Let's Buy a Plushie That Makes Piercing Data-Center Sounds!

Raising the satirical volume to 11

A toy that emits a grating drone like the din from those accursed data centers? Folks might buy one just to smash against the wall.

Creative studio Basura created 20 of the madding moppets, named “Bezzy,” as part of a promo for techno act Big Data.

“Since so much of AI is abstract, we liked the idea of doing something tangible,” Basura founder Rajeev Basu tells Muse. “We were interested in exploring the emotional packaging of tech advancements. The project is not anti-AI or anti-tech. But it questions how the physical costs of AI are being sold back to the public.”

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“Toys are emotionally persuasive objects loaded with trust, comfort and familiarity,” Basu says. “What better medium for vast pieces of critical AI infrastructure trying to win you over?”

Bezzy symbolizes the encroachment of Big Tech “into every area of our lives,” with its predictable combination of huge benefits and diabolical drawbacks, adds Alan Willis, the musician and producer behind Big Data.

On one level, Bezzy’s attractive and desirable. But the freak’s also extremely annoying and might induce headaches. That’s pretty much where we stand with encroaching automation today.

Each plushie was handmade “in a style somewhere between the ’80s childhood toy you forgot you had in the attic and corporate mascot,” Basu says. “Bezzy is designed to feel like a familiar friend who has always been around. Just like big tech messaging, every detail of the toy’s image is highly engineered.”

The project provides “a deliberately absurd invitation to look more closely at what we’re being asked to welcome into our lives. If a cuddly data center toy that lets off the ear-piercing sound of a real AI data center makes someone laugh—and then ask why one of them might need so much land, water, power or public subsidy—then we have succeeded.”

Put another way: “Satire is our hook to get people looking at the facts for themselves,” Wilkis says.

Related: Liquid Death and Garage Beer Made a Musical About Pee. So, You’re in for a Treat? (This is about data centers, promise.)