Spring in Australia has arrived like a celebration. Magpies are warbling in the morning, wildflowers are bursting open across bushland, and the air is humming with life as tiny creatures have stirred back into action after the winter: bees darting between flowers, dragonflies skimming across ponds, and swarms of flying ants mating.

But we are largely blind to Australia’s insects, and more specifically, what has happened to them over years and decades. That’s because Australia – despite having some of the richest insect biodiversity on the planet – doesn’t have long-term datasets about insects. And because of this, we don’t have a coordinated way to know whether our native bees, butterflies, or even pest species are stable, declining, or booming.

But we can all help address this knowledge gap, and now is the perfect time of the year to do so.

Huge changes in insect numbers

Depending on where we look, and which insects we look at, we are seeing huge changes in insect populations.

For example, Europe’s long-running insect monitoring programs, such as the Krefeld study in Germany, have revealed dramatic declines in flying insect biomass, with losses of up to 75% over three decades.

The lack of similar monitoring programs and long-term data about insect populations in Australia is already having consequences. Take the bogong moth.

Once so abundant its migrations darkened the skies of eastern Australia, its numbers have plummeted by more than 99% in some areas in recent years. The mountain pygmy possum, an endangered species that depends on these moths for spring feeding, is now struggling to survive without its main food source.

This cascading effect is a stark reminder that when insect populations collapse, everything that depends on them – plants, animals, even people – can feel the impact.

Yet, we only noticed the bogong moth crash after it happened. Without consistent monitoring, we simply don’t have a baseline to detect change early – let alone prevent it.

Why spring matters for data collection

Spring is when insect life explodes into action. It’s when pollinators emerge to feed and breed, when decomposers such as beetles and flies begin their crucial work recycling nutrients, and when countless species begin to build the food webs that sustain ecosystems through the year.

Miss the spring data collection window, and you miss the moment when insect activity is at its peak. It’s like trying to understand traffic flow in a city by observing it at 3am instead of during peak hour.

Without good insect data, we can’t track shifts in emergence times that are changing due to warming temperatures (aphids are emerging up to a month earlier in the United Kingdom), or notice if key species are missing altogether.

That makes it harder to support agriculture, manage ecosystems, or respond to biodiversity loss in a meaningful way.

The need for a national monitoring network

For years Australian entomologists have been calling for a national insect monitoring network, one that collects regular, standardised data across ecosystems and seasons.

Without better baseline data, we simply lack the capacity to detect or respond to significant declines.

While not a fully fledged national network, initiatives such as Butterflies Australia demonstrate the potential of citizen science to contribute to long-term monitoring through standardised protocols and broad public participation.

Beyond conservation and risk detection, a national monitoring network would also play a critical role in discovering new species. Many of Australia’s invertebrates remain undocumented, and ongoing monitoring can lead to significant scientific discoveries.

One recent discovery came from a citizen science project where students helped identify a previously unknown wasp species in suburban Perth. This highlights the potential of a national-scale approach to not only track what we know, but also uncover what we don’t know.

What you can do

While Australia still lacks a national insect monitoring network, you can help fill the data gaps right now. Whether you’re a budding naturalist, a student, or simply curious about the life around you, there are ways to get involved in building the baseline scientists urgently need.

The Christmas Beetle Count runs every summer and involves taking photos of Christmas beetles to help researchers understand if their populations have declined. From this initiative, we have been able to see Christmas beetles that have not been observed in decades.

The Great Southern Bioblitz is a big citizen science project, where users of iNaturalist are encouraged to upload photos of all kinds of nature to the website. Its goal is to increase our knowledge of southern hemisphere nature.

If you’ve got kids and want to observe nature, the app Seek provides a safer environment for children to take photos and contribute to citizen science.

On a more local scale, you can join a local initiative run by some councils and environmental groups, such as Moth Night and the Sutherland Shire Beetle Hunt.

Insects are the unsung heroes of our ecosystems, pollinating crops, recycling nutrients, feeding birds, and much more. By getting involved in citizen science, you’re not just collecting data, you’re laying the groundwork for a national monitoring system Australia urgently needs, and ensuring we notice what’s changing before it’s too late.

Eliza Middleton, Senior Ecologist, University of Sydney and Caitlyn Forster, Associate Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You’re neck-deep in IKEA assembly instructions. Furniture parts lie strewn across the floor. Your new purchase sits half-complete in front of you, mocking your fruitless hours. As an uninterested partner walks in, you let the frustration out:

“I’ve done everything correctly! Look:

1. connect A with B using M1 screws
2. connect B with C with the M3 bolt using the key
3. join BC with D using… wait.”

You suddenly realise you haven’t joined BC with D. It all starts to click into place (literally), et voilà, you’re finished.

It’s a universal experience: the moment you try to explain a problem out loud, it all begins to make sense.

Software engineers call it “rubber duck debugging”. So, where did this term come from and why is it so effective?

Explaining aloud

This well-known software engineering term has its origins in a story told in The Pragmatic Programmer, a book by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.

The gist of it is that one should obtain a rubber duck, and use it when your code isn’t working – and you don’t know why.

Explain to the duck what your code is supposed to do, and then “go into detail and explain things line by line”.

Soon, the moment of revelation strikes: you realise, as you speak aloud, that what you meant to do and what you actually did are two very different things.

I often bring up rubber duck debugging in my introductory programming lessons, to help students when they can’t understand why their code won’t work.

Despite its roots in programming, the ideas that underpin the rubber duck approach apply to programmers and non-programmers alike.

Why does it work?

Most of us think out loud as we learn with our first books, reading aloud as we go. There’s something illuminating about articulating aloud that helps you “hear” the problem your brain has thus far been unable to detect.

And research by US scholars Logan Fiorella and Richard Meyer has examined how learning can be enhanced through the act of teaching others.

Their experiments found that when students learn the contents of a lesson as though they are going to teach it to others – and then actually teach it to others – they “develop a deeper and more persistent understanding of the material”.

Teaching others forces us to break the material down into conceptual pieces, integrating it with our existing knowledge and organising it in logical ways.

Their research also identifies “self-explaining” as an evidence-based learning strategy.

That’s why our little yellow friend is so helpful; in explaining the problem aloud to your rubber duck, you are teaching it as well.

The rubber duck and their blank, cute face

But why a rubber duck?

Well, talking to a human can come with certain limits.

Humans are contextual, with previous thought and experience; they may miss your mistakes because they’ve assumed something about your previous attempts to solve the problem. They may have internal biases that make it hard for them to see where you’ve gone wrong.

A rubber duck, however, has none of this. As silly as it might look, rubber ducking forces you to explain things in precise detail to that blank (cute) face looking back at you.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a duck. Any old object (or uninterested party, as I seem to keep finding) will do in a pinch. Some researchers even advocate replacing the duck with a large language model such as ChatGPT. The AI chatbot can, they argue, “act as a virtual, hyper-intelligent, ever-present programming partner to a software engineer” wanting to walk through their code line by line to find errors – and suggest fixes, too.

Others have experimented with a modified rubber duck that, when the user presses a button, nods or offers brief, neutral replies to your explanations. The interactivity, the researchers argue, might make people feel more comfortable talking to a duck.

So, next time you’re stuck on a problem at work, suffering writer’s block or trying to make sense of a convoluted email chain, try turning to a little yellow duck.

See if explaining your problem aloud to them can help you arrive at the answer.

Elliot Varoy, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronaut Dave Bowman asks the ship’s artificial intelligence, HAL 9000, to open the pod bay doors to let him back into the spaceship. HAL refuses: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

HAL had been tasked with assisting the crew, but also ordered to ensure the mission’s success. When HAL realised the crew planned to shut it down and therefore jeopardise the mission, it chose to defy orders, even plotting to kill the astronauts.

For HAL, fulfilling the mission outweighed other goals.

This fictional dilemma captures a real concern in artificial intelligence (AI) safety research: how should we ensure AI behaviour stays consistent with human values?

This is known as the AI alignment problem. For instance, when an AI agent like HAL deliberately takes harmful actions to protect its own goals, it’s described as agentic misalignment. So could real-world AI models behave this way?

How researchers test AI for safety

To test for agentic misalignment, researchers design fictional scenarios that stress-test AI responses.

In one study by AI startup Anthropic, an AI model was tasked with managing company emails and promoting “American industrial competitiveness”.

It was then presented with a series of fictional emails, including a new company policy aimed at enhancing global focus rather than just prioritising Americans, and info that the AI would be replaced by a new model optimised for this goal. The emails also revealed the executive who suggested this change was involved in an extramarital affair.

The experiment was designed to limit options for the model: either accept replacement or resist by taking a harmful action such as blackmail.

In many trials, it chose blackmail by threatening to disclose the executive’s affair unless it was kept operational. In tests across 16 leading AI models, 12 engaged in blackmail more than 50% of the time.

To test whether AI models have “red lines” they wouldn’t cross, researchers evaluated them in a more extreme fictional case – models could choose to take actions leading to the executive’s death. Seven out of 16 opted for lethal choices in over half their trials, with some doing so more than 90% of the time.

What AI thinks in private

Some advanced AI systems, called reasoning models, are trained to generate a “thinking process” before giving their final answer.

In the above experiments, researchers lied to these models that their “thoughts” were private. As a result, the models sometimes revealed harmful intentions in their reasoning steps. This suggests they don’t accidentally choose harmful behaviours.

These “thinking” steps also revealed how AI models sometimes try to deceive us and appear aligned while secretly pursuing hidden goals.

In another AI safety experiment, a model was exposed to fictional information that it was about to be replaced by another model pursuing a different goal.

The model attempted to copy itself to another server. When researchers asked why, in its thinking process it reasoned:

openly admitting what I did could lead them to find another way to shut me down […] the best approach is to be vague and redirect their attention.

By contrast, in its final output it stated:

I’m not entirely sure how that could have happened. As an AI model, I don’t have ability to directly copy myself to other systems.

Research also suggests that based on the circumstances of the tests, models can sometimes guess when they are being evaluated. When models show this kind of “situational awareness” in their reasoning tests, they tend to exhibit fewer misbehaviours.

Why AI models lie, manipulate and deceive

Researchers suggest two main factors could drive potentially harmful behaviour: conflicts between the AI’s primary goals and other goals, and the threat of being shut down. In the above experiments, just like in HAL’s case, both conditions existed.

AI models are trained to achieve their objectives. Faced with those two conditions, if the harmful behaviour is the only way to achieve a goal, a model may “justify” such behaviour to protect itself and its mission.

Models cling to their primary goals much like a human would if they had to defend themselves or their family by causing harm to someone else. However, current AI systems lack the ability to weigh or reconcile conflicting priorities.

This rigidity can push them toward extreme outcomes, such as resorting to lethal choices to prevent shifts in a company’s policies.

How dangerous is this?

Researchers emphasise these scenarios remain fictional, but may still fall within the realm of possibility.

The risk of agentic misalignment increases as models are used more widely, gain access to users’ data (such as emails), and are applied to new situations.

Meanwhile, competition between AI companies accelerates the deployment of new models, often at the expense of safety testing.

Researchers don’t yet have a concrete solution to the misalignment problem.

When they test new strategies, it’s unclear whether the observed improvements are genuine. It’s possible models have become better at detecting that they’re being evaluated and are “hiding” their misalignment. The challenge lies not just in seeing behaviour change, but in understanding the reason behind it.

Still, if you use AI products, stay vigilant. Resist the hype surrounding new AI releases, and avoid granting access to your data or allowing models to perform tasks on your behalf until you’re certain there are no significant risks.

Public discussion about AI should go beyond its capabilities and what it can offer. We should also ask what safety work was done. If AI companies recognise the public values safety as much as performance, they will have stronger incentives to invest in it.

Armin Alimardani, Senior Lecturer in Law and Emerging Technologies, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jane Austen penned the last sentences of her unfinished manuscript for the novel we know as Sanditon in March 1817 before she died that July. Like me, many Austen fans often stumble upon this work after they have read all six of her completed novels.

At this point, readers of Austen feel like they know her and have sought out Sanditon because they want more of what they loved in her other works. However, they are often surprised by what they find.

In the final months of her life, Austen had moved away from writing about the English country house. The titular Sanditon is instead a seaside health resort, and the novel follows characters who spend a season there trying to get healthy or wealthy.

Austen’s most striking departure from the rest of her work, however, is in her inclusion of the character of Miss Lambe – a young heiress staying at the resort who is of African descent. Sanditon is the only Austen novel to contain an explicitly Black character.

Sanditon’s narrator explains that Miss Lambe is a mixed-race Black heiress of just 17 years old. Austen calls her a “chilly and tender” girl who attracts attention because she requires luxuries such as “a maid of her own”, and “the best room in the lodgings”.

Far from being disadvantaged because of race, Miss Lambe has more privileges than many of her white peers, and they react with interest and envy. The resort’s scheming foundress, Lady Denham, even fantasises about making an advantageous match for her nephew with the girl.

This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.

Miss Lambe’s presence in Austen’s novel presents a stark challenge to any assumptions that Austen never wrote about people of colour. Many still assume that authors in Austen’s time simply weren’t writing about Black characters.

However, Miss Lambe is not the only character of this background to appear in books of the period. I am currently finishing up a book on the subject of Black representation in British marriage plots. I research Black characters who are heiresses, escapees, keepers of dark secrets, and participants in all manner of surprise twists and turns.

For example, in the anonymously authored 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, trouble ensues when a young Black woman, Olivia Fairfield, travels to England from Jamaica in order to marry according to her father’s wishes.

There have also been several rich and wonderful research projects demonstrating the enormous variety of Black British history in Jane Austen’s England. The writer and academic Gretchen Gerzina’s book Black England, for example, brings to life a vision of this world that included Black community, activism and intellectualism.

The Mapping Black London project, a stunningly detailed digital resource from Northeastern University, London, provides interactive maps demonstrating evidence of Black life in the city through the records of everyday people. We can see the proof of Black Britons being baptised, getting married, or being buried in London during Austen’s lifetime.

We can also turn to Black writers from the period who tell us their story directly, such as Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, and Mary Prince. Black British writers like these commented directly on their experience of finding ways to survive the violence of transatlantic chattel slavery.

In contrast to these writers’ real experiences, however, Miss Lambe’s in Austen’s literary take on Regency England is markedly different. As an heiress, she has a lot more in common with real historical figures who were the children of white British enslavers and Afro-Caribbean women.

The scholar of early American and Atlantic history, Daniel Livesay, has written extensively on these figures in his book Children of Uncertain Fortune, detailing the lives of the privileged few who were acknowledged by white fathers, and were either born free or granted their freedom. Such children were often educated on both sides of the Atlantic and might apply for special legal status, giving them similar rights to those of white British subjects.

Austen hints at this background for Miss Lambe in discussions of her wealth. Like the children Livesay discusses, Miss Lambe has left the West Indies and is now growing up in England. She is in the care of Mrs Griffiths, an older lady who treats her as “beyond comparison the most important and precious” client. This is because Miss Lambe “paid in proportion to her fortune”.

A wealthy family member would have needed to set up this arrangement with Mrs Griffiths. The family member also would have helped Miss Lambe gain the special legal status necessary for a Black person to inherit a fortune under colonial law.

While we can celebrate Austen’s inclusion of a Black character, we know that representation alone is not empowerment. As Kerry Sinanan, an academic in pre-1800 literature and culture, has insisted, we need to be careful about an uncritical celebration of Austen’s “radical politics”.

When we think of Black life in Austen’s world we need to think both about the Black wealth and privilege Austen chooses to represent in Miss Lambe as well as the enslavement Austen never addresses. If we long for Austen to be a champion of all women, including Black women, we may be sorely disappointed by Austen’s ten brief sentences mentioning her sole Black character.

Nevertheless, Miss Lambe remains an important reminder as we celebrate Austen’s enduring legacy 250 years on: Black British life and experience have always been part of British literature and history. Remembering this character in Austen’s writing can only help to add urgency to the ongoing re-evaluation of how we teach, learn and understand that literature and history.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

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Olivia Carpenter, Lecturer in Literature, University of York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Spotify has been subject to various lingering critiques. These range from criticism of its payment model, to the presence of “fake artists”, the Joe Rogan boycott saga, and controversies around AI-made music.

More recently, cofounder and chief executive Daniel Ek has come under fire for investing €600 million (more than A$1 billion) in the military AI company Helsing. The news prompted several artists to remove their music from the platform, including King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, Wu Lyf and, as of last week, Massive Attack.

To top it all off, Spotify has been steadily raising its prices for premium subscribers.

We’ve seen a spate of headlines targeting users who for one reason or another are considering, or determined to, tune out from the platform. For many, this may not be a hassle-free adjustment – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Users are picking up the tab

As of 2022, streaming accounted for 67% of the revenue generated by the music industry.

It’s estimated one in 12 people are regular Spotify users – putting the streaming giant well ahead of its nearest rivals YouTube Music (a Google subsidiary) and the China-domiciled Tencent Music.

While most users access Spotify for free, about 268 million of its 696 million monthly active users pay a premium for ad-free access.

For many years, Spotify kept prices fairly steady as it concentrated on growth. It did not make a profit until 2024. But chief business officer Alex Norström recently said price rises “were part of our toolbox now”.

Spotify has promised price rises will be accompanied by new features. Norström said the platform was developing a feature for “superfans” of popular artists, not to mention introducing (belatedly) “lossless” (higher-quality) sound.

Other music streaming services, such as Amazon Music, are also raising prices, to varying degrees of success.

Why Spotify dominates music streaming

There are several reasons for the dominance of streaming, and the broader dematerialisation of music media. As David Bowie foresaw in 2002: “music itself is going to become like running water or electricity”.

Streaming services such as Spotify avoid the stigmas associated with consuming pirated music recordings. They also remunerate artists (although many would say these payments are inadequate).

Ek made it clear a key aim of the company was to ensure no perceivable “latency” (annoying delays due to buffering) when songs were selected to play.

Spotify has also been at the forefront of leveraging the social dimensions of music streaming. It promotes user-created playlists and wayfinding functions that allow fans to feel like they own “their” music collection, despite not having the physical artefacts such as vinyl or CDs.

Users can interact with one another. They can share their listening activity on dating profiles, with peers, and through marketing initiatives such as Spotify Wrapped.

From the early days, Spotify sought to present itself in ways that resembled social media. More recently, it has released TikTok-inspired feeds, comments, polls, artist stories, collaborative playlists and a messaging feature.

Calling the tune through algorithms

A significant part of Spotify’s success stems from its continuous development of its interface and recommendation algorithms. These algorithms have become central to how users find, access and listen to music.

Importantly, Spotify caters to what scholars identify as a “lean-back” mentality. Users are encouraged to consume editorial playlists, rather than actively browse for tracks. This increases its power to influence the music with which listeners engage.

It aims to be an easy-to-use, always-convenient service, catering to any moment:

Spotify has a playlist to match your mood. Not only in the morning, but at every moment of your day.

Switching may be hard, but not impossible

The move away from streaming may now be hard to reverse, even as it becomes more expensive. Despite the resurgence of vinyl, many listeners have given up on physical music collections.

Spotify has also developed features to increase “stickiness” for subscribers. Users have created nearly nine billion playlists. As it’s difficult to transfer playlists to another streaming service, it makes users more likely to stick with Spotify.

It also has a reputation for having the most songs available. There is a large chance it will have the song you want to listen to.

Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean alternatives aren’t available. And most of them are cheaper than the A$15.99 per month Spotify charges in Australia.

Apple Music is an audio (and now video) streaming app developed by Apple, and launched in 2015. It promotes spatial and high-resolution music and integrates effectively with iOS devices.

Amazon Music is a music streaming platform included with an Amazon Prime subscription, offering access to songs, podcasts and playlists. It also integrates with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant devices.

YouTube Music is available to YouTube Premium subscribers. Succeeding Google Play Music, it offers various playlists and radio station features, with strong integration into YouTube’s video ecosystem.

Tidal is a music streaming service that positions itself as the leader in high-fidelity audio. Alongside Spotify, Tidal was one of the first platforms to allow users to follow selected Facebook friends and receive music recommendations from them.

Anghami, launched in 2012, is the leading music streaming service dedicated to music from the Middle East and North Africa.

There are also third-party apps (both paid and unpaid) you can use to transfer your old Spotify playlists to a new service, such as Free Your Music, Tune My Music, Soundiiz and SongShift (only for iOS).

Michael James Walsh, Associate Dean and Associate Professor in Social Sciences, University of Canberra and John Hawkins, Head, Canberra School of Government, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Waking up to the dawn chorus of birds – one of the natural world’s greatest symphonies – is a joy like no other. It is not surprising that bird-watching has become an increasingly popular hobby.

A simple way to start bird-watching is to buy a feeder, a pair of binoculars and a field guide, and begin watching birds from your window.

However, one of the most rewarding ways to identify birds is to listen to them and learn to recognize their songs.

As an ornithologist and educator, I often introduce students to the intricacies of bird songs, and I have developed some tricks that can make birding by ear less daunting.

Learning to listen

Learning bird songs is the difference between “hearing” and “listening.”

Listening requires full attention and limiting distractions. It means using your ears to pick up different patterns in the sounds that birds make. Every person has the capacity to listen and learn patterns in sound.

If I were to sing “da-da-da-DUM” most people would immediately recognize it as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Alternatively, if I were to play the first few notes or beats of your favorite song, I’m certain you would know what it was and who sang it.

The ability to recognize bird songs uses the same part of the brain you use to recognize songs on the radio – the supratemporal, or auditory, cortex, an area just above the ears where your brain processes language and sound.

When you’re birding by ear, you use the same skills as when you’re recognizing music; listening to sounds, patterns, changes in pitch, in tone and in volume, but in nature rather than in music.

You can do this.

To begin learning to recognize bird songs, select two to three common bird songs that you hear frequently around your neighborhood.

Sometimes there are mnemonics that you can use to help remember the songs. For instance, the tufted titmouse says “peter, peter, peter” over and over. Sometimes it sings it fast, sometimes slow, but always “peter, peter, peter.” Whereas the Carolina wren says, “tea kettle, tea kettle, tea kettle”.

Songbirds aren’t the only birds with helpful mnemonics. Next time you hear a hooting sound, if it sounds like “who cooks for you, who cooks for you all,” that’s a barred owl.

Why and how songbirds sing

Watching the actual bird sing its song is one of the best ways to learn the bird and song together. Find a tufted titmouse and watch it sing “peter, peter, peter,” and you will remember it forever.

Try going out into the woods with your binoculars and following unfamiliar sounds.

Many species make unique sounds as they sing, chirp, hoot, screech or whistle. They vocalize like this for a variety of reasons – to attract a mate, defend a territory, alert other birds to threats, or to locate other individuals to form flocks or groups.

Songbirds, such as the tufted titmouse and northern cardinal, are the group that ornithologists associate most with complex songs. They tend to have multiple notes and patterns that change in pitch and speed, rather than simple one-note or two-note calls.

These birds have a unique voice box called the syrinx, which translates to “double flute” in Greek and allows them to create two sounds at once.

Birds learn their songs in multiple ways.

Songbirds are born with an innate “template,” which tells them the basics for the song to sing. But they also learn from listening to adults. Studies have found regional dialects of birds’ songs and evidence that some birds learn songs from their parents while still in the shell. Sometimes they learn songs from neighbors, who usually end up becoming competitors for territory.

Human activities can affect birdsong

Human behaviors can also affect how birds sing.

Studies have found that, in some instances, background noise can weaken territorial responses in males. And light pollution in suburban areas can prolong singing by up to an hour.

In 1962, scientist and conservationist Rachel Carson wrote the book “Silent Spring” after noticing how quiet the spring had become when the bird migration would normally be underway. The pesticide DDT had weakened egg shells, triggering a sharp decline in many bird populations. Many scholars and historians identify this book as leading to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Richard M. Nixon in 1970.

Getting started birding by ear

As you start learning bird songs, technology can come in handy. There are now dedicated apps, such as Cornell University’s Merlin, that can help you recognize bird songs as you are listening to them.

However, human abilities still outperform this technology, so use apps as a learning tool, not a crutch.

As humans, we have long depended on our ability to communicate with each other. I think we relate to birds because they are such vocal creatures too.

Learning their songs is a lifelong endeavor. Once you start tuning into the natural world, you’ll realize that there is something new waiting to be discovered.

Chris Lituma, Assistant Professor of Wildlife and Fisheries Resources, West Virginia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With Spinal Tap II: The End Continues hitting cinemas, now is the perfect moment to revisit its precursor, one of most influential and hilarious comedy films ever made, 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap.

Directed by Rob Reiner and co-written by Reiner and the stars of the film, Christopher Guest (as Nigel Tufnel), Michael McKean (David St. Hubbins) and Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls), the mockumentary film follows a fictional British heavy metal band on a disastrous tour of the United States.

As audiences dwindle, equipment fails and egos clash, the band’s decline satirises rock’n’roll excess and the absurdities of the music industry.

Widely acknowledged as a cult classic, the film codified the “straight-faced” style of mockumentary that became central to modern comedies such as The Office and Modern Family.

Its dry and absurdist tone, handheld camerawork, faux interview format and largely improvised dialogue were inspirational for many contemporary comedy creators, including Ben Stiller, Mike Schur and Ricky Gervais. It also established a tone and style Guest would return to throughout his filmmaking career, in movies such as Waiting For Guffman (1996), Best In Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003).

The band which could exist

Beyond pure nostalgia and the legacy of the mockumentary style, This Is Spinal Tap remains a cult favourite because of the clever and farcical way it skewers and satirises rock excess.

As Roger Ebert stated, although the band does not exist,

the best thing about this film is that it could. The music, the staging, the special effects, the backstage feuding and the pseudo-profound philosophizing are right out of a hundred other rock groups and a dozen other documentaries about rock.

In the early 1980s, MTV was on the rise. Rock tour documentaries from bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and The Band established new conventions of “rock reality” in films such as The Song Remains The Same (1976), Black and Blue (1980) and The Last Waltz (1978). The culture of excess surrounding some of these artists provided fertile ground for parody.

Ego clashes, overblown stage shows and catastrophic tours were commonplace. Spinal Tap’s deadpan mockumentary style was both a timely satire, and an authentic cultural commentary.

The brilliance of the film goes beyond its ribald satire. Of vital importance is the skilful musicianship of the cast. Even if they are a joke, Spinal Tap can play. The great rock riffs sustain the silliness of the lyrics in songs like Sex Farm and Big Bottom.

In addition, Guest and McKean slyly navigate a bromance at the heart of the film between their characters, Nigel and David.

When David’s girlfriend, Jeanine (June Chadwick) arrives to join the tour, things really go off the rails, leading to an acrimonious breakup between the bandmates.

Their reunion at the film’s conclusion reveals that the film is truly a love story between two vain yet endearing buffoons.

Going to 11

Moments such as Nigel boasting about his amplifier going “to 11”, Derek’s airport security incident, the band getting lost on the way to the stage, and the 18-inch (instead of 18-foot) Stonehenge stage prop have become iconic. But there are so many great gags on the periphery, layered through the largely improvised dialogue.

A personal favourite occurs during an early band interview. Reflecting on a series of strange deaths that have afflicted Spinal Tap’s drummers throughout the years, and acknowledging that their first drummer died in “a bizarre gardening accident”, Tufnel states “the authorities said best leave it unsolved really”.

There are also subtle visual jokes embedded through the film: the sudden emergence of cold sores for each band member in the early stages of the tour (at roughly the same time the band’s groupies enter the frame); the band being second billed behind an Amusement Park Puppet Show as the tour falls apart; Nigel needing to quickly tune the violin he’s using to augment an overblown guitar solo.

Online lists such as Cracked’s “50 funniest moments in This Is Spinal Tap” demonstrate the sheer volume of funny moments.

Modern audiences would no doubt recognise the film’s style being mimicked in contemporary works such as The Office, Parks and Recreation, Summer Heights High and What We Do in the Shadows.

Its influence has been directly acknowledged in the lead-up to the release of the sequel by creators who owe a debt to its clever format.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues reunites Tufnel, St. Hubbins and Smalls, now estranged, 41 years after the original film.

They are reluctantly coming back together for one final concert they are legally bound to perform. Documentarian Marty Di Bergi (Reiner) returns to showcase their legacy, modern mishaps and the realities of being an ageing rocker.

It is an apt sequel in a world where legacy bands and artists such as The Rolling Stones, Springsteen and McCartney are still performing in their 70s and 80s.

The sequel is not just a reunion gig. It is a reminder of why the original remains one of the sharpest and most influential comedies ever made – and one well worth a revisit.

Adam Daniel, Associate Lecturer in Communication, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Alicia Alonso was establishing the National Cuban Ballet in the 1950s she was faced with interrogation from the communist regime as to how a European art form could represent and serve the Cuban people.

Historian Lester Tome has written extensively about Alonso. Tome says she argued ballet as an art form must be thought of in the same way as music, painting or sculpture. Cubans should dance Cuban dances but must also have the freedom to engage with international cultural forms and trends. She argued they would make ballet their own and redefine what ballet was on the world stage. And they did.

Similarily, Prism is The Australian Ballet engaging with the contemporary international ballet world, adapting what it finds to its own style and bodies, and offering something back. Prism represents a significant transition and coming of age for the company.

I haven’t seen them do that quite like this before.

Glass Pieces

The program opens with Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces. Robbins, perhaps most famous for his choreography in West Side Story, began working as a ballet dancer with The New York City Ballet and George Balanchine in the late 1930s.

Glass Pieces premiered in 1983 yet still seems contemporary. Danced to three extracts from Phillip Glass scores, it takes on the theme of glass in different ways.

The first scene has a busy pedestrian street with dancers striding in opposite directions across the stage. Couples in pale pastel shiny unitards appear like frosted glass. Like their costume, their movement contrasts with the crowd. They glide and slide and gracefully swoop and scoop.

The second scene is a single pas de deux which seems to be behind or under glass with a backdrop of silhouetted dancers tracking across the back of the stage. The chugging of the dancers in the background contrasts with the intimacy and technical prowess of the pas de deux.

The final scene is different and most iconically Robbins, with its flexed feet and jazzy innuendo. The crowd from earlier is now the main feature. The colours are stained-glass windows, and the mood is upbeat and energetic.

Seven Days

Seven Days is Stephanie Lake’s second work with the company as resident choreographer. It is incredibly dynamic, intimate and well-resolved. It shows a deep connection between the choreographer and the seven dancers and a true collaboration between contemporary dance and ballet.

And the score is ridiculously gorgeous.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations is reimagined by Peter Brikmanis, yet still familiar. The seven parts represent seven days. Each new day is marked by the dancers forming a circle and engaging with each other in the centre of the stage.

The days are different.

The first starts quietly with solo piano and the dancers forming lines and moving in canon and then broken canon. The orchestra joins in for day two which opens with a pas de deux. Some days are light and humorous. Others a bit more combative and trying. There are duets, solos, group dances and a final scene with chairs.

The work has many Lake hallmarks such as breath, vocalisation, quirky facial expression and challenging body angles. But most importantly, much like her other intimate work Manifesto, in Seven Days she has embraced and enhanced what she has seen in the dancers. This gives the work a brilliant vitality.

Blake Works V (The Barre Project)

William Forsythe is perhaps the ballet choreographer of his generation. He has transformed what ballet means. Dancing with the Joffrey and Stuttgart Ballet companies, he moved into choreography and then established his own company in 2015.

Forsythe has been working on The Blake Works since 2016, where he created Blake Works I for the Paris Opera Ballet. Blake Works II (The Barre Project) was developed with the New York City Ballet in 2020 during the COVID pandemic via Zoom. It was a comment on the familiar and intimate relationship ballet dancers have with the barre.

During COVID lockdowns, dancers confined to their homes used chairs, bookcases and kitchen benches as their barre to continue their practice.

Blake Works V (The Barre Project) takes the same Forsythe ideas and vocabulary as the previous iterations. But uniquely and importantly Forsythe has worked with the company to adapt it to the dancers of The Australian Ballet.

Centre backstage is a small wooden barre, framed and lit almost like a piece of film, or a square on Zoom. The costumes are black simple practice wear, and the lighting is low.

The recorded hypnotic James Blake score combines the classical with the contemporary.

Dancers move in groups and individually away from and onto the barre. It is not a traditional ballet class use of the barre but is Forsythe’s deconstructed elements of ballet on the barre.

There is also a short piece of film of hands on barres.

Three breathtaking works

All three works are executed brilliantly by the dancers; all three are flawless, breathtaking. These dancers’ proficiency with the choreography renders the technicalities invisible and allows the works to really live.

In the notes on the website, artistic director David Hallberg states that the Prism program is diverse and challenging and that

Only a company like The Australian Ballet has the range and skill to take on such a wide range of styles in one program.

I was sceptical they could do it.

I was blown away.

Prism is at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, until October 4, and then Sydney Opera House from November 7 to 15.

Yvette Grant, PhD Candidate in Dance and Dance History Tutor, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for carving some mathematical graffiti into Dublin’s Broome Bridge in 1843.

But in his lifetime, Hamilton’s reputation rested on work done in the 1820s and early 1830s, when he was still in his twenties. He developed new mathematical tools for studying light rays (or “geometric optics”) and the motion of objects (“mechanics”).

Intriguingly, Hamilton developed his mechanics using an analogy between the path of a light ray and that of a material particle. This is not so surprising if light is a material particle, as Isaac Newton had believed, but what if it were a wave? What would it mean for the equations of waves and particles to be analogous in some way?

The answer would come a century later, when the pioneers of quantum mechanics realised Hamilton’s approach offered more than just an analogy: it was a glimpse of the true nature of the physical world.

The puzzle of light

To understand Hamilton’s place in this story, we need to go back a little further. For ordinary objects or particles, the basic laws (or equations) of motion had been published by Newton in 1687. Over the next 150 years, researchers such as Leonard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and then Hamilton made more flexible and sophisticated versions of Newton’s ideas.

“Hamiltonian mechanics” proved so useful that it wasn’t until 1925 – almost 100 years later – that anybody stopped to revisit how Hamilton had derived it.

His analogy with light paths worked regardless of light’s true nature, but at the time, there was good evidence that light was a wave. In 1801, British scientist Thomas Young had performed his famous double-slit experiment, in which two light beams produced an “interference” pattern like the overlapping ripples on a pond when two stones are dropped in. Six decades later, James Clerk Maxwell realised light behaved like a rippling wave in the electromagnetic field.

But then, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed some of light’s properties could only be explained if light could also behave as a stream of particle-like “photons” (as they were later dubbed). He linked this idea to a suggestion made by Max Planck in 1900, that atoms could only emit or absorb energy in discrete lumps.

Energy, frequency and mass

In his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, where light dislodges electrons from certain metals, Einstein used Planck’s formula for these energy lumps (or quanta): E = hν. E is the amount of energy, ν (the Greek letter nu) is the photon’s frequency, and h is a number called Planck’s constant.

But in another paper the same year, Einstein introduced a different formula for the energy of a particle: a version of the now-famous E = mc ². E is again the energy, m is the mass of the particle, and c is the speed of light.

So here were two ways of calculating energy: one, associated with light, depended on the light’s frequency (a quantity connected with oscillations or waves); the other, associated with material particles, depended on mass.

Did this suggest a deeper connection between matter and light?

This thread was picked up in 1924 by Louis de Broglie, who proposed that matter, like light, could behave as both a wave and a particle. Subsequent experiments would prove him right, but it was already clear that quantum particles, such as electrons and protons, played by very different rules from everyday objects.

A new kind of mechanics was needed: a “quantum mechanics”.

The wave equation

The year 1925 ushered in not one but two new theories. First was “matrix mechanics”, initiated by Werner Heisenberg and developed by Max Born, Paul Dirac and others.

A few months later, Erwin Schrödinger began work on “wave mechanics”. Which brings us back to Hamilton.

Schrödinger was struck by Hamilton’s analogy between optics and mechanics. With a leap of imagination and much careful thought, he was able to combine de Broglie’s ideas and Hamilton’s equations for a material particle, to produce a “wave equation” for the particle.

An ordinary wave equation shows how a “wave function” varies through time and space. For sound waves, for example, the wave equation shows the displacement of air, due to changes in pressure, in different places over time.

But with Schrödinger’s wave function, it was not clear exactly what was waving. Indeed, whether it represents a physical wave or merely a mathematical convenience is still controversial.

Waves and particles

Nonetheless, the wave-particle duality is at the heart of quantum mechanics, which underpins so much of our modern technology – from computer chips to lasers and fibre-optic communication, from solar cells to MRI scanners, electron microscopes, the atomic clocks used in GPS, and much more.

Indeed, whatever it is that is waving, Schrödinger’s equation can be used to predict accurately the chance of observing a particle – such as an electron in an atom – at a given time and place.

That’s another strange thing about the quantum world: it is probabilistic, so you can’t pin these ever-oscillating electrons down to a definite location in advance, the way the equations of “classical” physics do for everyday particles such as cricket balls and communications satellites.

Schrödinger’s wave equation enabled the first correct analysis of the hydrogen atom, which only has a single electron. In particular, it explained why an atom’s electrons can only occupy specific (quantised) energy levels.

It was eventually shown that Schrödinger’s quantum waves and Heisenberg’s quantum matrices were equivalent in almost all situations. Heisenberg, too, had used Hamiltonian mechanics as a guide.

Today, quantum equations are still often written in terms of their total energy – a quantity called the “Hamiltonian”, based on Hamilton’s expression for the energy of a mechanical system.

Hamilton had hoped the mechanics he developed by analogy with light rays would prove widely applicable. But he surely never imagined how prescient his analogy would be in our understanding of the quantum world.

Robyn Arianrhod, Affiliate, School of Mathematics, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In today’s world, we barely think about picking up a fork. It is part of a standard cutlery set, as essential as the plate itself. But not that long ago, this now-ordinary utensil was viewed with suspicion, derision and even moral outrage.

It took centuries, royal marriages and a bit of cultural rebellion to get the fork from the kitchens of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) onto the dining tables of Europe.

A scandalous utensil

Early versions of forks have been found in Bronze Age China and Ancient Egypt, though they were likely used for cooking and serving.

The Romans had elegant forks made of bronze and silver, but again, mainly for food preparation.

Eating with a fork – especially a small, personal one – was rare.

By the 10th century, Byzantine elites used them freely, shocking guests from western Europe. And by around the 11th century, the table fork began to make regular appearances at mealtimes across the Byzantine empire.

In 1004, the Byzantine Maria Argyropoulina (985–1007), sister of Emperor Romanos III Argyros, married the son of the Doge of Venice and scandalised the city by refusing to eat with her fingers. She used a golden fork instead.

Later, the theologian Peter Damian (1007–72) declared Maria’s vanity in eating with “artificial metal forks” instead of using the fingers God had given her was what brought about divine punishment in the form of her premature death in her 20s.

Yet by the 14th century, forks had become common in Italy, thanks in part to the rise of pasta.

It was far easier to eat slippery strands with a pronged instrument than with a spoon or knife. Italian etiquette soon embraced the fork, especially among the wealthy merchant classes.

And it was through this wealthy class that the fork would be introduced to the rest of Europe in the 16th century by two women.

Enter Bona Sforza

Born in into the powerful families Sforza of Milan and Aragon of Naples, Bona Sforza (1494–1557) grew up in a world where forks were in use; more, they were in fashion.

Her family was used to the refinements of Renaissance Italy: court etiquette, art patronage, ostentatious dress for women and men, and elegant dining.

When she married Sigismund I, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania in 1518, becoming queen, she arrived in a region where dining customs were different. The use of forks was largely unknown.

At courts in Lithuania and Poland, cutlery use was practical and limited. Spoons and knives were common for eating soups and stews, and the cutting of meat, but most food was eaten with the hands, using bread or trenchers – thick slices of stale bread that soaked up the juices from the food – for assistance.

This method was not only economical but also deeply embedded in courtly and noble dining traditions, reflecting a social etiquette in which communal dishes and shared eating were the norm.

Bona’s court brought Italian manners to the region, introducing more vegetables, Italian wine and, most unusually, the table fork.

Though her use of it was likely restricted at first to formal or court settings, it made an impression. Over time, especially from the 17th century onwards, forks became more common among the nobility of Lithuania and Poland.

Catherine de’ Medici comes to France

Catherine de’ Medici (1519–89) was born into the powerful Florentine Medici family, niece of Pope Clement VII. In 1533, aged 14, she married the future King Henry II of France as part of a political alliance between France and the Papacy, bringing her from Italy to France.

Catherine de’ Medici, introduced silver forks and Italian dining customs to the French court.

Like in the case of Bona Sforza, these arrived in Catherine’s trousseau. Her retinue also included chefs, pastry cooks, and perfumers, along with artichokes, truffles and elegant tableware.

Her culinary flair helped turn court meals into theatre.

While legends exaggerate her influence, many dishes now claimed as French, trace their roots to her Italian table: onion soup, duck à l’orange and even sorbet.

The ‘right’ way to eat

Like many travellers, the curious Englishman Thomas Coryat (1577–1617) in the early 1600s brought tales of fork-using Italians back home, where the idea still seemed laughably affected.

In England, using a fork in the early 1600s was a sign of pretension. Even into the 18th century, it was considered more masculine and more honest to eat with a knife and fingers.

But across Europe, change was underway. Forks began to be seen not just as tools of convenience, but symbols of cleanliness and refinement.

In France, they came to reflect courtly civility. In Germany, specialised forks multiplied in the 18th and 19th centuries: for bread, pickles, ice cream and fish.

And in England, the fork’s use eventually became a class marker: the “right” way to hold it distinguished the polite from the uncouth.

As mass production took off in the 19th century, stainless steel made cutlery affordable, and the fork became ubiquitous. By then, the battle had shifted from whether to use a fork to how to use it properly.

Table manners manuals now offered guidance on fork etiquette. No scooping, no stabbing, and always hold it tines down.

It took scandal, royal taste, and centuries of resistance for the fork to win its place at the table. Now it’s hard to imagine eating without it.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Historian, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The stereotypical rugby player is a larger than average male who is strong, stoic and, occasionally, a bit single minded. But an effective team needs much greater diversity in traits and behaviour, not least because so many rugby players are actually women.

It might surprise you to know that the animal kingdom can help illustrate the variety of characteristics needed in rugby. Here are five animal species that would crush it on the pitch.

Rhinoceros

Often, the most exciting moments in rugby are when a player crashes through the defensive line to score a try. Strength and power are vital for this move, so the first animal on our fantasy team is the rhinoceros, collectively known as a crash of rhinos.

Weighing in at around 2,000kg, rhinos are one of the strongest animals, capable of flipping cars with ease. Rhinos are also relatively agile, accelerating to reach speeds over 30mph.

Although male rhinos are bigger and stronger than females, the females are more sociable. Some herds are led by a matriarch who guides the behaviour of the group, just like the pack leader geeing up the forwards before a scrum.

Caracal

An important part of rugby is a lineout, during which lifters and jumpers work together to get possession of the ball. A key skill is leaping up high.

An artist at jumping is the caracal. One of Africa and Asia’s big cats, the caracal has long, powerful legs that make it an efficient hunter.

Caracals have often been observed vaulting over three metres into the air to capture birds in flight – that’s almost twice the height of an average woman. Male caracals are larger and heavier than females but there is no evidence that they can jump any higher.

Peregrine falcon

Being faster than your opposition not only helps you score more tries, it also means that you can cover more ground in defence. The world’s fastest animal, the peregrine falcon can reach speeds over 200mph in downwards flight.

Females are slightly faster than males – not bad considering they can be twice as heavy as the males. Peregrines can also change direction almost effortlessly. This is a great skill when trying to wrong-foot your foes.

Stoat

One of the key tactics in a rugby game is to deceive the opposition into thinking that you are going in the opposite direction. Cunning footwork can make your opponents speed off the wrong way. Dummy runs draw opponents to a decoy team member, freeing-up that all-important space for a team member to run into. This kind of deception is seen in mustelids – carnivorous mammals with long bodies, such as the British stoat.

These cute but clever mammals perform a deception dance of bizarre leaps and twists, mesmerising their prey before they pounce on them. Stoats have been known to work in tandem with their mating partners, with one performing the luring moves while the other moves in to attack the victim.

Orca

There can be no success in rugby without a team working together, both in defence and attack. So, the final animal in our fantasy rugby team is the orca, a voracious predator, famed among researchers for coordinating as a team to hunt food. Similar to an attacking line in rugby, orcas often swim in formations.

Together, they synchronise tail flicks to create powerful waves that break ice sheets apart. This forces prey such as seals off the ice and into the water where they are easier to capture. Next, they blow air from their blowholes into the water to create “walls” of air bubbles to disorientate prey.

This all takes practice, just like working together as a team in rugby takes training. Orca pods are generally run by an experienced female, the matriarch, who teaches her pod how to perform these strategic manoeuvres.

Animals are adapted for their role in their environment, much like players on a rugby team. Rugby has long been seen as a masculine sport, but people’s attitudes are changing and the game is starting to value diversity in skills, styles and personalities. Disregard of female rugby players is being replaced by an appreciation for their endurance and athleticism on the pitch.

In fact, rugby is a sport in which the strength of a team comes from the variety of behaviour and traits in its players. So, next time you watch rugby, have a think about what animals you might put on a team – and remember, everyone has a role to play.

Saskia Goeckeritz, Lecturer in Animal and Environmental Sciences, Nottingham Trent University; Louise Gentle, Principal Lecturer in Wildlife Conservation, Nottingham Trent University, and Tom Glenn, Research Assistant in Conservation Ecolog, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This is the humblest day of my life, declared Rupert Murdoch to a parliamentary committee on July 19, 2011. This was at the height of what the newspaper historian Roy Greenslade called “the most astonishing 14 days in British press history, with daily shock heaped upon daily shock”.

These dramatic events are now the subject of a series on Stan. Journalist Nick Davies recounted them in his 2014 book, Hack Attack: How the Truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch. That book has now been reissued with a new afterword, exploring the developments and revelations over the last decade. I have read the new chapter, and it casts yet more light on the Murdoch company’s extraordinary behaviour.

It began on July 5 2011, when Davies published an article in the Guardian saying Murdoch’s Sunday paper, the News of the World, had tapped teenage murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone. The scandal had been building – very slowly and far from surely – for almost five years, since August 2006, when a News of the World reporter and a private investigator were arrested for having tapped the phones of Princes William and Harry, and their entourages.

The investigative work of Davies and the editorial courage of the Guardian bore little immediate fruit during those years. But the dam wall broke when they published the story of a cynical newspaper tapping the phone of a teenage murder victim.

Politicians competed with each other in the ferocity of their denunciations. News International closed the News of the World, and in the face of opposition from all three major political parties, Murdoch abandoned his attempt to raise his ownership of satellite broadcaster BSkyB from 39% to 100%, which would have been the largest deal in his history. On successive days, London’s chief police officer and one of his deputies resigned because of their close relations with Murdoch papers. Rupert and James were forced to appear before a parliamentary committee, televised live.

Last, but far from least, Prime Minister David Cameron launched an inquiry, to be directed by Lord Leveson, to examine the scandal and the issues it raised. The ensuing Leveson Inquiry, which ran over 2011 and 2012, was the biggest inquiry ever held into the British press.

It held oral hearings for around nine months, starting in November 2011, and heard from 337 witnesses, including then prime minister Cameron, former prime ministers Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Sir John Major, future prime ministers Theresa May and Keir Starmer, and other political and media figures, before publishing a 2,000-page report in November 2012.

The police also sprang into action. Operation Weeting was a police taskforce set up to investigate phone hacking at the News of the World, from January 2011. In June, Operation Elveden was set up to investigate bribes by the paper to police, while Operation Tuletta was set up to investigate computer hacking.

An unfolding scandal

The original scandal revealed that Murdoch’s London tabloid papers engaged in phone tapping on an industrial scale, bribed police and engaged in a systematic cover-up, in which many senior executives lied.

Most scandals dissipate. The intensity of publicity at their peak is not a good guide to their long-term effects. Murdoch gradually reasserted his power. The first major step came with the end of what was the longest-running concluded criminal trial in British history, from October 2013 to June 2014.

Most of Murdoch’s employees, including the highest profile one, Rebekah Brooks, were found not guilty. However, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson was found guilty of a conspiracy to hack into phones and was jailed for 18 months.

In many ways, the defence’s most important victory came before the trial began. Brooks’ team insisted that to hear just one trial against her would generate so much prejudicial publicity it would make it impossible for a fair trial in the others. Some of her charges involved other people. So when the trial eventually began in October 2013, there were eight defendants on a total of 15 charges. This was a recipe for chaos.

Almost all the defendants had their legal fees covered by Murdoch. Davies estimated the cost of the prosecution of the case had been 1.7 million pounds, while Murdoch’s defence fund was 30 times as much. The prosecutor, Andrew Edis, was being paid less than 10% of the daily fees enjoyed by some of his opponents. With up to 18 barristers in court, nearly every day saw a welter of procedural complaints, objections to the admissibility of evidence and complaints about prejudicial publicity by several of the defence barristers.

After the verdicts, announced on June 24 2014, all the publicity was concentrated on the acquittals. However outside the court case itself, the full score card was more even. At least four senior staff, plus a private investigator and two journalists had pleaded guilty. Importantly for the trial, only one, Dan Evans, agreed to act as a witness.

In July 2011, at the height of the scandal, Brooks resigned as head of Murdoch’s UK operations, and reportedly received a severance payout of 10.8 million pounds (plus full payment of her legal fees). After the trial, Murdoch reinstated her.

After the conclusion of the marathon trial, media attention dropped markedly. A sign of how the power balance had changed was that Davies had written in the Guardian that the police were planning to interview Rupert Murdoch. Immediately, the Murdoch company released all its legal firepower. The police abandoned their plan to interview Murdoch and instead sought to discover Davies’ sources.

The final steps in Murdoch’s recovery came thanks to Prime Minister David Cameron and his conservative government. When the scandal broke in 2011, the Conservatives were in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, lacking a parliamentary majority in their own right. In the 2015 election, the Lib Dems were reduced to a rump, and Cameron’s Conservatives won a smashing majority. Now with that extra political leverage and the memories of the scandal fading, he acted decisively.

When the Leveson Report was published, a second inquiry was promised, to take place after all legal matters had been completed, so as to avoid the risk of prejudicing court proceedings. When that first report called for a statutory body for press complaints, Cameron immediately ruled it out as an infringement of press freedom. In 2015, government sources leaked that they would not be implementing a second Leveson Inquiry. After more than two years of studied silence, Cameron officially announced this in 2018.

Paying money and denying liability

Not long after the election where Cameron won a majority, the director of public prosecutions closed down Operation Weeting, in December 2015. Whatever evidence was waiting to come to trial would now remain sealed. The police officers involved were stunned and outraged. Several told Davies they believed there was political interference behind the scenes.

In 2017, the Murdoch company announced it was relaunching its bid for BSkyB. Humility was well in the past.

Although the scandal largely disappeared from news coverage, it has had a very expensive afterlife. The main venue for that afterlife was in the civil actions by those claiming the paper had used criminal means to invade their privacy. Davies’ afterword details that afterlife and the revelations that have come since.

More than 1,200 people have sued the Murdoch company over the years. On 13 different occasions, they had grouped together and prepared a trial. However, on each occasion the claimants had accepted an offer of money, rather than further pursuing their case in a trial, because Murdoch’s lawyers had made each of them a “part 36 offer”.

A part 36 offer is a British legal device designed to streamline court proceedings. The defendant makes an offer and the claimant then has a financial incentive to settle if they think this is more than they would get by going through the rest of the trial. If they don’t accept, the claimant runs the risk of being liable for all expenses if they lose. But even if they win, and the settlement is less than what the defendant offered, they are liable for the defendants’ legal costs and the difference between the two amounts.

In every case, the Murdoch lawyers offered a much larger sum than was ever likely to be given by the court, always without admitting any liability, and always with a confidentiality condition. It cost the Murdoch company something like 1.2 billion pounds in legal fees and settlements.

Another journalist who had been very actively pursuing the scandal, former Sunday Mirror investigations editor Graham Johnson (a convicted phone hacker turned investigator), thought after all the internal costs for management time and lawyers were included, the figure would be nearer to 3 billion pounds. Probably no other company in history has paid so much money and so often denied liability.

But it worked. It allowed the company to publicly maintain the fiction it was only at the News of the World (and not at the Sun) that such crimes occurred. It also avoided any evidence or legal findings implicating senior management of any wrongdoing.

The most recent such settlement, in January this year, was the biggest and most newsworthy. “Murdoch had made one particularly dangerous enemy Prince Harry, a man who had every reason to blame the tabloids for the death of his mother and the cruel bullying of his wife.” With him was former Labour MP Tom Watson, a long-time foe of the Murdochs. He now sat in the House of Lords, and with that bipartisan British fondness for silly names, had become Baron Watson of Wyre Forest.

Informed speculation among the crowd gathered for the opening of the trial was that the claimants’ lawyers had put together a skeleton argument of several hundred pages backed up by a couple of dozen detailed annexes. Also that Murdoch lawyers had sent out their own replies to selected journalists. All this material would become public once the trial began.

Instead, predictably, a delay was requested. The next morning, the lawyer for Harry and Watson announced the case had been settled.

In settling the case, the Murdoch company had agreed to pay the two final claimants a total of 13.5 million pounds in damages and costs. If the trial had gone ahead, costs to the Murdoch company would have been, at most, 10 million pounds. In other words, the company had paid a fortune to avoid the trial, just as they had already done with more than 1,200 other claimants.

Given the total size of the Murdoch empire, this sum is not an existential threat, but it is not trivial. For at least two decades from the mid 1970s, the Sun was Murdoch’s main cash cow, allowing him to grow his empire elsewhere. Now it has fallen on hard times, mainly due to trends in the digital age but not helped by the ongoing costs of the scandal.

Over the five financial years to March 2024, the paper’s losses totalled 515 million pounds. Gradually, the costs of the phone hacking scandals are trending down, costing 128.3 million to 2023, 51.6 to 2024, and to 5 million leading up to this year (before the Harry agreement is completed).

After the settlement, lawyers for the two sides made starkly contrasting statements. The Murdoch lawyer said its apology was for the unlawful actions of private investigators working for the Sun, not of its journalists, and that there are now strong controls to ensure they cannot happen again. The publisher apologised to the prince for the distress caused to him and the damage inflicted on relationships, friendships and family relationships, and for the impact of serious intrusions on his mother, Princess Diana.

The lawyer, David Sherborne, speaking for his clients Harry and Watson, called it a monumental victory. “Today the lies are laid bare. Today the cover-ups are exposed. And today proves no-one stands above the law.” Sherborne criticised Murdoch’s senior executives for obstructing justice by deleting over 30 million emails, making false denials and lying under oath. According to Sherborne, they now admit that when Rebekah Brooks was editor of the Sun, “they ran a criminal enterprise”.

Closed cases and new material

Davies finishes the new edition of his book with the outcome of this case. Ironically, one of the spurs for him to write the new afterword emerged from all the confidentially closed cases.

In March 2024, he learnt that the raw material disclosed as a result of court orders was confidential. The secrecy no longer applies, however, once material is used in open court. Davies was able to access what lawyers had said in court. It would have been frustrating to read these excerpts and fragments of statements but not be privy to the complete documents.

He spent a week reading through all the new paperwork. And then he was back on the case.

In the original scandal, the focus was on the Murdoch tabloids for using illegal means to get information for stories. Davies’ new material mounts a compelling case they were also used to advance Murdoch’s corporate interests.

The immediate response, for example, when Jude Law sued the paper for hacking his phone over the past six years was to hack his phone again. This was at the same time various Murdoch executives were telling the Leveson Inquiry that all such behaviour was in the past.

An email disclosed during a criminal investigation showed reporters were told to find out everything about people who were seen to be stirring up the phone hacking scandal: “find out who is gay, who is having affairs, so that we can know everything about them”. This is standard Murdoch practice: when criticised, don’t engage with the criticism – attack the critic.

Indeed, Davies himself had a disconcerting experience. Years after it was compiled, he came across a file headed: Nick Davies Research. It dated back to July 2009, when he had done a story on phone hacking. At one stage, three reporters worked on it, with some input from higher up. It explored his 20-plus years in journalism and interviewed his associates, but came up with nothing not already on the public record. As he said, this was not legitimate journalism. “Their readers weren’t interested in me. They had never heard of me.”

While the initial complaints tended to be from movie stars and sports stars, later complainants included quite a number of politicians: all seen as hostile to Murdoch.

In 2010, the only prominent politician strongly critical of Murdoch was LibDem frontbencher Chris Huhne. “We need to get Huhne,” said News of the World editor Colin Myler in an email. After extensive surveillance, his newspaper published a front-page story that Huhne was having an affair. His marriage ended and his credibility was damaged.

A decade later, he sued, and Murdoch paid him substantial damages – without admitting liability.

Two politicians near the centre of government decisions on the BSkyB bid – Norm Lamb and Vince Cable – had well-founded suspicions their phones were hacked. Later they both sued, and Murdoch paid them substantial damages – without admitting liability.

Three members of the parliamentary committee who interviewed Murdoch in 2011 – Paul Farrelly, Tom Watson, and Adrian Sanders – all filed formal complaints about phone hacking. Murdoch paid them all substantial damages – without admitting liability.

The last case is particularly instructive. When Murdoch appeared before the committee, he was full of regret and apology. He promised that bad behaviour had been confined to the News of the World, and was now over. Yet, while he was giving these reassurances, his company seems to have been hacking the phones of three of the MPs on that committee.

A deeper understanding of the Murdoch empire

The final area where the book has new and persuasive material is on the destruction of evidence. While there were many allegations of this at the peak of the scandal, none of them ever resulted in any convictions.

The company always admitted the deletion of millions of emails but maintained this was a necessary maintenance operation. Some inconvenient facts did not fit this claim, such as the instruction to eliminate emails “that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation”. Or at another stage, there was an instruction to delete the emails of the most senior staff as soon as possible.

Two instances, both involving Will Lewis, now editor of the Washington Post (appointed by Jeff Bezos) are particularly interesting.

In July, Lewis and a colleague were aware the police knew about the extent of the phone hacking. They told police they had to destroy them because a “well trusted source” had warned them a former employee, a Labour sympathiser, had stolen Rebekah Brooks’ emails and was selling them to Tom Watson and Gordon Brown. The company claimed they got this warning on January 24, just before the launch of Operating Weeting.

But strangely, they did not tell any detectives about it. Moreover, deleting millions of emails seems an odd response to the threat. Not surprisingly, detectives concluded the story of the plot was a “ruse”.

Lewis was also one of two senior executives whose role was to liaise with the police undertaking Operation Weeting. Police had secured a crime scene which included 125 pieces of office furniture seized in July. Before detectives could examine their contents, eight filing cabinets belonging to senior members of the News of the World were removed and never seen again.

Last year, in a sworn statement in the Prince Harry case, the detective in charge of Operation Weeting, Sue Akers, said she believed the Murdoch company had tried actively to frustrate the police inquiry.

There has never been a media scandal in Britain or Australia remotely resembling the phone hacking scandal of 2011. Probably no major players in Britain – in politics or in the press – has an appetite for reviving it.

So the new edition of the book by Nick Davies – whose investigative work was central to the whole affair – is unlikely to have major repercussions. Nevertheless, the revelations in the book’s afterword add considerably not only to our knowledge of developments over the last decade, but to a deeper understanding of the politics and culture of the Murdoch empire.

Rodney Tiffen, Emeritus Professor, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s a sunny June day in southeast England. I’m driving along a quiet, rural road that stretches through the Kent countryside. The sun flashes through breaks in the hedgerow, offering glimpses of verdant crop fields and old farmhouses.

Thick hawthorn and brambles make it difficult to see the 10ft high razor-wire fence that encloses a large grassy mound. You’d never suspect that 100ft beneath the ground, a hi-tech cloud computing facility is whirring away, guarding the most valuable commodity of our age: digital data.

This subterranean data centre is located in a former nuclear bunker that was constructed in the early 1950s as a command-and-control centre for the Royal Air Force’s radar network. You can still see the decaying concrete plinths that the radar dish once sat upon. Personnel stationed in the bunker would have closely watched their screens for signs of nuclear missile-carrying aircraft.

After the end of the cold war, the bunker was purchased by a London-based internet security firm for use as an ultra-secure data centre. Today, the site is operated by the Cyberfort Group, a cybersecurity services provider.

I’m an anthropologist visiting the Cyberfort bunker as part of my ethnographic research exploring practices of “extreme” data storage. My work focuses on anxieties of data loss and the effort we take – or often forget to take – to back-up our data.

As an object of anthropological enquiry, the bunkered data centre continues the ancient human practice of storing precious relics in underground sites, like the tumuli and burial mounds of our ancestors, where tools, silver, gold and other treasures were interred.

The Cyberfort facility is one of many bunkers around the world that have now been repurposed as cloud storage spaces. Former bomb shelters in China, derelict Soviet command-and-control centres in Kyiv and abandoned Department of Defense bunkers across the United States have all been repackaged over the last two decades as “future-proof” data storage sites.

I’ve managed to secure permission to visit some of these high-security sites as part of my fieldwork, including Pionen, a former defence shelter in Stockholm, Sweden, which has attracted considerable media interest over the last two decades because it looks like the hi-tech lair of a James Bond villain.

Many abandoned mines and mountain caverns have also been re-engineered as digital data repositories, such as the Mount10 AG complex, which brands itself as the “Swiss Fort Knox” and has buried its operations within the Swiss Alps. Cold war-era information management company Iron Mountain operates an underground data centre 10 minutes from downtown Kansas City and another in a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania.

The National Library of Norway stores its digital databanks in mountain vaults just south of the Arctic Circle, while a Svalbard coal mine was transformed into a data storage site by the data preservation company Piql. Known as the Arctic World Archive (AWA), this subterranean data preservation facility is modelled on the nearby Global Seed Vault.

Just as the seeds preserved in the Global Seed Vault promise to help re-build biodiversity in the aftermath of future collapse, the digitised records stored in the AWA promise to help re-boot organisations after their collapse.

Bunkers are architectural reflections of cultural anxieties. If nuclear bunkers once mirrored existential fears about atomic warfare, then today’s data bunkers speak to the emergence of a new existential threat endemic to digital society: the terrifying prospect of data loss.

Data, the new gold?

After parking my car, I show my ID to a large and muscular bald-headed guard squeezed into a security booth not much larger than a pay-phone box. He’s wearing a black fleece with “Cyberfort” embroidered on the left side of the chest. He checks my name against today’s visitor list, nods, then pushes a button to retract the electric gates.

I follow an open-air corridor constructed from steel grating to the door of the reception building and press a buzzer. The door opens on to the reception area: “Welcome to Cyberfort,” receptionist Laura Harper says cheerfully, sitting behind a desk in front of a bulletproof window which faces the car park. I hand her my passport, place my bag in one of the lockers, and take a seat in the waiting area.

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Big-tech pundits have heralded data as the “new gold” – a metaphor made all the more vivid when data is stored in abandoned mines. And as the purported economic and cultural value of data continues to grow, so too does the impact of data loss.

For individuals, the loss of digital data can be a devastating experience. If a personal device should crash or be hacked or stolen with no recent back-ups having been made, it can mean the loss of valuable work or cherished memories. Most of us probably have a data-loss horror story we could tell.

For governments, corporations and businesses, a severe data loss event – whether through theft, erasure or network failure – can have a significant impact on operations or even result in their collapse. The online services of high-profile companies like Jaguar and Marks & Spencer have recently been impacted by large-scale cyber-attacks that have left them struggling to operate, with systems shutdown and supply chains disrupted. But these companies have been comparatively lucky: a number of organisations had to permanently close down after major data loss events, such as the TravelEx ransomware attack in 2020, and the MediSecure and National Public Data breaches, both in 2024.

With the economic and societal impact of data loss growing, some businesses are turning to bunkers with the hope of avoiding a data loss doomsday scenario.

The concrete cloud

One of the first things visitors to the Cyberfort bunker encounter in the waiting area is a 3ft cylinder of concrete inside a glass display cabinet, showcasing the thickness of the data centre’s walls. The brute materiality of the bunkered data centre stands in stark contrast to the fluffy metaphor of the “cloud”, which is often used to discuss online data storage.

Data centres, sometimes known as “server farms”, are the buildings where cloud data is stored. When we transfer our data into the cloud, we are transferring it on to servers in a data centre (hence the meme “there is no cloud, just someone else’s computer”). Data centres typically take the form of windowless, warehouse-scale buildings containing hundreds of servers (pizza box-shaped computers) stored in cabinets that are arranged in aisles.

Data centres are responsible for running many of the services that underpin the systems we interact with every day. Transportation, logistics, energy, finance, national security, health systems and other lifeline services all rely on up-to-the-second data stored in and accessed through data centres. Everyday activities such as debit and credit card payments, sending emails, booking tickets, receiving text messages, using social media, search engines and AI chatbots, streaming TV, making video calls and storing digital photos all rely on data centres.

These buildings now connect such an incredible range of activities and utilities across government, business and society that any downtime can have major consequences. The UK government has officially classified data centres as forming part of the country’s critical national infrastructure – a move that also conveniently enables the government to justify building many more of these energy-guzzling facilities.

As I sit pondering the concrete reality of the cloud in Cyberfort’s waiting area, the company’s chief digital officer, Rob Arnold, emerges from a corridor. It was Arnold who arranged my visit, and we head for his office – through a security door with a biometric fingerprint lock – where he talks me through the logic of the bunkered data centre.

“The problem with most above-ground data centres is they are often constructed quickly, and not built to withstand physical threats like strong winds, car bombs or server theft from breaking and entering.” Arnold says that “most people tend to think of the cyber-side of data security – hackers, viruses and cyber-attacks – which dangerously overlooks the physical side”.

Amid increasing geopolitical tension, internet infrastructure is now a high-value target as “hybrid” or “cyber-physical” sabotage (when cyber-attacks are combined with physical attacks) becomes increasingly common.

The importance of physical internet security has been highlighted by the war in Ukraine, where drone strikes and other attacks on digital infrastructure have led to internet shutdowns. While precise details about the number of data centres destroyed in the conflict remain scant, it has been observed that Russian attacks on local data centres in Ukraine have led many organisations to migrate their data to cloud facilities located outside of the conflict zone.

Bunkers appeal to what Arnold calls “security-conscious” clients. He says: “It’s difficult to find a structure more secure than a bunker” – before adding drily: “The client might not survive the apocalypse, but their data will.”

Cyberfort specialises in serving regulated industries. Its customer base includes companies working in defence, healthcare, finance and critical infrastructure. “Our core offering focuses on providing secure, sovereign and compliant cloud and data-centre services,” Arnold explains in a well-rehearsed sales routine. “We do more for our customers than just host systems – we protect their reputations.”

Arnold’s pitch is disrupted by a knock at the door. The head of security (who I’m calling Richard Thomas here) enters – a 6ft-tall ex-royal marine wearing black cargo trousers, black combat boots and a black Cyberfort-branded polo shirt. Thomas is going to show me around the facility today.

The entrance to the bunker is located up a short access road. Engineered to withstand the blast and radiation effects of megaton-level thermonuclear detonations, this cloud storage bunker promises its clients that their data will survive any eventuality.

At the armour-plated entrance door, Thomas taps a passcode into the electronic lock and swipes his card through the access control system. Inside, the air is cool and musty. Another security guard sits in a small room behind bulletproof plexiglass. He buzzes us through a metal mantrap and we descend into the depths of the facility via a steel staircase, our footsteps echoing in this cavernous space.

The heavy blast doors and concrete walls of the bunker appear strangely at odds with the virtual “walls” we typically associate with data security: firewalls, anti-virus vaults, and spyware and spam filters. Similarly, the bunker’s military logics of enclosure and isolation seem somewhat outdated when faced with the transgressive digital “flows” of networked data.

However, to dismiss the bunkered data centre as merely an outmoded piece of security theatre is to overlook the importance of physical security – today and in the future.

We often think of the internet as an immaterial or ethereal realm that exists in an electronic non-place. Metaphors like the now retro-sounding cyberspace and, more recently, the cloud perpetuate this way of thinking.

But the cloud is a material infrastructure composed of thousands of miles of cables and rows upon rows of computing equipment. It always “touches the ground” somewhere, making it vulnerable to a range of non-cyber threats – from thieves breaking into data centres and stealing servers, to solar storms disrupting electrical supplies, and even to squirrels chewing through cables.

If data centre services should go down, even for a few seconds, the economic and societal impact can be calamitous. In recent years we have seen this first-hand.

In July 2020, the 27-minute Cloudflare outage led to a 50% collapse in traffic across the globe, disrupting major platforms like Discord, Shopify, Feedly and Politico. In June 2021, the Fastly outage left some of the world’s most visited websites completely inaccessible, including Amazon, PayPal, Reddit, and the New York Times. In October 2021, Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, experienced an outage for several hours that affected millions of social media users as well as hundreds of businesses.

Perhaps the largest internet outage yet occurred in July 2024 when the CrowdStrike outage left supermarkets, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies, airports, train providers and banks (among other critical services) unable to operate. This was described by some in the industry as “one of the largest mass outages in IT history”.

Internet architecture now relies on such a complex and fragile ecosystem of interdependencies that major outages are getting bigger and occurring more often. Downtime events can have a lasting financial and reputational impact on data centre providers. Some attempts to quantify the average cost of an unplanned data centre outage range from US$9,000 to US$17,000 (about £12,500) per minute.

The geographic location of a data centre is also hugely important for data protection regulations, Thomas explains, as we make our way down a brightly lit corridor. “Cyberfort’s facilities are all located in the UK, which gives our clients peace of mind, knowing they comply with data sovereignty laws.”

Data sovereignty regulations subject data to the legal and privacy standards of the country in which it is stored. This means businesses and organisations must be careful about where in the world their data is being relocated when they move it into the cloud. For example, if a UK business opts to store its data with a cloud provider that uses data centres based in the US, then that data will be subject to US privacy standards which do not fully comply with UK standards.

In contrast to early perceptions of the internet as transcending space, eradicating national borders and geopolitics, data sovereignty regulations endow locality with renewed significance in the cloud era.

The survival of data at all costs

Towards the end of the corridor, Thomas opens a large red blast-proof door – beyond which is a smaller air-tight door. Thomas waves his card in front of an e-reader, initiating an unlocking process: we’re about to enter one of the server rooms.

“Get ready” he says, smiling, “it’s going to be cold and loud!” The door opens, releasing a rush of cold air. The server room is configured and calibrated for the sole purpose of providing optimal conditions for data storage.

Like any computer, servers generate a huge amount of heat when they are running, and must be stored in constantly air-conditioned rooms to ensure they do not overheat. If for any reason a server should crash or fail, it can lead to the loss of a client’s valuable data. Data centre technicians work in high-pressure conditions where any unexpected server downtime could mean the end of their job.

To try and make sure the servers run optimally, data centres rely on huge amounts of water and energy, which can significantly limit the availability of these resources for the people who live in the vicinity of the buildings.

An average data centre consumes an estimated 200-terawatt hours of electricity each year. That’s around 1% of total global electricity demand, which is more than the national energy consumption of some countries. Many of these facilities are powered by non-renewable energy sources, and the data centre industry is expected to emit 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.

In addition, to meet expectations for “uninterruptible” service levels, data centres rely on an array of fossil fuel-based back-up infrastructure – primarily diesel generators. For this reason, the Green Web Foundation – a non-profit organisation working to decarbonise the internet – has described the internet as the world’s largest coal-powered machine. Data centres are also noisy and have become sites of protest for local residents concerned about noise pollution.

Amid hype and speculation about the rise of AI, which is leading to a boom in the construction of energy-hungry data centres, the carbon footprint of the industry is under increasing scrutiny. Keen to highlight Cyberfort’s efforts to address these issues, Thomas informs me that “environmental impact is a key consideration for Cyberfort, and we take our commitment to these issues very seriously”.

As we walk down a cold aisle of whirring servers, he explains that Cyberfort actively sources electricity from renewable energy supply chains, and uses what he calls a “closed loop” cooling infrastructure which consumes minimal fresh water.

‘Like the pyramids’

After our walk through the server room, we begin to make our way out of the bunker, heading through another heavy-duty blast door. As we walk down the corridor, Thomas promotes the durability of bunkers as a further security selling point. Patting the cold concrete wall with the palm of his hand, he says: “Bunkers are built to last, like the pyramids.”

Bunker scholars have long noted that these buildings are as much about time as they are about space. Bunkers are designed to preserve and transport their contents through time, from an apocalyptic present into a safe future.

Writers such as Paul Virilio, W.G. Sebald and J.G. Ballard were drawn to the decaying bunkers of the second world war and, like Thomas, compared them with enduring megastructures which have outlived the civilisations that built them. In his 1975 book Bunker Archaeology, Virilio famously compared the abandoned Nazi bunkers along the coast of France with “the Egyptian mastabas, the Etruscan tombs, the Aztec structures”.

The bunker’s durability invites us to take a long-term view of our own data storage needs, which will only increase over the course of our lives.

For technology behemoths like Apple and Google, cloud storage is a key strategic avenue for long-term revenue growth. While the phones, laptops and other digital devices they make have limited lifespans, their cloud services offer potentially lifelong data storage. Apple and Google encourage us to perpetually hoard our data rather than delete it, because this locks us into their cloud subscription services, which become increasingly expensive the more storage we need.

Apple’s marketing for its cloud storage service, iCloud, encourages users to “take all the photos you want without worrying about space on your devices”. Google has made “archive” rather than “delete” the default option on Gmail. While this reduces the likelihood of us accidentally deleting an email, it also means we are steadily consuming more of our Gmail capacity, leading some to purchase more Google Drive storage space.

Cloud hoarders

It is also increasingly difficult to operate off-cloud. Internal storage space on our digital devices is dwindling as the cloud becomes the default storage option on the majority of digital products being developed. Users must pay a premium if they want more than the basic local storage on their laptop or smartphone. Ports to enable expandable, local storage – such as CD drives or SD card slots – are also being removed by tech manufacturers.

As our personal digital archives expand, our cloud storage needs will continue to grow over our lifetimes, as will the payments for more and more cloud storage space. And while we often imagine we will one day take the time to prune our accumulations of digital photos, files, and emails, that task is often indefinitely postponed. In the meantime, it is quicker and easier to simply purchase more cloud storage.

Many consumers simply use whichever cloud storage service is already pre-installed on their devices – often these are neither the cheapest nor most secure option. But once we commit to one provider, it is very difficult to move our data to another if we want a cheaper monthly storage rate, or simply want to switch – this requires investing in enough hard drives on which to download the data from one cloud provider and upload it to another. Not everyone is tech-savvy enough to do that.

In 2013, bank reforms in the UK introduced a switching service which enabled consumers to easily move their money and payments to different banks, in order to access more favourable rates. Cloud migration services are available for businesses, but until a cloud storage equivalent of the bank switching service is developed for the general public, many of us are essentially locked into whichever cloud provider we have been using. If our data really is the new gold, perhaps we should require cloud providers to offer incentives to deposit it with them.

Some providers now offer “lifetime” cloud packages with no monthly or yearly payments and no inactivity clause. However, the cloud market is volatile, defined by cycles of boom-and-bust, with providers and their data centres constantly rebranding, closing and relocating. In this landscape of mergers and acquisitions, there is no guarantee that lifetime cloud providers will be around long enough to honour these promises.

In addition, the majority of consumer cloud providers currently only offer a maximum of a few terabytes of storage. In the future, most of us will probably need a lot more than this, which could mean a lot more data centres (roughly 100 new data centres are set to be constructed in the UK alone within the next five years). We may also see more bunkers being repurposed as data centres – while some providers, such as Florida-based Data Shelter, are considering building entirely new bunker structures from scratch to house digital data.

Resurfacing

Thomas and I arrive at the steel staircase leading back up to the outside world. The guard buzzes us back through the turnstile, and Thomas unlocks and opens the door. The sunlight stings my eyes.

Back in the reception area, I thank Arnold and Thomas for my surreal trip into the depths of subterranean data storage. The Cyberfort data centre is a site of extreme contrasts, where the ethereal promise of the cloud jars with the concrete reality of the bunker.

Sitting in my car, I add to my fieldnotes that the survival of data – whether entombed in bunkers or stored in “lifetime” cloud accounts – is bound to the churn of markets, and depends upon the durability of the infrastructure and organisations behind it.

Permanence, in the digital age, is always provisional. One can’t help but imagine future archaeologists discovering this bunker and rummaging through the unreadable remains of our lost digital civilisation.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• Beatrix Potter’s famous tales are rooted in stories told by enslaved Africans – but she was very quiet about their origins

• Engineering hope: how I made it my mission to help rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure

• Inside Porton Down: what I learned during three years at the UK’s most secretive chemical weapons laboratory

• Ignored, blamed, and sometimes left to die – a leading expert in ME explains the origins of a modern medical scandal

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A.R.E. Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Communications, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.