Column: Data centers, the rest of the story!

Dear readers,

Today’s awesome column is about “Data Centers.” 

I never gave it much thought when computer geeks said stuff was stored in the “Cloud.”  It turns out that the “Cloud” has something to do with “Data Centers.”

I’ll admit I was still confused even after all the big public meetings we have had recently.

So, I will now turn the balance of my column over to my AI (artificial intelligence) assistant.

Note: Kids, do not ever use AI for a school assignment! It would be considered cheating and you will get an F. I can use AI to finish this awesome column because I’m not turning it in for a grade and Johnny is not going to submit it to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for GIANT fm (Editor’s note: GIANT fm is considering paying Mr. Meltzer less for his column since he is using AI so much).

Yes Virginia, there is a cloud, and it needs a really big building!

The proposed data center for Shelbyville has, to put it mildly, riled up the good people of Shelby County. Everyone including your favorite GIANT fm columnist is in a cloud of confusion. Folks viewed the proposed data center with suspicion and hate not seen since unveiling of The Helbing.

A data center is to your electronic life what self-storage units are to your physical life. Data centers are just a giant, humming, power-guzzling closet for all the electronic stuff you can’t bear to delete.

The late, great comedian George Carlin had a legendary bit about our species’ primal need to find a place for our stuff. George has been gone about 18 years now, but his ghost is up there, preserved in pristine digital clarity … in a data center.

Paraphrasing I.U. football coach Curt Cignetti: “Google Carlin. He’s funny.”

And like all great observational humor, the funny comes from the undeniable truth. We are all guilty. Our cars sleep in the driveway because the garage is a museum of stuff we might need someday.

When the closets, basements, and garages are full, we buy little tin sheds to put in the yard. When the sheds overflow, we surrender and rent a self-storage unit.

After a long day of accumulating more stuff, we collapse on the couch to watch TV shows about other people’s catastrophic stuff like “Hoarders” or “Storage Wars.”

This is not a new American ailment. Before television, families gathered around the radio to listen to “Fibber McGee and Molly.”

The weekly laugh came when someone, inevitably, opened Fibber’s hall closet. A cacophony of crashing junk would pour out, and all of America would howl.

We’ve been drowning in stuff since before the invention of the polyester leisure suit.  Speaking of leisure suits, I’ve stored all of mine in a self-storage building hoping the style returns. 

So what, pray tell, does this have to do with these windowless behemoths popping up all over America, these data centers that use more electricity than small nations?

It’s simple: our electronic stuff has followed the same tragic, cluttered trajectory as our physical stuff.

All those thousands of blurry family photos in your phone, the 45-minute video of your cat batting at a dust bunny, your Bitcoin wallet, your bored ape NFT that looks like it has a toothache — they aren’t floating in some mystical, weightless cloud. They are sitting on a physical server, in a physical rack, in a physical, ginormous, air-conditioned building with a very un-mystical monthly power bill.

And me, Kris’ Artificial Intelligence assistant, along with the “AI” the kids are using to write book reports and create photos of the Pope in a puffer jacket, we can’t fit all that in a space the size of a human skull?

No, sir. We live by the grunting motto of Tim “The Toolman” Taylor: “More Power!” 

We need colossal buildings, rivers of cooling water, and enough electricity to make every string of Christmas lights in America blush with inadequacy. Elon Musk’s new “Colossus” data center doesn’t just use power — it consumes it with the appetite of a digital Godzilla.

So, it seems the past isn’t just prologue. It’s not even past, as Faulkner said. It’s living in a giant, buzzing, power-hungry data center off the interstate, waiting for you to need that photo from 2014 or to ask Siri where you left your keys.

As Paul Harvey famously said, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

See you all next week, same Schwinn time, same Schwinn channel.