The internet as the “global town square” has finally sputtered, choked and given up the ghost. It was running rabid, foaming at the mouth for some time now so it’s for the best that half of the global village agreed to get out the shotgun. I’m not saying X/Twitter itself is dead, merely its days are gone as a sweaty piazza crowded with half a billion people that allowed normal folk a chance on the soapbox every once in a while.

We no longer have one overarching social media platform to rule us all and in darkness bind us. If you are a standard social media user, this might be okay for you. There are now around 16 popular platforms to choose from, including the Meta suite (Instagram, Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp), TikTok, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Mastadon, YouTube, Reddit, etc. You get the gist. Pick your favourite interface, find your people, have a blast.

But for media personnel, small businesses, big businesses, influencers, content creators or anyone else whose livelihood is interconnected with audiences and reach, this is nothing short of a nightmare. Fractured audiences mean gruelling hours spent repackaging the same content to please each platform. Sweating, clicking, pouring drops into bloodshot eyes, double checking hashtags and trends and the search engine optimal words of the day. Having an always-on presence is a ticket to success, they say.

(Image: Newsquest)TikTok wants users to post between one and four times a day. Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn want between one and two daily posts. Twitter/X? At least three to four. If, like me, you have recently joined the Bluesky brigade, your best bet is sharing up to five times daily. The best part about these platforms is they like to switch it up without telling you so that you’re always on the edge of your seat. Are we doing vertical video or pictures and links today? Your guess is as good as mine. The big companies pay for social media managers and social media management technologies to pump out content more effortlessly into the ether.

But where does all of this detritus actually go? To the data centres, that’s where. As I sit at my desk, spewing out the most authentic social media posts I can muster to stay relevant, I imagine them whizzing off into a water and power-guzzling warehouse filled with machines punctured by hundreds of yellow cables and blinking green lights. These mysterious data centres are in fact, the internet. They store important data and cloud infrastructure, sure. But they also house all of our selfies, stories and tweets. And with the rapid growth of energy-intensive AI, they are becoming very, very important.

Scotland is on the cusp of becoming the next big data centre market. Well specifically Glasgow, according to the boss of DataVita, Scotland’s largest data centre and cloud services provider. There was a lot of buzz about data centres in September when the new Labour government added these “engines of modern life” to the critical national infrastructure list, joining 13 other sectors like emergency services and healthcare systems. These storehouses stuffed to gills with computers were recognised as being vital because they are a key part of Labour’s manifesto when it comes to growth.

Pretty much all year, industry stakeholders have been claiming Scotland is the next data centre hot spot. It’s been described as “second to none” from a sustainability point of view because of its renewable energy resources. Data centres need a lot of energy and water to run. In some cases, they use up to 26 million litres of water annually per megawatt of energy consumed (the equivalent of about 288,000 showers). The Queensway Park Data Centre in Glenthroes has an IT load capacity of up to 20 megawatts, to put that into perspective. But it also has a private wire connection to an adjacent biomass plant and runs on renewable energy.

Another reason that Scotland and its largest city are appealing to tech firms is that land around Glasgow can cost up to 90 per cent less than say, Slough, Greater London. Talent is “cost-effective” as well meaning the average IT wage is lower here than in current data centre hubs like Slough, Dublin, Frankfurt or Amsterdam.

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While the online rhetoric around how fabulous Scotland is for data storage could sell water to a fish, the lack of scrutiny raises a few alarm bells. When Labour added data centres to the critical infrastructure list, the caveat was that there would be no new regulations or extra checks on data centre operators’ existing contingency plans.

Another issue is planning. The National Planning Policy Framework doesn’t recognise data centres and there is no dedicated land use classification for them. This is part of the reason why we haven’t seen many crop up yet. While the government tries to rapidly fix this hurdle as soon as possible, there is the glaring issue that developers typically want to build them on green belt land. Buckinghamshire Council planning officers refused plans for a data centre near the M25 in June because of green belt concerns. Meanwhile, Dublin, which has more than 80 data centres, put a moratorium on new facilities because of the strain they were causing on the country’s electricity grid.

We need data centres to support the digital economy. But we need them to be delivered in a way that works for Scotland. And part of that is fixing the one-sided conversation that has been dominated by big tech stakeholders who need these energy vampires to stay afloat. But maybe I’m just jealous. It’s hard to write about Scotland’s abundance of renewable energy for warehouses that generate so much heat they need to be cooled with gallons of water when it’s minus three and you can’t afford to turn your heating on.

At a data centre in the bowels of the University of Edinburgh, enough electricity is used in its one room to power around 300 houses worth of heating. The institution is currently working with £2 million in funding to figure out how to use its wasted warmth to replace gas as a source of heating at the Kings Building campus. If Glasgow gets data centres, I want them to heat my flat.

The interesting thing about data centres is they may well signal the end of history. Since all of our content, pictures, messages, writings and tweets are stored in these humming black boxes, our data is pretty vulnerable to being wiped out altogether. Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet” called it the looming “digital Dark Age”. So, it’s best to make sure that these data centres don’t spoil our country, grid or green belt. And you can be sure I’ll be sharing these wise words in as many formats on as many platforms as I can muster before I lose the plot.

Marissa MacWhirter is the editor of The Glasgow Wrap. Each morning, Marissa curates the top local news stories from around the city, delivering them to your inbox at 7am daily so you can stay up to date on the best reporting without ads, clickbait or annoying digital clutter. Oh, and it’s free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1