To Stream is to Touch Relentlessly

Beneath a pile of cotton and quilts, you stream. The glow is fluorescent, a parade of color wheels spinning across your pale bedroom wall. The heat of a silver tablet seeps through blankets and onto your thighs. High-pitched voices reverberate through this plate of mirrors; a specter of life pouring out of a disembodied screen.

In 2010, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly posited that “Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods … is just the latest in a steady move toward the immaterial.” Our devices reinforce this sense of weightlessness; to “stream” suggests the unencumbered flow of frictionless vapor.

But the armature of this stream is anything but ephemeral. Your laptop is compressed geology: an amalgamation of sand hauled from beaches; quartz melted and purified into glass. Steel and aluminum form its chassis. Indium and tin foil around the tablet’s surface—enabling light to respond to touch. Beneath it, circuits braid copper and gold, shuttling signals under keys. The battery is a vault of chemicals: lithium drawn from evaporated salt flats and cobalt mined deep underground, where laborers descend into unstable shafts, breathing mineral dust, trading bodily risk for global interconnectivity.

These materials travel. Ore moves by truck, by ship, by rail, across borders and oceans, to refineries and factories, where components are etched, soldered, assembled under bright lights and buzzing machines. Chemical solvents wash silicon wafers clean. Heavy metals circulate through industrial water systems. Waste accumulates downstream: lead pooling in ponds, mercury trickling into oceans. Sealed in sleek finality, the device travels again, swaddled in plastic and cardboard, shipped to warehouses, delivered to a store near you. You drive it home, break the seal, and reveal a surface that shows no trace of its making.

From the cocoon of your house, burrowed in bed, you press play. Electricity flows from distant plants—gas, coal, hydro—into your outlet, into the transformer on your street, into the grid beneath your feet. Data fractures into packets and slips into fiber-optic cables: threads of ultra-pure glass buried beneath sidewalks, strung along poles, sunk beneath oceans. Light pulses through them in a mycelial network spanning continents, through trenches dug by the night shift.

Mere miles from your bedroom, a data center exhales. Racks of servers whimper and grumble, powered by coal and gas and cooled by fans and water drawn from local supplies—all to maintain a continuous stream of power. Land that was once forest is now asphalt and concrete. Nearby residents learn the tune of its constant hum. Outdated servers are shipped to distant countries, joining hills of electronic waste leaking slowly back into the earth.

Despite claims that we’ve shifted from an industrial society to an immaterial information economy, we have only intensified our reliance on the physical environment. Data centers account for roughly 2% of global electricity consumption—a carbon footprint that rivals the entire aviation industry. If the Cloud were a country, it would rank as the fifth largest global electricity consumer. As artificial intelligence scales, so do the demands on energy, land, and water. One peer-reviewed study estimates that AI-related data center operations could consume up to 764 billion liters globally by 2025—more than the annual global consumption of bottled water.

The material reality of our devices is obscured by design. Interfaces and marketing tactics render extraction invisible and infrastructure distant. Technology’s ethereal lexicon—wireless, cloud, virtual—masks its deeply material reality. Yet our devices are merely the polished edge of a vast system sustained by resource extraction, labor appropriation, industrial manufacturing, chemical processing, energy consumption, and waste accumulation—systems that persist long after the show has ended and your screen goes dark.