Every month I send out a sample of my current writing, whatever I am working on, or have just published–always hopeful, sometimes draft. Subscribe or read them below. As a writer and professor-for-hire, you can also ask me to write something for you bespoke.

2026

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January

An electricity atlas would have pages or layers of information relating to a geographic region. The carbon intensity of electricity and other data used in power-purchase agreements would be transformed into related, perhaps overlayed, pages. [...] 

We can speculate on five more livable futures that might result from data industries living with such an unflat electricity atlas. [...]

A) A data center operator wants to reduce their carbon emissions and considers investing in a North Sea offshore wind farm. They look at the electricity atlas and learn that there are risks due to a lack of local grid reinforcement and public concerns around the siting of substations in peatland, which is important for both carbon sequestration and wildlife. 

The operator looks at the resource map and notes the massive potential for tide energy up the coast, where a local organization has uploaded a report on a tide energy array that has planning permission. Therefore, the data center operator makes an investment to support the popular tide energy array, not in the delayed offshore wind farm. This supports the future of a precarious coastal community.

B) An urban data center operator is considering how to upgrade its backup power, which is a diesel generator. They want to reduce their carbon footprint but have limited space. 

They look at the electricity atlas and discover there is a local energy company that represents houses and businesses in the city who have formed an energy community.1 They have home batteries, solar panels, electric car charges, and thermal storage, which they balance among themselves and from which they sell electricity to the grid. 

The urban data center contracts this local organization to provide their backup power and forms a long-term, trusting relationship with them.


Sample from my latest journal article with Julia Velkova ‘From Flatlands to Livable Futures: Unflattening Carbon Metrics in the Energy and Data Industries' published in Big Data & Society 12 (4). doi.org/10.1177/20539517251396074. 

Read the full article (open access).

References
1. Chemnitz NØ, Bonnet P, Büttrich S, et al. (2021) Unionized data governance in virtual power plants. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems. New York: ACM, 282–283.

February

Kara waved at the white table and gestured me to sit. I chose the least uncomfortable looking chair, the one with the least bent legs, and sat in genuine pleasure, pulling off my heavy jacket. She reached down to a cardboard box on the floor, and pulled out two not-entirely-clean tumblers, along with a bottle of 18 Year Highland Park whisky, which instantly made me grin and give marginally less of a care about who she was–and what this place was. If she was the kind of person that could produce a decent bottle of whisky out of a cardboard box, then she and I were going to get on famously. (It's a pretty high bribery bar, that's stuff’s not cheap.)

She dropped into one of the other assorted chairs, wobbled for a moment, and with a practiced kick, shoved a paper wedge under the offending, missing chair foot. I nodded my acknowledgement of her skill. The chairs must have been rejects from the Heritage Centre. They were old and well-used, for sure. 

Kara leaned back, tripped her feet up on another chair and poured two drams. We raised our glasses, two islanders toasting the new year. 

“Skål!” We both said, together. 

I blinked, surprised at her. That was my line, borrowed from my Scandinavian friends. No matter. 

I stretched my spine, leaned back, and enjoyed being out of the haar. I had no idea where I was, no idea who I was with. But my companion was an islander, and one with whom I did not have to navigate twenty years of history and family feuds. At least, not yet. All I had to do was let the whisky coat my cold bones with honey.

The imagined servos under my face stopped whirring, my hard smile was gone, and I felt a dreamy blankness roll over my features like a calm sea. My eyes rested on Kara, her head back, enjoying her dram, unconcerned with me. She seemed older now, or more ageless.

On my now calm face, I felt the dimpling of stars, twinkling in my cheeks. 

"I don't know what this is.” I waved at the building. "But it's great – I can feel it’s great.” 

And I could. The building felt right. It felt like it belonged here. I felt right. I felt like I belonged here.

Kara nodded. “It took a bit to get the data centre here. Someone, I won't say who, of course, practically sailed off in protest. I'll not get any tea from that house.” (House? Haus? Hoose? I could not get her accent.) “But if we can do energy, then we can do data, right? It's all just cables and poles. All just the same stuff.”

“Absolutely!” I toasted her. 


Sample from a work-in-progress, a revised version of 'Datahowe: Speculative fable of a data centre under the hill' for an edited book on Speculative Ethnography (being edited by Kathrin Eitel and Chakad Ojani).

Read the first version published in 'Orkney Cloud' magazine.

March

The dark skies at night mean I can watch Andromeda, 2.5 million Light Years away and a ghostly cloud near Pegasus, the winged horse. Excessive light is not needed. We listen and watch with our ears. We do not fear the dark. We are from the stars–we are star stuff, and know it. We all look up at the same stars. Humanity is bound together by the night, Earth's night. Who knew it was the stars, not the Sun, that would hold our future.


Sample from impromptu writing for the public event 'Towards 2100: Imagining a future without fossil fuels' organised by Amber Nordholm and Tomas Moe Skjølsvold, NTNU, Trondheim. Everyone was invited to write a postcard from the year 2100 about what life is like... (I happened to have a postcard handy to write on...)

Actual postcard that I sent from the year 2100...

April

Legitimate Salvage
by Laura Watts
March 2026


“Get that connection up!” Yelled Katja as she braced against her seat, squeezed amidship with the other hackers. How were they supposed to manage the ad hoc energy and data networks for a dozen communities in this? The storm kept knocking out their mesh signal.

The bow dropped and Katja glanced at the bucket wedged on the floor, more for reassurance than genuine seasickness. She focused on the local electricity grid she was managing for a North Sea town in Scotland. It was December, and the town had voted to give out free energy to everyone. Katja was determined to make that happen. No-one was getting cold on her watch.

“Box 359 is shrink-wrapped and ready,” announced Alex, sitting at the end of their workbench, his voice loud in her headset. 

He had the easy job, Katja reflected. All he had to do was ready the salvaged data centers that were sitting up top, on deck, in their rusting cargo containers. He could get personal with his rack equipment if he really wanted to. Well, until they salvaged the array of underwater data centers that had been abandoned in that Scottish loch next week. Then he’d need a diving suit.

Data Shepherd had a clear and practical mission as an organisation: salvage the data center containers that had been abandoned in the sea–or just dumped on shore, if the decommissioning companies got away with it. Data Shepherd claimed the unwanted kit, with its forever plastics and toxic metals. They sailed out in their adapted offshore vessel to grab whatever they could and to stop the e-waste from leaking into the marine ecosystem. Then they, the hacker team, got in there and repurposed the data servers and put them to good use. Legitimate salvage. What could be more legitimate than running community data services? Katja’s expertise was electricity grid software. 

The connection popped back and Katja sent her code to the little data center they had donated to run the town’s microgrid. Then she switched screens and read the SCADA data that squirted in from the onshore wind turbines, which the town had been stuck with after the dash-for-data collapsed. 

White foam splattered the small portal next to her. The wind must have shifted. The ship began to corkscrew as it rode the swell and Katja grimaced, sipped her sweet tea, but refused to be distracted.

The wind was dropping for the turbines near the town, too, so she needed to activate the thermal heaters to keep everyone warm. 

The collapse of the dash-for-data building frenzy had left a bizarre over-proportioned electricity grid as well as abandoned data centers. One was supposed to feed the other. Towns and communities had been left with unwanted ‘bit barns’ on their doorstep, and a landscape and seascape filled with renewable energy farms gone dark–along with their energy companies. Data Shepherd was salvaging both, thought Katja. And then plugging them together. Because, really, there was no such thing as too much green electricity: it kept people warm and fed. It was all legitimate salvage.


This microfiction Legitimate Salvage was written for Anne Pasek's zine for the conference, Before Ruins, Ruhr University Bochum. She wanted a speculative future of the ruins left behind after the 'AI bubble' pops and what that might mean for local communities. As soon as the zine is available to download and print I will add a link.