Link Roundup: August 19, 2024
August 19, 2024
One article?! Yes. And I am sorry. It’s the first week of the semester, and I’ve been working on a research project that’s taken up a lot of my independent reading/writing time. At the very least, I am also posting an additional blog post I’ve been working on, which you can check out here.
As always, I generate summaries using AI and edit those summaries for accuracy and usefulness. Then, I offer some thoughts of my own.
Bert Hubert, “The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud”
Generated Summary (ChatGPT)
The article discusses the vulnerability of Europe’s electricity grid due to centralized, cloud-based management of millions of solar panels. These systems, largely unregulated, could be hacked or malfunction, leading to massive power disruptions. The author calls for stricter regulation, treating these management platforms like energy companies rather than just websites. Upcoming EU directives like NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act could help address these issues, but immediate action is needed to prevent potential grid failures.
My Thoughts
Oddly enough, just this past week I was referring a friend to Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, which has a lot of parallel lines to Hubert’s article here. The article is centrally focused on the Netherlands but (as Hubert notes) its themes and the problems it identifies are certainly internationally concerning. In his Prehistory, Hu writes:
as each infrastructure becomes naturalized, we tend to refer to it with increasing amounts of abstraction, talking about its use (cloud storage) rather than the infrastructure itself (storage servers in data centers). (xxvii)
This “forgetting” of the material and geopolitical basis of our technological lives, noted by both Hubert and Hu, is something we should resist.