive and less resource intensive than doing the processing and calculation and machine learning, and all of these things that are energy intensive, cryptocurrency production being another kind of computationally intensive process. But if we think of all of this within a continuum of computation, I think that gets us a little bit clearer as to what's going on, especially when the Mediaev is talking about artificial intelligence as if it's some separate new infrastructure that's not connected or continuous with what we had before.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:12:03]:
In actuality, it's a scaling up of what we had before, an intensification, a shift in the density of the computational processes.
Mizter Rad [00:12:12]:
And so when you talk about AI and all these new technologies, I'm guessing more data, more computational power is being required for that. And as we grow, as we evolve, as we go into the matrix with more high tech or digital tech as we know it, or maybe we don't know that. We don't know it yet. What are the risks that you see in terms of data storage or data computation that are, or that could happen or could be affecting our lives or, in general, humanity in the next decades?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:12:54]:
This is a great question. So I think that if we look at the past and we look at the trends and how this industry has grown, and what I mean by this industry is the data center industry, but also the tech industry, because they're very connected. Sometimes these companies run their own data centers. Other times they outsource them to bigger companies that do that at scale. And that's what that hyperscale is often referred to as, cloud. But really, the story is a troubling one, in that we know that as of 2022, the International Energy Agency estimated that data centers and the data transmission networks, that collectively they contribute to about 2% of global electricity use. That's something like the equivalent carbon emissions of, say, the airline industry. And this is a very kind of rough estimate, but it's the best estimate that we have because there's not a lot of transparency within the industry, reporting and so forth.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:14:02]:
But what we've seen with artificial intelligence, by the admission of Google and Microsoft and others who have made some information public about things like water use, we know that these numbers are going up at a level that that is consistent with some of the most alarmist critics of this industry. We know that Google has started to release its water footprint after a lot of lobbying by reporters, by activists and others who are demanding to know how much water Google data centers are using to cool their servers. One of the ways that we were able to curb carbon emissions in this industry, not curb them, but to flatten the curve. The industry has grown significantly since 2000, 2015, but the curve of electricity use and carbon emissions has not been as exponential as what some of the worst people feared. And one of the ways.
Mizter Rad [00:14:57]:
Well, that's good news. That's good news, yes.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:15:01]:
One of the ways that that was achieved was by turning to water based cooling solutions. And so that's bad news. And I think making those gains was also aligned with the goals of the companies themselves. Because reducing the amount of electricity that you consume not only is good for the environment, it's good for the wallet, for the pocketbook, because now you're spending less to run your data center, and it's actually a lot cheaper in most cases to use water to cool. And so what we've seen with Google, going back to the AI commentary, so both Google and Microsoft have admitted that from 2021 to 2022, they have, they have documented a significant increase in water usage. So Microsoft case it's 34%. In Google's case it's 20%. And that's alarming, because if this AI boom continues and it continues at a level of exponential growth, we could be looking at a 50% increase in water use over the next five years, or even 100% increase in water use.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:16:11]:
And this is incredibly concerning, because in the US, about 20% of data centers are located in water stressed or water distressed locations, places that are in active drought or are at drought risk. And so what comes to be important for me is this question of what is important to us? What is more important to us? Water for crops, for raising food, or water to cool tech. And that is a question that we're going to have to start to seriously ask and answer. And also, there's the human rights side of this as well. You have Uruguay, you have a data center going in there that is going to consume somewhere between three to 5 million gallons of water a day. And this is a place that's in active drought to the point where the municipal authorities in some cities have been adding chlorides and salt into the water, into the drinking water to extend it, to make it go farther. And here you have a great.
Mizter Rad [00:17:18]:
Sorry, what do you mean with that? Why do they do that?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:17:21]:
In cases where water supplies are stressed? One of the ways that you can kind of extend the water supply is by adding certain chemicals to the water. This is actually not very good for you, for your body, if you've heard of hard water versus soft water. But the point of that being that data centers and the way that computers are designed and run, you can't just put any water in a data center. You have to have, for the most part, water that is potable, that is filtered, that is clean, yes. That is free of corrosive particulates, because if those are run through the system, they can create growth of bacteria.
Mizter Rad [00:18:04]:
They.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:18:04]:
Can actually facilitate the corrosion of racks and so forth. And so any it equipment and all kinds of things. And so the water is also treated and filtered. And so that's, it is directly competing with the water resources of communities for drinking, for agriculture, and for other things. And so I think that's really important to think about as we, as AI expands.
Mizter Rad [00:18:28]:
Okay, so one thing is water. The other thing is electricity. High consumption of water. High consumption of electricity. If a data center would be a human being or a family, they would be one of the most wasting families of electricity and water. What else do data centers consume? Or how else do they, let's say, damage the planet? If you could say like that, yes.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:18:55]:
Yeah, so I think that. Yeah. And just to kind of build on your metaphor, there would be, I mean, the average data center consumes as much electricity as a small city. And so that's also kind of.
Mizter Rad [00:19:09]:
That's quite a lot.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:19:10]:
And I'll add a caveat to that. Data centers vary considerably in terms of scale and size and density, but these are the average. There are just some average numbers out there. And one last thing on electricity, not only are we talking about electricity consumed, that has carbon emissions associated, but also electricity supply itself for a country. So in the case of Ireland, data centers are consuming about 20% of the electricity, the entire country. And so they are competing with. There are other people are competing with data centers for just electricity, for their homes and so forth. Thing to consider is the actual supply, the availability, the capacity of the grid.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:19:53]:
Yeah, I'll say. The other effects of this ecology of computation is the material side. I started talking about how I first became to love computers by building them and working with their components. But many of these components that computers are made out of are rare earth minerals and metals that are difficult to procure, that are currently procured in really abhorrent conditions, where you have so called artisanal mines, where children are going into these really narrow, unsafe passages to try to get cobalt and coltan, all of these different minerals and metals and lithium and so forth. So the ecology of computation is also very material and metal and mineral based. And we can look at the. The conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one example of a conflict that is in part motivated by the supply and availability of these materials that subtend all of computation. So I think that that's important.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:21:03]:
And global. E waste is a huge problem, because these materials are scarce, but they also are toxic in their life cycles. Having worked inside of data centers and been in them, I can tell you I've seen just tons and tons and tons of servers. I myself have helped decommission servers, and we put them on these carts, and we wipe the drives of all their contents, of their information, their data contents, and then they get shipped off to a company to be disposed of in some unknown way. And we know that based on the United Nations e waste monitor, that less than 20% of e waste is actually recycled. And much of it ends up in these kinds of junk graveyards, in places like Ghana or India or China, where there is this whole informal economy that has developed, where people go and actually salvage valuable materials like copper, from these dead computing and electronics components. And the process of actually removing that copper can be very toxic to the people involved, so their bodies, but also the environment, the watersheds, because a lot of it involves burning and smelting and all this. And so this is a whole problem that also is upon us.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:22:31]:
The material components that actually make up cloud.
Mizter Rad [00:22:37]:
Who do you think in the material components, who do you think should be responsible for the whole chain of usage, let's say.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:22:47]:
Well, I think that for one, listeners who have had the history of upgrading their personal devices very frequently should really reconsider that because we now know, based on many lawsuits, one with Apple, one with certain manufacturers of smartphones and other equipment, this obsolescence, this plant, yeah, this fragility of digital equipment is actually designed in. And so that's part of the profit strategy for these companies. And I think the companies need to be held accountable for designing stuff that breaks very quickly, purposefully, so, so that they can reap more profits and contributing to this horrific cycle of conflict, mineral procurement, but also waste on such a scale that we haven't seen before. So whereas many, many older technologies were designed for durability in mind repairability, you see increasingly that many of these newer devices are locked. If you open it, the warranty expires. There's all these ways that they have designed against upgrading and repairing. Of course, there's a lot of resistance to that. I can thank the DIY people and the repair shops who continue to do this, even with the obstacles.
Mizter Rad [00:24:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's definitely fascinating how the industry and the big tech companies are trying to lock in customers all the time and seems to be no way out, unfortunately, even though of course, there's a growth, especially in Germany, I don't know if you've noticed, this DIY community is quite strong in every sense, not just technology, but they like to build their own stuff, furniture, you name it, make their own repairs at home. So DIY community is quite strong here in Germany. But yeah, the strength of the force of the big tech giants is quite heavy. You could remain very unhopeful, let's say, when you look at the three problems that this big data centers have, electricity, water, materials. Is there anything else that we're missing here besides those three things that we mentioned?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:25:19]:
So another less well known phenomena that I've tracked in my research is the proliferation of noise as a result of data centers. Interesting one is a somewhat unknown and unexpected consequence of the way that data centers are sometimes built and cited and located and so forth. In particular, I spent time in Chandler, Arizona, where Osiris, one data center was creating, is creating a lot of disruption. And one of the things that has affected the residents of that community is just the constancy the data center was not constructed and did not start operating until about 2017. I believe these residents had been there before. It was a small suburb of Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona, called Sheller. And so they moved there mostly to kind of get away from metropolitan life and kind of be a somewhat quieter place to kind of raise families and so forth. And so the data center was built abutting this park where a lot of people go for walks and for children play basketball, where there's picnics and barbecues, and it's kind of a quiet, nice community space.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:26:38]:
And they built the data center right there, which is also really close to five or six residential communities in the nearby area. There are other data centers as well in Chandler that have caused concern, but this one has been particularly problematic for the community. There have been numerous studies that have shown the effects of noise pollution on communities, on people, on the human body. And noise pollution is something that affects your body in somewhat specific way, you know, so this makes it a little bit of difficult of an issue to kind of prove and get to measure legal action for, because it's so perceptive, perceptual. Right. And there's also a difference between the loudness of some things we call the decibels versus the frequency, the tone that you hear. And so that has also been a challenge for the residents, but they were able to organize and get some. Some kind of justice through the first of its kind noise ordinance passed by the city of Chandler in 2023.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:27:46]:
So I think that's hopeful that grassroots mobilization can actually lead to some kind of action. But this case of noise pollution is now spreading to other communities in the US. And as I said, there are well documented health effects of noise pollution. And what. What makes the noise pollution of data centers somewhat unique is the constancy of it, because your cloud never goes to sleep. That's the whole point. It's constantly in operation. Data centers do not turn off.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:28:18]:
In fact, when they turn off, it's cataclysmic, both for the company and for you, the user of cloud services. That's what we call downtime. The data centers are in constant operation. The source of the noise are these air chiller units that are usually on the roofs, or these h vac systems that are on top of the buildings, but also fleets of diesel generators that are in state of standby in case the power goes out. There will be a way to power the data center, I see, which can also affect air quality. So that's another issue.
Mizter Rad [00:28:50]:
That's another thing.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:28:51]:
But really, the health effects are myriad. Everything from anxiety to hypertension to insomnia to generalized distress and anxiety. And I've seen the receipts. I've talked to people who've experienced this.
Mizter Rad [00:29:06]:
Tell me something, Stephen. Is there anything documented in regards with electromagnetic radiation that affects people nearby or something? Because this is a bunch of computers that emit a lot of. Together, they might affect, somehow, the human body, for example?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:29:24]:
Yeah. So I haven't heard anything in my own research. I haven't encountered anyone who's experienced this or documented this in any kind of systematic way. What I can say is that you're right that the concentration of these computational infrastructures or equipment can actually create certain kinds of electromagnetic spectral phenomena. And I know this because part of my research was embedded in Puerto Rico, and I was interviewing people who worked at the Arecibo ionosphere Observatory, where they had to build a special data center that did not interfere with the radio signals of the telescope, which is actually really sensitive to those kinds of disruptions. So it was actually an RMI proof data center. So it is true that.
Mizter Rad [00:30:20]:
So there is something there, but we just don't see it. It's not like noise that you hear it, and so you're aware that there's noise. This radiation is. You don't see it. It's invisible. Maybe in the long term, you can see some consequences.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:30:35]:
Yes. Yes.
Mizter Rad [00:30:37]:
Okay. Now, let's. Let's stop talking about the bad things about this. Let's. Let's. Let's switch into a more, hopefully, positive future of this whole thing. And I want to know, from your experience, what kind of practices do you think will evolve in the years to come to mitigate these problems? How can we solve this? Basically?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:31:05]:
Yeah. So this is a great question. It goes back to your point. Why do I say computation? I say computation because I think it's important to think of these different functions of computers on a spectrum. So, storage being one function, but calculation and the kind of computational work being another function that is maybe specific to artificial intelligence, but also cryptocurrency, and very alarming in terms of its resource use. But on the side of storage, these computers are not the only choice that we have to actually facilitate storage. We have long histories of analog storage systems, everything from tape and going all the way back to the sumerian cuneiform. Right.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:31:55]:
So these were clay tablets that people etched all this information about, tax ledgers and so forth. And we can still read those today. And I think that's one of the fascinating things about the past, is that even though here we are, in this future of constant connectivity and constant availability of information. But the actual stuff that makes this information ecology possible is so fragile. And so the lifespan of a server is like about five years. In some cases, it's two to three years based on the warranty or the design of the manufacturer. Here you have a server that's supposed to hold all this information for us, and it, you know, it's not even a decade. It doesn't even last for a decade.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:32:42]:
But we can read clay tablets that Sumerians etched, or even we can think of the andean tipu as another example, which is a computer made out of fabric fibers.
Mizter Rad [00:32:54]:
In Peru.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:32:55]:
In Peru and in the Andes, you know, the andean civilizations, Tawantin Suyu, sometimes called the Inca.
Mizter Rad [00:33:02]:
Yeah.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:33:02]:
They actually had an entire computing system that was based on fabric. Right. But we also have things that are closer to home that are less exotic, that are still vastly more durable than a solid state disk drive, things like paper or film or tape. And there is a reason why the world's most elite financial institutions do nothing, rely exclusively on computers to store information. All of these institutions still write to magnetic tape because they know that it's more reliable, it's more durable, and in case there is some kind of disruption to computers, if there's a solar flare, if there's some kind of cataclysmic terrorist attack or something, cyber terrorism, this is an infinitely more durable alternative, or seemingly so in the magnitudes. But I think if we look to the past, we know it's possible to design ways to store information that have a very low environmental footprint and that are very durable. And there are emerging technologies today that are exploring this in a more futuristic kind of mode. And this is what I'm tracking in my second research project, which is thinking about what are the other possible ecologies for information storage? And that solves half of the problem.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:34:29]:
And so there are the possibilities of storing information on these. Something like ceramics that would. They somewhat resemble the cuneiform tablets of the Sumerians of the Mesopotamians, right? But they're these laser etched 5d memory crystals, as Microsoft silica calls the project. So there's one project that's being explored by Microsoft, there's others by other companies and startups. But then we also have something a bit more closer to ourselves and to life itself as a kind of phenomenon. In this world, life is about data, right? So that, like, DNA is data, and the propagation of all these species on earth is all about data and transcription RNA DNA.
Mizter Rad [00:35:18]:
Absolutely.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:35:18]:
There's people exploring that as well. Can we, can we harness the very mechanism of life, DNA or something like it, proteins, molecules as a way to store information. And we know that they are also quite durable as archaeologists who found the DNA of a bone that's 5000 years old and can attest to that. Molecular storage is another possibility. And it doesn't need to be air conditioned and climate control to the same degree that a server farm would have to be. And so these are some possibilities. There are artistic experiments like the grow your own cloud project which is pondering the possibility of actually encoding information into living tissues. So that would mean plants.
Mizter Rad [00:36:10]:
That's interesting. So instead of using a hard drive you would use a living being a plant or even your own skin to save store data. Is that what you're saying?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:36:25]:
This is the concept or the premise of the Starbucks?
Mizter Rad [00:36:28]:
That's a concept.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:36:28]:
Different technologies. And it's possible. They've proven that it's possible to encode information to living tissues. It's possible to encode shakespearean sonnets into synthetic DNA and so forth. So these things are possible. The question is how can they be implemented at a scale? I think most of the people listening might be skeptical of these possible futures and rightly so, because of both the greed of the current system, the hegemony or the power of big tech today. But I think that there is space for a kind of transition or kind of heterogeneous information system where we have some things in a state of hot storage. So living in data centers the way that we have them today and other information archives that are based on what these other technologies are, cold storage.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:37:28]:
So tape or DNA or these ceramics that can store information with more density, with more durability and with less of a footprint. And that solves at least some of the problems that we're seeing with computation, which is storage. And many people have done studies of the information that we have uploaded to the cloud and wondering if it's useful. Why is it even there to begin with? Does that need to be.
Mizter Rad [00:38:01]:
Yeah, there's a lot of trash in the cloud for sure. I mean, I myself produce a lot of, you know, photos or documents that I don't need anymore and they're still in the cloud. That's surprising that it works like that. By the way, this episode and all the other episodes of the Mister rat show they're stored in the permafrost in the north of Norway next to north wall in a film that is analog. And wow, for the next 2000 years, anyone that wants to hear the Mister rat show will be able to do that if they're able to retrieve the information. So, talking about storage, your voice will be. Yeah, your voice will be there, and this conversation will be saved for eternity as well. But I find fascinating to store data in DNA or living tissue, and I think this sounds super interesting.
Mizter Rad [00:39:01]:
What else do you know about this? How advance are we there? What do we need to advance there? Is there any technology specifically in this field that is giving you a lot of hope lately?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:39:13]:
Well, I think that what gives me hope is the shift in relationships. That kind of technology implies the possible shift. Right? So currently we've gotten to this point where, you know, if you're old enough to remember the early Internet or even just the turn of the millennium, where we stored our own information on physical drives, for the most part on floppy disks or hard drives, and many people, I think, do have external hard drives, especially if you're working with a lot of data. But there was this sense of stewardship of your own data that, that quickly became, that fell out of fashion because of the convenience of Google Cloud, of apple cloud, all these things, of outsourcing it and sending it elsewhere. And we know that that outsourcing was not only about providing a service and convenience, but also about harvesting certain aspects of that data to create the chat GPTs of the world, to create all of these targeted advertising that really characterize Sweb's 2.0 social media era, where you have the scary ads that seem to know your innermost spots and fantasies.
Mizter Rad [00:40:36]:
Oh, they know a lot. Yeah, definitely.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:40:39]:
Yeah. And so, so much of this is about, we gave so much to this industry.
Mizter Rad [00:40:43]:
Right.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:40:44]:
And I think that it. The possibility of becoming, say, you know, just to. Just to humor me, a data gardener who was, you have a garden in your backyard that is actually a series of hard drives that shifts the relationship. And maybe that's just a way to think of it metaphorically and not in actual practice, but I think that if we become stewards of our own data, then it democratizes the process of data storage as well, and takes some of this back from the industry. But I also think that the fact that these things are possible, that does give me hope, because it seems insurmountable, the problem that we're facing, especially with the growth of AI and the kind of inevitability that tech often presents itself as expanding inevitably. But we've also seen that people power drives the way that tech advances oftentimes. So it's not only a top down thing, but also a bottom up and one example of that is we have been hearing about virtual reality for two decades as a serious possibility, and it still hasn't really taken off.
Mizter Rad [00:42:00]:
Right. People don't seem to like it.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:42:03]:
Right. And that's not because the technology isn't there. And this inevitable, this idea that someday the tech will be there and everyone will flock to it. The tech is there. It has been there in some way, shape or form for over a decade on some unfeasible, scalable platform. But people have not taken to it because people's agency, the consumers, the users, the citizens, the digital citizens, it just hasn't really resonated with us. That gives me some hope. If we can think of our role as consumers, we can exercise some power.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:42:40]:
I also think that we can exercise this power to fight this issue of planned obsolescence. We need to demand and refuse to upgrade unnecessarily. We need to complain that our iPhone stops functioning after a certain amount of time. When you spend over $1,000, if you look at the value of one of the iPhones today, $1,000. I think we need to demand more from these companies. I think this is shifting. Google just a few days ago was found to be monopolist. Right? So, I mean, I think that the tide is turning for tech.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:43:16]:
We have the EU AI act and all of these for so long, these regulatory possibilities felt impossible because of power and seeming inevitability attack. But because of people like you who are raising awareness of these issues by bringing folks like me into conversation with the public, reporters and others, I think people are starting to get involved and not to be so intimidated by the black box of technology.
Mizter Rad [00:43:45]:
Right. So would you say that culture shapes technology or the other way around?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:43:52]:
I think there is an interplay and between the capacities of a computer, for instance, and the creative interpretation and I and practices of people who use it. And a computer is often designed by an engineer, for instance, for a certain purpose, and people sometimes use it for that purpose, but then sometimes it goes in a completely unexpected direction. And this is the wonder of anthropology for me, is just the way that humans make meaning out of things, and the way that humans find ways to repurpose, reinvent, remix, refurbished, twist things into different, into novel alignments. Right. I think that's a beautiful part of the human experience, is our creativity and our adaptability.
Mizter Rad [00:44:44]:
Even when you think about this rapid advancements in AI and tech, there are some theorists nowadays that suggest that we might be living in a simulation, like a layer within a layer of existence. Given that the fundamental data of our reality seems to be encoded in the tiniest particles, let's say, molecules, DNA, what we were talking about before. How do you view this simulation hypothesis or the simulation theory? Do you think that the technological progress that we've been seeing might hint at a larger underlying digital structure to our existence, to our universe? In other words, could our world be a sophisticated computer, like a computer game created by an advanced civilization, given the tiny data like particles that make up everything?
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:45:40]:
What an interesting question. You remind me of the work of Norbert Weiner's the Cybernetics theory, in the way that there were some theorists who believed that reality is information, that fundamentally you can reduce everything to something like binary code, ones and data. Or if we want to be a little bit more contemporary, maybe it's a quantum qubits, so it's ones and zeros and one and or zeros and kind of entanglement. I mean, I certainly think that that's the theory. I've heard of this theory, and I think it's certainly possible, insofar as I think many theories are possible. But I think that I would say that there is a certain collective capacity of humans to imagine things and to create. And that is what has drawn me to anthropology. And the way that humans collectively imagine and collectively create is historically and culturally really specific and different.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:46:47]:
When you can be in a world where people have totally different systems for understanding how the universe came to be, whether it's a God, whether it's gods, whether it's a big bang, and then you can also. And they can all be in the same space together in these parallel universes of difference. That, to me, is so remarkable. And that is what really drew me to anthropology as a field, is just the staggering capacity of humans to create, imagine. And I think also that they do so in really unique ways. And I come from the Caribbean. My heritage is from Puerto Rico. And Puerto Rico is a place that, like many parts of the Caribbean, was a place that was shaped by the collision of different worlds and the fusion of those worlds into something new.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:47:45]:
This is the world of the Europeans, of the Iberians, the Spanish, but also that the indigenous Caribbeans, the Tainos, and there before, and the enslaved peoples of West Africa, Igbo, Yoruba, who all converged in this place through violent means, of course. And they all had very different understandings of reality. And so I am also skeptical that there is one singular reality that is beneath the surface of this world. I think that just personally, that there is. That nature and reality is so breathtaking and the scale of it is just so unfathomable. To presume that there is only one just seems very limiting to me. Especially when within our own histories and our own experiences, we've seen how there have been different worlds even here within this world. And I find that so endlessly fascinating.
Mizter Rad [00:48:44]:
Yeah, well, I find fascinating that what you say about life, life is about data. And when you look at even the smallest particles of this planet, what you were saying, it's all data, it's all information. And I find that super interesting. I find also interesting the idea that we might be in a layer of a different layer of another layer, and we're within layers. And sometimes I feel like we're so arrogant about what we believe life is, and it's more complicated than we think, but at the same time, more beautiful than what we think. I think so, yeah. It was absolutely. It was amazing having you here, Steven.
Mizter Rad [00:49:32]:
I think that we had a great conversation. I really like what you're doing. It's not very usual to find people talking loudly about the impact that data centers, data storage, data management has. And I think it's definitely a topic that is undervalued, that should be more looked at. And that's why I wanted to have you here in the Mister rat show. It was a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for being here, Stephen.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:50:02]:
Thank you. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity and for such a great conversation and wonderful, inspiring questions. I'm going to be thinking about this simulation theory for the rest of the day and the ways that even, like, I even think of the Caribbean's indigenous belief system, about how every bit of reality is alive in some way. That stones are alive.
Mizter Rad [00:50:29]:
Exactly.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:50:30]:
And we can think about that in conversation with these ideas that, you know, everything is a simulation or everything is information.
Mizter Rad [00:50:37]:
That's crazy, crazy, crazy, amazing, beautiful existence. Thank you so much, Stephen. It was a pleasure to have you here. And it's Vulc die and Shuntec Shunetak. Thank you.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [00:50:51]:
Thank you.