Environment and Energy

The “cloud” is not a cloud. It is a vast network of data centers consuming electricity and water on a scale that would be immediately recognizable as industrial extraction if the servers were visible. Crawford’s EARTH chapter traces the material supply chain of AI — from lithium mines in Bolivia to rare earth processing in Inner Mongolia — while “The Cloud Is a Factory” reframes computation as physical labor with real environmental costs. In the Middle East, this story has a particular resonance: the region that powered the twentieth century’s fossil fuel economy is now positioning itself as a hub for the twenty-first century’s data economy, raising urgent questions about whether the patterns of extraction are being replicated rather than replaced.

This session also includes our first hands-on workshop with NotebookLM, bringing your own research sources into direct conversation with AI tools. What are the environmental costs of the technology we are using right now? How does the geography of data centers map onto existing patterns of resource extraction? And what does it mean to critique AI’s environmental impact while using AI in our own scholarly practice?