Uh oh, wegot 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 studioBasuraandBig 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 Datasingle, is calledAdopt a Data Center. The goal is to present people with a “cuddly introduction to life with a real data center.”
Data Centersare veryun-vogueright now. Built out by all thebig AIcompanies to power their increasinglypower-hungryAI tools, data centers have spread across thousands of acres of land in the US. They have been heavily criticized for theirenergy consumptionand expansion ofgas power. They have also proven to be audibly annoying, stirring upcomplaintsaboutnoise pollutionfrom 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 wayDon’t Hug Me I’m Scaredis 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 makingluxury wear for dogsand a partnership with Yerba Madre that madedirt shoesdesigned 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.”
