Stuff a sachet with some dried mugwort for your pillow, brew a pot of chamomile tea, and get your dream journal ready, because it’s time we talked about energy, addiction, asters, the surprising effects of the moon on our sleep and mood, and what’s at stake when an AI data center comes to town.
Once, I tried out a challenge described in the book HEALING NIGHT: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening by Rubin Naiman.
I didn’t turn the lights on when the sun went down. I didn’t watch any screens, either. The idea was to just pass your time until sleep comes. You’re supposed to see a difference in sleep, including an increase of it in the winter, and a decrease of it in summer. It’s supposed to improve the quality of sleep overall, by reducing light pollution.
I lasted only that one night. I was itchy with anxiety. I felt lonely, wondering what my friends were posting or messaging about. I thought about shows I wanted to watch. I noticed how empty the rooms felt without the warm glow of light from the lamps. The silence of the void, without music or podcasts, was only interrupted by traffic and neighbor sounds. I wondered if I was finally going crazy, sitting there in the dark, while the world buzzed on around me. My dog, on the other hand, had long since passed out. He seemed unphased, even relieved, by the absence of electricity.
These days, the concept of addiction to technology is becoming more widely accepted. The results are in on things like screen time, sedentary life, and lack of face-to-face, positive interaction with other people. The risks to our physical and mental health outweigh the reward.
However, as an adult child of alcoholics, I have to question whether the term “addiction” is warranted whenever it gets thrown around. If drugs and alcohol are the baseline of addiction, how does our use of technology compare?
The phrase “technology addiction” might bring to mind the image of a teenager, head drooped, constantly swiping on a phone about 3” from their face. It could be your grandparent taking facebook AI slop as gospel truth. It can look like a toddler who melts down without their favorite hyper-stimulating show on. It’s me, scrolling, shopping, checking the group chat, and researching recipes on the couch.
However, none of those individual instances seem to quite live up to active addiction for me. People quite literally die from their addiction every day, either slowly from health complications or suddenly, in the case of an overdose. They are completely out of control of their lives, and it’s quite clear that the cost of the addiction far outweighs any benefit they may receive from it. They are incapable of taking care of themselves, let alone others.
While there may be exceptions, people can take breaks from social media, videogaming, or whatever their preferred format of tech is and still be able to eat, sleep, and function in life.
Therefore, it might be more apt to describe our use of electricity in general as an addiction. The phone, computer, or TV are just delivering it. A stationary T.V. in the house, then, is like a pitcher of beer. Enough to alter you, but not enough to make you throw up. The more mobile sources of electricity, like phones, are more like smoke from a pipe. The dose is higher with more short-form and attention-grabbing content. Add in AI tools like ChatGPT and AI-generated content that you don’t even know you’re consuming, and the dose that most people receive today is higher than ever before.
Of course, it’s hard to connect energy usage as a whole with what’s going on with the internet. But it is all artificial energy, generated by either fossil fuels, or fossil fuel-built solar power and wind turbines. Which, of course, could never keep up with current levels of energy consumption and also pose threats to the natural world.
It is completely normalized to rely on electricity for even the most basic necessities of life. For example, I can’t even get to sleep easily without a fan on. When the power goes out, it’s impossible not to notice, and your mode of operation gets significantly re-routed. Getting the electricity back becomes the first priority. Some of us need it to cook, store cold food, even access drinking water. It would completely reshape one’s life to quit electricity, the way that people in recovery have to in order to maintain sobriety. But that alone doesn’t make it an addiction.
The key parallel here is in the cost vs benefit analysis. If alcoholics could drink all they want all day long, but without any detriment to their mental and physical health and relationships, we could just normalize the drinking and move on. It wouldn’t be a problem.
We are consuming energy without second thought all day, every day, just like an alcoholic, but we are blissfully unaware of how it affects not only our health and relationships, but also the planet. Data centers are an ugly come-to-Jesus reckoning with that. Data centers, like the one being built in Port Washington, WI as we speak, are the chickens coming home to roost for our collective addiction. They are the decision of the tech oligarchs to justify the total destruction of land, water, and air quality in the name of chasing the high of whatever technology will look like in the future. They justify it by saying, well, don’t you use facebook? Don’t you like your streaming services? As if that’s the only thing this technology will be used for.
As with any active addiction, it will never be “enough”, otherwise we would’ve stopped already. And no, we can’t just stop any time. We might have gotten away with it for now, but there will be no going back once the pollution from all that energy is released in the atmosphere, and the fresh water spent. We can’t give the Earth a liver transplant.
To be clear, I’m not advocating that we go cold-turkey and live without electricity. In fact, many people who rely on refrigerated medicines, breathing machines, mobility devices, or other appliances to live would be severely harmed by the removal of electricity.
I’m just saying that, hypothetically, if there were any other substance that could harm us at the level of addictive drugs and alcohol, then it could be electricity. The harm already done worldwide by our electricity addition has spurred genocide, land theft, political assassinations, and species extinction.
While some uses of electricity are truly life-saving, a lot of it for us is just convenience and entertainment. With each ping of a notification, each direct hit in gaming, each plot twist in a movie - we get a dose of feel-good juice to our brain. When it’s too much of a good thing and end up spending hours in front of a screen, we feel drained.
But, like an addict, we come right back to it the next day.
Of course, humans didn’t invent electric energy. Everything in the Earth’s atmosphere is under the influence of electromagnetic energy (light and radiation), thermal energy (heat), and kinetic energy, by which air moves. Our bodies, as well as all living things, are animated by the same energy that’s described by physics and thermodynamics, after all.
Bees can map out their surroundings using their body hairs and antennae to detect electrical fields.
Flowers, in turn, give off an electrical charge to advertise to the bees. It’s electricity that allows the pollen to stick to the legs of the bees, allowing them to collect it for food back at the hive.
A much larger source of electrical charge than flowers, however, is the moon. Last week, Science Vs. podcast (a favorite of mine) released an episode called Is the Moon Really Messing with Us? Don’t let me spoil it for you, please go listen and come back! It’s a couple of PhD nerds talking about energy and the moon.
Basically, the answer is yes, the moon does mess with us. It hasn’t been proven yet, but we can measure it in indirect ways, like with sleep studies. We don’t officially know the mechanism at work here, but it seems plausible that it may be our bodies responding to changes in the Earth’s electromagnetic field during different phases of the moon. I felt specifically called out, because they mentioned how people with type II rapid-cycling bipolar disorder may be more prone to episodes around certain times of the lunar calendar.
To many like myself, this comes as no great surprise. It is, however, still breathtaking. The “energy” we feel from looking up at a clear night sky and seeing a universe full of stars and the moon looming overhead is probably one of the most universal human experiences.
We can also, in smaller degrees, get that feeling from plants. The Asters, aka Asteraceae, with their sunny ray flowers, their tiny star seeds that can float through the air, and their bitter, moon-white sap. They all emit an energetic force, which in many herbal traditions, is one aspect of their healing properties.
Asteraceae includes such familiar crops as lettuce, sunflower, and radicchio. We also see aster herbs all over the herb cabinet, including echinacea, dandelion, burdock, elecampane, yarrow, and more. These each have their own story and unique action. They all, however, have some things in common.
The Asters are one of the largest an most diverse family of flowering plants. They feature a universe of tiny flowers within each larger flower. Their leaves are attached alternately, meaning every other side of the stem, which is usually round. Many, but not all asters secrete a white milky latex sap when the stem or root is cut. Generally, the asters as a food and medicine are helpful for the liver, lung, and digestive tonics.
Dandelions, for example, are good from their head (flowers) down to their toes (roots). Their leaves are more nutritious than spinach, and when roasted, the roots make a good bitter drink like coffee. The flowers are delicious on salads, infused in apple cider vinegar, or even brewed into dandelion wine.
From the moment they bloom, dandelions, calendula, and some other Asters open their flowers only during sunlight hours, closing to “rest” at night. Sunflowers even turn their flower heads from east to west, following the sun as it crosses the sky each day, until the seeds are mature.
At first glance, then, you may think that the Asters are all sun, no shade. Positive vibes only. On the contrary, what is left after all the flowers have gone to seed, and the seed gone to wind and birds? The lunar look-alike of the spotted disc at the end of a dandelion stem. The empty seedhead of a sunflower is round and pale as a full moon. Night must follow the day, after all.
The energetics of herbs can be a fraught business, and it’s no wonder. How are we supposed to sense the energetics of herbs, when we can’t see or hear those things? Is it all just projection anyway?
Energy is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It has radically transformed not only our species but the whole world. Natural or pre-industrial sources of energy have always existed, in the form of the Earth’s atmosphere, fire, lightening, and the soft energetic pulses of living things. But now, we have energy coming out our ears from headphones. Electric cars, “smart” washing machines, ring cameras on every front door. I’m using wifi right now to write this, on my battery-powered laptop.
We are swimming in artificial, man-made electric energy field that was probably not there for 99% of our evolutionary history.
While I don’t subscribe to theories about 5G specifically, I do think that it’s worth evaluating where our use of energy affects our lives and the planet we call home. Are we getting enough of the natural energies of the sun and other stars, the moon, Earth, each other, and our little Earth-stars, the plants?
When feeling overwhelmed or burnt-out, it might be time to put the phone down, go outside, and see what’s blooming before winter comes. If you have a good view of the sky, check in with the moon. Remind yourself that you’re still here, the Earth is still alive, and it’s speaking to you, just like the bees. If only we will learn (or re-learn?) its language, before it’s devoured by a data center’s over-consumption.
To get involved in the active campaign to resist the Port Washington data center, please subscribe to the Milwaukee chapter of PSL. It’s time for a people’s party, and one with decades of history of liberation at that.
Sources:
https://beeculture.com/the-electrical-world-of-the-honey-bee/#:~:text=Researchers%20found%20that%20the%20biophysical,away)%20from%20electrically%20charged%20objects?
BOTANY IN A DAY by Thomas J. Elpel
RODALE’S ILLUSTRATED ENCYLOPEDIA OF HERBS
https://www.datacenterwatch.org/