Alex Saum-Pascual proposes that new artistic representations could help bridge the gap between knowing a technology is harmful and actually changing our behavior.
It’s easy to forget that the cloud isn’t an amorphous ball of fluff, says UC Berkeley Professor Alex Saum-Pascual — that it is, in fact, physical internet infrastructure that takes many forms in many places across the world.
In her forthcoming book, Earthy Algorithms: A Materialist Reading of Digital Literature, Saum-Pascual argues that digital tools like generative AI mask the messy reality of the internet — the massive energy, hardware and human labor it requires — to trick us into thinking we are separate from nature.
This vast footprint stretches across every corner of the globe. Hundreds of fiber-optic cables, buried underground and crisscrossing seabed floors, connect to millions of servers housed in nondescript data centers located from California and Florida to Ireland and Indonesia. With them comes significant environmental and social costs, from surging carbon emissions and local water scarcity to habitat fragmentation and community displacement.
“I’ve always been interested in that exercise around visibility, because there’s something so perverse in digital technology,” says Saum-Pascual, an associate professor of contemporary Spanish literature and culture and of new media. “Isn’t it surprising that the biggest thing that humans have made — the internet — is the most hidden?”
In this UC Berkeley News interview, Saum-Pascual discusses how she aims to pull the reality of the internet to the surface, and why we should treat AI like a “pharmakon — a kind of drug where a little bit can cure you and too much can kill you.”