floof.org
Gorgeous new artwork by @leggy2fast with @CheetahObscura - in which it's a hopeful and more gentle solarpunk future. We're happily working together to get some old solar panels up and running, and in the background a long-abandoned data centre has been partially reclaimed by nature, partially absorbed into our small, sustainable community.
I love how this turned out so much. I love the colours and light, I love our nonbinary clothing that says in this world we can express ourselves however we want, I love how we're doing important work and actually finding joy and meaning in it in it, I love the sense that there's a thriving community working the landscape behind us making a world I'd actually want to live in, and I love that the data centre is in ruins as a symbolic, gentle but resolute middle finger to data centres and AI and all the damage they're doing to us and our world today. And most of all I love the way this piece is an expression of hope in a time where, moment of vulnerability, I'm feeling really, really damn short of it lately.
I'm so grateful to Obscura for proposing we go together on another art piece, and to Raf for realising this absolute beauty.
#furryart #solarpunk #nonbinary
I very much understand what you mean - my apologies, people tend toward shorthand terms for things even when it loses important distinctions. What I meant to throw shade on here is indeed very much -AI datacentres-, as you say the sort that are exceptionally power- and water-hungry and and specialised to such an extent that they won't be much good to anyone if and when the AI bubble bursts because they can't really be repurposed to handling other, more useful types of data or cloud services. Apart from maybe finding some use for the building itself which is little more than a giant barn with a strong floor. They've become a pretty hot political topic and those especially tend toward easy shorthand terms. People don't like them, the environmental impact is huge, and they can only ever really do one thing, and it's a thing that more and more people are really getting tired of having shoved in their faces when it's hard to see any actual value to them.
And like you say with 'crypto', you're exactly right that that became the common shorthand for 'cryptocurrency' and that's what people were wanting to trash on. Cryptography itself is an incredible and important field - I live not far from Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and other brilliant minds worked tirelessly to crack the Enigma code during World War 2, so I've got plenty of appreciation for that!
But yes, my apologies, no disrespect intended toward your livelihood and the broader infrastructure that makes so much of the internet and the modern world as we know it possible.
@The4thCircle
Sounds like a really neat video! Though yeah I can see what you mean. If they don't have enough structural strength to do much in or on top of them, maybe better to just leave it to nature (in a solarpunk vision like this anyway) and reroute the power and water infrastructure elsewhere outside of them.
@pippin @The4thCircle
I'd wonder about the relatively weak roof and only a single floor, it seems like to try and repurpose it to any sort of conventional building you'd have to effectively build a new actual building inside the shell which would probably not be cost effective, if possible at all. Those unusual features you mention definitely could be valuable, but it would take some investment and cleverness and I worry at the extent to which businesses tend to prefer solutions that are cheap and easy. With the right thinking and investment, I'm sure the infrastructure could be repurposed to a more general and useful sort of computing centre, so hopefully that proves to be the case.
You have to wonder how much of "optimised for this specific hardware and use case" is actual necessity and how much is an excuse to ask for more investment to build these things.