@JamisonAlexander A hot dry climate is perfect for those very sensitive servers once there's lot of cheap public water available. It's all about costs.

Last time I checked, Arizona had one of the cheapest rates for water, even though it was facing historic droughts.

@yogthos No concept has done more damage to our environment than the pursuit of efficiency. It has always led to a totality of greater consumption and harm. Just like with AI, where total material, energy and water use is growing at alarming rates.

The tech industry has done such incredible harms to out environment, hiding behind it mantras of efficiency, innovation and progress

you're shifting the argument here. First you made a false claim regarding energy consumption, now you're talking about Jevons paradox.

The problem here is rooted in the mechanics of the capitalist economic system as opposed to technology which you're attacking in misguided fashion.

@yogthos I don't think so. The initial argument was about the huge and growing water demand from Big Tech.

You cannot remove capitalism from its technologies. It was the Scientific Revolution that supercharged capitalism. First we make the tools, then the tools make us. There is no neutral tech. We are accelerating into a Sixth Mass Extinction and a global civilizational collapse because of the type of concentrated elite cultures that only modern surveillance capitalism tech could enable.

technology very obviously exists outside capitalism, and some of the most rapid advancements in technology happened in socialist countries.

The argument that technology necessarily leads to capitalism is completely baseless in nature.

Meanwhile, focusing on technology is fundamentally misguided because unless social relations change, there is no path towards any of these problems being addressed.

@yogthos I agree with you that the underlying issue is social relations. That's the whole focus of AI and social media: to individualize us and break up communities, so as to gain more control and power.

I'm reading a good bit about how Indigenous cultures approach tool / tech development. Very slow. Almost total opposite to the way the West approaches tech.

There are other ways and we need to try and find them.

that's certainly how this tech will be applied by the ruling class. However, pretending that the toothpaste can just be put back in the tube is naive.

The solution is to create community driven alternatives and wrestle control away from the oligarchs. It's the exact same thing platforms like Mastodon are doing with social media, and it's working.

It's also very telling to look at how differently this tech is developed in China compared to the west.

youtube.com/watch?v=X0PaVrpFD1…

@yogthos I agree there is no going back. I can only see civilizational collapse coming. The question now is to prepare for what comes after, and I agree 100% that community driven alternatives are the only alternatives worth pursuing.

I will check out your China link.

our civilization collapsing is a real and likely possibility, but I don't think that's a given either.

I actually thought this was a pretty good take on the situation we're in. thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the…

The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?

An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival.

^{The MIT Press Reader}