In this essay at The Dial, Jessica Traynor writes about the proliferation of data centers across Irish cities and towns, which store much of Europe’s digital information while increasing Ireland’s energy footprint and straining its power grid. Today, people generally think the cloud is an effective and secure way to preserve knowledge, but here, Traynor argues that the digital preservation of a nation’s records and memories is not as stable as we think. “The benefits of the data center economy are diffuse, intangible,” Traynor writes. “Unless Ireland figures out a way to surge forward with its slow development of renewables, these data centers seem impossible to sustain.” This is an interesting read on data, memory, and sustainability.
We drive back from Clonshaugh through Priorswood and Darndale, estates built during the 1980s, a time when Ireland suffered successive recessions, mass emigration and a heroin plague. The estates seem to have changed little since those days, even though the country as a whole has seen massive economic and social shifts, and I start thinking about the fragility of social and national memory. I wonder if data centers such as the one in Clonshaugh will contribute to the kind of record keeping Ireland has not always excelled at as a nation. Ireland is a country with a long memory, but a patchy one. . . .
“We have a black hole opening in history. When Irish government departments started using computers in the 1970s, there was no network, and many of those files can’t be read any longer. There’s no real policy for digital preservation of state records. A nightmare is facing us. Emails, Excel, Word, PowerPoint — they’ll all vanish — unless there’s a decision made by the government.”
I was surprised by the projected speed of deterioration of the images we were creating for our database; even TIFF files, the largest and most detailed of commonly used image file types, were prone to quick degradation. And so all that material floating around in the cloud — which is in reality being bounced from server to server, degrading each time this happens — is not really being preserved in the way we might imagine. Its continued existence is dependent on a steady flow of electricity, the continued provision of which is contingent upon governments reaching renewables targets they can’t agree upon.
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