The urgency of Acid Clouds is embedded in crucial ecological, socio-economic, political and ethical issues arising from the imperative of capitalism and the misconception that everything needs to be digitised, without fully understanding the actual ecological footprint. At the core lies the exponentially growing electronic waste and the disastrous environmental impact due to the unrestrained consumption of energy of data storage centres, the CO2 emitting power that is required to run their digital frameworks, and the rapidly increasing production and consumption of data and of data traffic by our societies.

To map the complexity of the problem, Acid Clouds has compiled a long list of extensive interviews with internet industry leaders (fragments are available here: www.acidclouds.org). These conversations allowed to identify topics related not only to the giant ecological footprint, but also raise urgent ethical and political issues and questions in the field of digital rights, the ownership and administration of Big Data, the power of large tech companies, public access to information, privacy issues and the vulnerability of data versus their indelibility.

The project illustrates how complex and entangled the issues surrounding data centres are. It makes clear that data centres have become the new control rooms of the automated landscape, not only storing the world’s growing body of virtual knowledge but also facilitating its distribution and the flow of capital.