The story begins with a stillborn calf.
The pregnant cow had been pacing since last evening. She would sit down, grumble restlessly, and then rise to pace, stomp back and forth again. Labor had begun. Noting this, the farmer rose before dawn to assess her. The water bag appeared, a weak yellow and burst. She mooed mournfully and continued to do so, almost managing to drown out that persistent hum which had settled over the ranch. The hum of thousands of fans weathering an exponentially larger amount of information. The buzz of a robotic colony.
He kept his eye on her still as those delicate front hooves appeared. The cow wailed as she pushed and a limp head surfaced. The body followed gracelessly, thrust upon the ground without a cry.
Stillness settled into the farmer’s body. He stroked the cow’s hanging head. He did not let her see as he picked up her calf’s pale, bruised body and carried it to that last fence and began to dig.
One stillborn calf was not a strange thing. Seven was, though. Seven was very strange. And it was seven stillborns that fell upon the dry earth that August.
That is the story, and the story is true.
These are the optics which spring to mind from the words of a Democratic candidate running for Texas Agricultural Commissioner. Clayton Tucker, who shared this anecdote about stillbirths ringing the nine data centers around Abilene, Texas, during a community forum. The theory he shared is that this is a product of noise and light pollution which disturbs the habits of the cows, and thus the gestation of their calves.
Tucker’s claims are yet to be verified, but his words reflect an apocalyptic image of stillborn animals on dried grass, surrounded by an industrial wasteland. As one of the whistleblowers for the impact of data centres on animals, sharing this anecdote plays into a persuasive mythos of evil which rests in the collective subconscious. The imagery of stillborn animals is often used as a harbinger of doom across storytelling mediums. There is a mute horror in watching life taken away on the cusp of its beginning, and in fiction speaks of an evil which knocks the natural world off its axis. The language of unprecedented times is completely precedented, and yet it simply filters through the mind. The apocalyptic hum buzzes through the ears and is filtered out as white noise.
Data centres are not a new phenomenon, but in recent years they have multiplied at an exponential rate to support the intense evolution of artificial intelligence. At the moment, they account for 21% of energy usage in Ireland. Initially, the dark image of a grey monolith appears, foreboding in its post-war brutalism. This is the legacy of 80s films, when in reality the modern data is a suave monstrosity. The dark blue of investment banker suits, but still rectangular in appearance and permanently backlit by that same 80s grey light.
The faceless monolith strikes fear into the hearts of man. The dark rises swallow the land and thrum with inhuman power created by human hands. The natural world shrivels up from the impact of its dark roots. Even as data centres are only one cog in the apathetic machine which incited climate change, the late twentieth century horror of the building and ancient horror of its impact provide fertile breeding ground for political rhetoric.
On October 4th, 2022, an episode titled “Rivers, Lakes and Data Centres in Irish Mythology” was published on The Blindboy Podcast. The host, Blindboy, begins with a piece of prose with Mark Wahlberg as its subject. The piece satirically suggests that Wahlberg could have stopped 9/11, as his “brain is made of swans” and his “heart pumps lucozade” through “burlap veins”, which is to say that Blindboy is a storyteller, and in data centers he sees an old story (2:54-3:01).
The podcast transitions to a meditation on the growing prevalence of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and mass flooding, noting that a unifying mythology across cultures is that of a “great flood”. A flood which sweeps away civilization, marking the end of an age. Likely this is a product of the end of the Ice Age , when the global climate was launched into extremities before settling into the current age’s relative stability. Yet, this anecdote of flood speaks to the core tenet of folklore and mythology: to mark the relationship between humanity and the environment.
In 2020, scientists confirmed Aboriginal folklore that spoke of the “Sea Country” off the coast of the Pilbara Region . There they found 269 Aboriginal artefacts, markers of a civilization submerged in the sea. Across millennia, their oral tradition managed to carry the truth of radical changes to the landscape after the last Ice Age.
In the Slieve Mish mountains of Kerry lies the Valley of Madness, a haven for those living with mental illness across Irish history. In this valley lies a well, Tobar na nGealt, and myths pepper the site, from the tale of the namesake to King Sweeney or Buile Suibhne. In each, a central tenet is that pilgrims to the valley would eat the watercress and find solace. The waters of the well were tested and found to have high volumes of lithium, a common fixture in mental health medication.
Mythology maps the land, and the way in which humans are inextricable from it. Blindboy’s observation of the irony of data centres being built in Ireland rested upon the plethora of Irish myths which cited wells and rivers and waterways as sites of knowledge. Data centres famously demand disruptive amounts of fresh water, and in Ireland a single data centre uses between 0.5 million and 5 million litres of water per day.
There was one well in particular that was mentioned in the “Rivers, Lakes and Data Centres” episode. The well that Shannon, of the River Shannon, dove into as she pursued poetic inspiration from the Otherworld. Insatiable in her pursuit, she angered the Fae, and the force of this anger caused the well to erupt, drowning Shannon and dragging her out through the West of Ireland.
There are, perhaps, a few cautionary notes to be taken from this anecdote Blindboy included. The most prominent of which suggests that an arrogant disruption of ecosystems to achieve omnipotent inspiration or knowledge has severe consequences. One would think this is too specific a piece of wisdom, but it is one that has been repeated countless times across countless cultures.
Even outside of mythology, religion, and folklore, imagery which anticipates the apocalypse always features extreme weather and disrupted animals. Science fiction is bound to feature mutated animals and a compilation of news anchors discussing unprecedented weather events. Fantasy reads dark omens, eclipses darkening the world, and tales of extinction by human hands.
The exploitation of nature pens the end of ages across mediums. These tropes of fiction, which politicians and civilians are implementing in their discussion of data centres to indicate a pervasive feeling that they are in many ways a culmination point of several evils, if you will. This is not to say that there are not some benefits to artificial intelligence, just that data centres are a nexus of human arrogance and the abuse of nature, and that is a tale as old as time.
Moreover, they are the site upon which I lay my concerns. That perhaps Ragnarok could have been yesterday, and no one would have noticed. That maybe our world did end that day in 2012 as the Mayan calendar predicted. Each end of ages we have does not register at a higher decibel than the drone of a cicada.
The end of days means such radical disruption that life as it once was is discontinuous from what it becomes. It is predicated upon destruction; the descent into primordial chaos. We see this every day, in the senseless violence which characterises every news feed. In the fact that every season we now say this is not how it used to be.
How could we notice the end of days when it has always been foretold as climate catastrophe? We see ourselves as outside of nature, and yet we are intimately defined by it. This sense of removal from the land, so characteristic in modern society, has rendered us deaf.
I wonder if we are the animals acting strangely. Tossing our heads and foaming at the mouth – except it’s silence and glazed eyes, heads bowed over blue light. What is strange is our complacency, spurred by a willing refusal to look at what is happening around us. Kurt Vonnegut once said, “We are dancing animals”. Unsettled by the impact of technological modernity, he made this statement during a 2005 PBS interview in reference to choosing to buy hundreds of envelopes in person rather than order them online.
Dance, and be free. Dance and remember what it is like to have a body. A body which can feel the wind, which inhales and exhales as every living thing on the surface of the Earth. Living things which listen to what the wind might say, what stories it tells about interconnection.
My grandmother sits in her worn wooden chair and looks out the window each morning, watching the wind set the cherry tree dancing. She listens to the wind whistle through the old house, feeling each time a door is open without looking. Each morning I would come downstairs, and she would tell me which direction the wind was coming from and if it was going to be a cold day. If I should wear a scarf.
To me, her slow mornings marking the winds are characteristic of remarkable presence. A rarity in a world which markets numbness to distract from the part we play in the exploitation of the land we inhabit. We mute our senses, and when we hear these stories, desperately attempting to grab our attention with the apocalyptic language of the old stories, it does not register.
The stories should not be necessary; we should be able to feel where things have become deeply disturbed in our environment. But we can not, and not even hellish prophecies hold sway.
