Future Storage: on digital preservation and data decay
The world is experiencing an unprecedented demand for data storage. Data centre capacity dictates the rhythms of everyday life.
It is critical to fields such as planning, climate science, and healthcare and fundamental to delivering developments in AI, the Internet of Things,
and the Metaverse – which demand vast amounts of data stored for extended periods. As digital-data production is outpacing the scalability
of today’s storage solutions, data centre architecture becomes a critical site of investment and innovation. This thriving industry, however,
is dependent on extractivist practices and involves vast energy consumption, land occupation, and CO2 emissions. It is fuelled by outdated
notions of progress and endless growth. As a result, creating these profit-driven digital worlds results in the degradation
of communities and ecosystems and puts the only world we all inhabit at risk. In this lecture we will explore alternative architecture paradigms for storing data.
