The internet has a sound. It is a low, steady roar, like wind in a tunnel or a ship’s engine heard from the deck above. You would not notice it at first. Then, after ten minutes inside the converted warehouse in the port where several hundred companies keep their servers, you realise that you have been raising your voice without meaning to.
The cold aisle
The building is organised into aisles. In the cold aisle, chilled air rises from the floor and is drawn through the fronts of the machines. In the hot aisle behind them, the same air comes out warm and is sucked back into the cooling system. Stand in one and you want a jumper. Stand in the other and you want a window. The cloud is loud, and it is very, very cold.
Everything here is about heat. Every photo you upload, every film you stream and every message you send is, at some point, turned into warmth by a processor in a room like this. The machines do not care what the data means. They only know that it has to be moved, and that moving it makes them hot.
The people inside
A small team works here around the clock: engineers who swap failed drives, security staff who check badges at three doors, and a facilities manager who talks about air handling units the way other people talk about their children. The job, she says, is to be boring. If anyone outside ever notices this building, something has gone wrong.
There is something moving about that. We tend to think of the digital world as weightless, but it lives in places like this: rooms full of blinking lights and humming fans, looked after by people who work nights so that nothing ever stops.
Listening again
Before leaving, I stood for a minute in the cold aisle and listened. Under the roar there were smaller sounds: the tick of a fan changing speed, the click of a door, the soft beep of a drive being replaced. It is the sound of a city’s memory being kept awake. It seems only fair that somebody should listen to it once in a while.
The cloud is loud, and it is very, very cold.
