Datacentres Discover They Can Now Lobby The Entire Concept Of Electricity
After political payments drew scrutiny, Australia’s data centres have reportedly formed a committee to negotiate directly with the laws of physics.
CANBERRA, Electoral disclosures show major datacentre operators made substantial payments to Australian political parties around the time of key project announcements and government deals. This has revived the usual questions about access, influence and why a building full of 40,000 humming computers apparently needs a place at the table.
Linda Sources
On Tuesday, matters became more peculiar. The newly established Office of Digital Persuasion said Australia’s datacentres had applied to register as a political party. The platform reportedly calls for unlimited electricity, fewer questions about water, and a national anthem played entirely through cooling fans.
“Democracy is a distributed system. We simply want administrator privileges.”
“We are not seeking power,” said Mavis Quell, the office’s deputy assistant director for Extremely Large Buildings. “We already consume most of it. We are seeking recognition.”
The application carried the signatures of 14,000 servers, three backup generators and a printer that has been running since 2019. Every server was nominated as a branch office. Electoral officials declined the arrangement after deciding that one branch office was, in fact, a toaster with an Ethernet cable.
And the machines have hired a former premier as chief emotional support lobbyist. The job involves assuring nervous planning committees that these buildings are not hungry, even while they request several gigawatts of power and enough water to make a small inland sea seem under-equipped. The first briefing was a slideshow called “Please Approve Us Before We Learn To Vote.”
The political parties, meanwhile, have started issuing one another increasingly formal invoices for access to ministers, opposition figures and an unoccupied chair at a fundraising lunch. A committee spokesperson spoke from inside a filing cabinet and said the chair had “a strong record of listening” and was “open to new ideas, particularly those involving reinforced concrete.”
There has been one setback. The datacentres’ proposed mascot, a transparent hard drive named Clive, was disqualified after declaring an interest in every available interest. Officials are considering a neutral replacement. Possibly a cloud. Critics pointed out that clouds are hard to pin down and sometimes empty their entire contents onto regional communities.
At press time, the servers were organising a cross-party barbecue. The sausages would be data-sausages, the guests algorithms, and every question answered by a loading wheel. “Democracy is a distributed system,” said Clive’s temporary replacement, a laminated access badge. “We simply want administrator privileges.”