Driving across Pennsylvania, in the northeastern US, you notice throughlines. Innumerable rivers and streams, thousands of miles of railroad tracks, acres of farmland, sheep grazing. Concrete highways where long-haul Amazon and Dollar General trucks cross paths with old coal mines and new fracking wells, steam from nuclear reactors, and warehouses in industrial parks. Increasingly, construction crews are turning over the landscape. And every so often, there’s a new version of a roadside placard: ‘NO TO DATA CENTERS’.
We have spent the past year and a half conducting research on how data centres and their related energy infrastructures – existing and planned – are changing landscapes and communities in Pennsylvania. As social science researchers at Data & Society, a non-profit research institute studying the social impacts of technology, we are interested in the myths, histories and lofty visions driving this particular version of an AI future.
