Something I hadn't considered before

I just read an NYtimes article about the consumption and waste of energy by data centers around in the U.S. that illuminated something for me that I had not stopped to consider before: that every e-mail., blog, video or song that we store online in "the cloud" is kept on a disk drive in a factory building somewhere in West Virginia. These data centers, or factories, are what were inspected by the newspaper, to determine how much energy they use and waste. Unsurprisingly, it's a lot. Our constant need for instant access to anything and everything online has created an industry-wide paranoia of system failures, which would delay us from watching the next YouTube video for example, and create an uproar of complaints and criticism which would then put some data storage company out of business. Therefore, these warehouses stocked with serves are run at full power 24/7 and furthermore connected to diesel burning generators to back them up in case of emergencies. Damn that's a lot of energy. The journalist found that quite often the servers are not running efficiently at all, often using energy to power operations that are no longer needed, or that are running at 12% utilization, a measure of the percentage of the entire system needed to operate, while 100% is being fueled. These energy-sapping safeguards are to satiate our need to access info, however useful or mundane it may be, at anytime. Also, though, it's caused by us growing into a system that most don't fully understand. I for one didn't think twice about the space and energy my 500 stored emails were wasting, or even the space that this maltreated blog is occupying on a disk drive somewhere. For me, this was another lesson of how important it is to be a little more conscious of the things happening around us because, however seemingly impossible they are to change, a bit of awareness always helps. Maybe in the future people will be forced to store the majority of what they want on their own external hard drives that can be powered on and off instead of kept on eternally running servers somewhere. The more time passes the more I'm convinced that things would be better with a small reset to a past state of things. A hybrid of sorts that mixes the new and old. The problem is that the mass perception of how the world, similar to how religion works, will not change anytime soon.