Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Celebrating Division

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The trivia of inconsequential differences can and will turn us all into smaller versions of ourselves.

There was a very small item recently in the New York Times about the online ridicule faced by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was asked about his favorite kind of bagel.  Stating a preference about any New York icon is bound to produce second-guessing from those who want to parade their bonafides.  So, without missing a beat the press reported on the Twitter guffaws created by the Mayor’s expressed preference for a toasted whole wheat bagel from a Brooklyn bakery.  The infraction that brought out the smirks?  Apparently an authentic New Yorker never toasts a bagel.  It apparently sounds like what people might do in Boston, where de Blasio grew up.  To some, it’s almost as bad as eating pizza with a knife and fork, another supposed faux pas committed by the Mayor a few years ago.

The bagel kerfuffle is obviously a non-story.  And one can only guess that the Times was facing a light news day.  But there’s a lesson in the online comments that work people into a dither of useless vitriol.

We key on the terms of division in our rhetoric because it is a way to signal our status. We celebrate “us” more than “them.”  Others who are different are not allowed to be different.  They are too often renamed as impostors or poseurs. Their person-hood is devalued and their authenticity is judged in the language of a put-down. These days we seem to be carrying around a loaded quiver of arrows at the ready if another person has expressed preferences we’ve decided are fraudulent, or some form of misappropriation, or motivated by some imagined slight.

We now seem so quick to entertain the words of others who have found pleasure in the ridicule of others.  Its becoming a kind of candy for the mind. 

Most folks can still survive they day without denigrating the work, tastes, clothing or choices of others.  But fewer of us seem to be able to resist serving as willing bystanders to a ragged rhetoric of differences re-clothed as revelations of inauthenticity. Its becoming a kind of candy for the mind.

But wasting time and energy on ostensible violations of authenticity gets us nowhere.   And it would help if media would resist measuring every story using the measure of whether it can be framed as a pseudo conflict.

The trivia of inconsequential differences can and will turn us all into smaller versions of ourselves. Somehow and at some point Americans are going to have to grow up and leave the useless internet chatter behind.

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This Cloud Pollutes

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Think of a server as something like your cable box.  It’s probably always on, always warm, and usually has a cooling fan.  Now add 80,000 thousand more for one location.

Communications equipment isn’t particularly known for creating excessive amounts of pollution.  But we may need to reconsider that view.  Unfortunately, our language isn’t very helpful.  “Cloud computing” may be a boon to organizations and internet-based businesses.  But its clear that what we are really talking about is server farms firmly planted on earth, often in the Southwest, but spreading to other locations as well.  The “cloud” sounds so. . .well. . .innocent. It’s our habit as Americans to put a gloss on what is usually a harder reality–like the euphemism of “bringing justice” to Iranian general Qasem Soleimani rather than naming the harder truth that the United States assassinated him.

Imagine a server farm the size of a shopping mall, with thousands of separately powered electrical units generating heat that needs to be controlled. As with other industrial processes, the shortest route is no longer opening a window (dust, you know), it’s building huge cooling units that usually sit on a corner of the site.  It’s the part of the site with machinery that is clearly on the outside of the structure: cooling units, large insulated pipes and standby generators. This section is filled with energy-thirsty pumps and large heat-exchangers.  It’s one thing for a boxed toaster to sit on a shelf until needed in an Amazon warehouse.  No special air handling is required to store it. But Amazon’s servers, along with Google’s and others, need to operate in conditions that will not melt down their circuitry. Think of a server as something like your cable box.  It’s probably always on, always warm, and usually has a cooling fan.  Now add 80,000 thousand more for one “farm.” The units obviously burn energy as they work, with heat as one of the largest side effects.  The need for cooling makes two forms of pollution.  Now add a third.

We are swimming in a sea of racket.

As a homeowner, you may be in for a surprise if you live in an area where server farms operate.  There is growing evidence that the pumps for cooling not only generate chilled air, but a fair amount of infrasonic noise.  This is the kind of low noise that approaches the point where the ear passes off the responsibility of detection to the body.  We can feel some infrasonic noise.  And that’s apparently what’s happening in the Southwest, where residents complain about a very low hum that never stops and is not easily blocked by routine building materials.  Bianca Bosker recounts the stories of some residents in Chandler Arizona in her recent Atlantic article, “Why is everything getting louder?”

It would not be true to say that server farms are the worst polluters. Indeed, in the 19th century you could identify towns like Lowell Massachusetts or Pittsburgh Pennsylvania or Dearborn Michigan by the rumbles of their heavy industries and the dirty air.  Smoke was the most visible form of pollution in these places, and few then considered the equally destructive effects of this newer culprit of industrial noise.

But our day of reckoning is here.  Partial deafness in older Americans is now as much a certainty as wrinkles. We are swimming in a sea of racket made worse by devices that have almost made it impossible to remember what quiet sounds like.