Throw a rock into a pond, and you may make bigger waves than you planned for: all of a sudden those big expensive data centers in the Gulf are looking very vulnerable.

One wonders whether this might lead to increased doubts about datacenters elsewhere. Already deeply unpopular with the communities upon which they are being imposed, for reasons economic, infrastructural and environmental, their potential to become sites of sabotage and warfare is not going to help their public image in the slightest.

This was foreseeable, though I’ll concede that I didn’t make the relevant intuitive leap myself: massive centralised datacenters are a deeply strange and retrograde move in a sociotechnical and political context that has long been moving in the direction of decentralisation. Indeed, decentralisation has been the functional and rhetorical logic of “the internet” for three-plus decades. Big datacenters are like a return to castle-building in an era of guerrilla warfare.

For all the talk of “sovereignty” in matters of data and “compute”, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what information technologies are, and how they’ve affected the way the world works. It will be interesting to see how that particular discourse mutates in the months ahead; some sort of swing-back from the most radically decentralised position was probably inevitable, but artefacts have a politics, and infrastructures encode and sustain them at a structural level.

As Saint Donna has said: “nothing is connected to everything, but everything is connected to something”. Sociotechnical megafauna are spectacularly vulnerable in an ecosystem that has long been changing in favour of smaller, nimbler creatures. I suspect that a great number of the datacenters currently proposed will never be built.