Uh oh, we got a cute alert! It’s Bezzy, your adorable, cuddly, anthropomorphized server-rack and stuffed-animal friend! Give this soft lil’ doll a squeeze, and it shall sing you its telltale song: the piercing, grinding ambient squeals emitted from a real US data center.
The Bezzy doll is a stuffed plushie made in a satirical collaboration between the New York–based creative studio Basura and Big Data, the musical project of producer Alan Wilkis, best known for the song “Dangerous,” a 2013 collaboration with the band Joywave. The joint project, which is coming out the same day as a new Big Data single, is called Adopt a Data Center. The goal is to present people with a “cuddly introduction to life with a real data center.”
Data Centers are very un-vogue right now. Built out by all the big AI companies to power their increasingly power-hungry AI tools, data centers have spread across thousands of acres of land in the US. They have been heavily criticized for their energy consumption and expansion of gas power. They have also proven to be audibly annoying, stirring up complaints about noise pollution from those nearby.
The Adopt a Data Center stunt aims to make people think differently about how services produced by data centers fit into their lives. That manifests as a plush stuffie that looks like a server rack in a data center, albeit with long arms and legs and googly eyes. It’s cute in the way Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is cute. Squeeze Bezzy’s torso and the sound bursts out. It’s a screeching few seconds of a recording taken by a neighbor of a data center in Virginia. The tag on the Bezzy plushie reads, “Hug me for ear-piercing forever hum.”
“We picked this recording as it was the clearest and most suitably irritating,” wrote Rajeev Basu, the founder of Basura, in an email to WIRED. In an interview with the person who recorded the audio, Basu says they described the sound as “like a car alarm going off nonstop. It's high-pitched, and it's all you can focus on.”
Basura has worked on other projects like making luxury wear for dogs and a partnership with Yerba Madre that made dirt shoes designed to break apart during a walk to spread wildflower seeds.
Along with Bezzy, the data centers project includes a collection of stickers that say things like “Every data center deserves a forever home” and “Open your heart. And your power grid.” Basu says the project is the result of dozens of interviews with people who live near data centers in the US. The website itself reads, “Adopt a data center: All they ask for is everything.”
Wilkis, whose band Big Data has “It’s giving Black Mirror, but make it music” in its Spotify description, says that the one upside of the data center debate is that the backlash is genuinely bipartisan.
“AI is a proxy for decades of widening wealth inequality in America, and data centers are its physical embodiment,” Wilkis wrote to WIRED. “With roughly 40 percent of the stock market's value riding on a handful of tech companies, the US economy is already a bet on AI's success.”
Sadly, only 20 Bezzy dolls are available for $99 from the Adopt a Data Center website and the Big Data storefront. Basura designed the toys, which are handmade in the US. But the physical toy isn’t the real point. The satire is meant to hook people into looking at the facts for themselves. When you click “adopt now” on the website, you’re taken to a statement with links to research and stories about how data centers fit into the world.
“It’s not about whether AI data centers should exist,” Basu says. “It’s about who gets to decide where they go, what resources they consume, and whether the communities living beside them actually benefit.”
Comments
Back to top