Action on Extraction

When computers were introduced in the mid to late 20th Century, they were often described as a new, clean form of industry. The (mad) rush to create data centers has put the lie to these utopian visions, as exponentially growing massive data centers create noise pollution and heat, use tremendous amounts of energy, and burn through our remaining carbon budget. For local communities, the environmental and health impacts are intolerable. Our international research group in rural New York State is working to understand local impacts, using a combination of techniques that blend art, engineering, and activism. Through it, we are working on novel ways to understand the data centers through acoustic monitoring, power mapping, and other forms of intelligence and surveillance. Through our work with communities, we try to make the process of polluting more expensive, and to prevent global flows of capital from successfully extracting value while externalizing harms and avoiding local accountability. In this lecture, we will describe three directions of our work: 1) sensing damage through environmental monitoring, with specific attention to 2) covert unmanned surface drones, and 3) passive acoustic monitoring and new forms of machine listening we call "industrial music."