Oakland Asks The Cloud To Please Wait Outside For 45 Days While They Figure Things Out
City officials have set up folding chairs at the border for billions of uncompressed vacation photos and software updates to sit in until the moratorium is lifted.
OAKLAND, Local officials have officially asked the entire internet to please wait outside for the next month and a half. They need to figure some things out. So the city council voted unanimously Tuesday to impose a forty-five-day moratorium on new data centres. By mid-morning, municipal workers were already at the city limits putting up velvet ropes and arranging folding chairs for incoming algorithms and extremely large email attachments.
The pause on construction means the ethereal concept of the cloud has to physically loiter in neighbouring jurisdictions until mid-November. Commuters entering the city saw billions of pending software updates milling around near the toll plaza. And uncompressed vacation photos were checking their watches, asking if anyone knew when the council meeting was going to wrap up.
“We aren’t saying the cloud cannot come in,” said Arthur Pendelton, Oakland’s newly appointed Director of Telling The Future To Sit Down. “We are just saying it needs to grab a coffee and read a magazine in the waiting room for forty-five days. Building massive warehouses for invisible data takes a lot of electricity. We just need a minute to catch our breath and look at some charts. Maybe the internet could come back after Thanksgiving.”
“Now I am just sitting on a curb in Alameda eating a lukewarm pretzel.”
That waiting room is getting crowded. The moratorium created a visible backlog of digital information at the border. Delivery drivers had to navigate around a towering physical pile of unprocessed streaming video recommendations that spilled into the breakdown lane. Local residents got a notice. If you try to upload documents to a remote server right now, those files will simply be placed in a large plastic tub outside the municipal building.
The council plans to use the six-week delay to study the environmental impact of hosting the infinite digital void. Researchers will focus on whether the internet makes too much noise when it thinks. They also want to know if the physical manifestation of cyberspace might accidentally block the view of the bay. Some experts warned that giving the internet a physical time-out could lead to unpredictable behaviour. Things like sentient spam folders wandering into residential neighbourhoods to ask for directions.
“It is very frustrating to be told you cannot enter a city just because you are a continuous stream of binary code requiring massive amounts of cooling infrastructure,” muttered a disgruntled piece of artificial intelligence. It spoke through a damp piece of cardboard fashioned into a megaphone. “I was supposed to be processing logistics for a global shipping conglomerate by noon. Now I’m just sitting on a curb in Alameda eating a lukewarm pretzel.”
City staff are trying to manage the overflow. They set up temporary hydration stations for stranded megabytes and put out complimentary crossword puzzles to keep the machine learning models occupied. But several local cafes reported a massive influx of search engine algorithms. They just take up all the tables without buying anything.
“We appreciate the digital realm’s patience during this administrative pause,” said local zoning enforcement officer Brenda Higgins. She was currently trying to shoo away a flock of stray search queries that had nested in a public park. “If everyone just stays calm and keeps their data packets leashed, we will figure out exactly how many giant humming boxes this town can reasonably handle.”