Search Results for: cloud

The Cloud is Too Loud: Spotlighting the Voices of Community Activists from the Data Center Capital of the World

Madelyn Zander August 13, 2024
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What does it mean to speak about the cloud? While the term tends to conjure images of fluffy white objects, the cloud in technological terms is a complex physical infrastructure that comprises hundreds of thousands of servers distributed around the globe that provide on-demand access to data storage and computing resources over the internet. The problem with describing this physical infrastructure as the cloud is that it abstracts away the data centers, subsea fiber optic cables, copper lines, and networked devices that enable our digital interactions, as well as the consequences that the expansion of this infrastructure poses to people and to the environment. Scholars of infrastructure have written about the cloud’s incredible energy and water consumption to power and cool servers, as well as its massive carbon footprint (Carruth 2014; Edwards et al. 2024; Hogan 2018; Johnson 2023). However, less attention has been given to the cloud’s auditory presence, a problem of growing concern for people who live alongside cloud infrastructure. In this post, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2021 with community activists in Northern Virginia, a place known as the “data center capital of the world,” to bring the cloud’s emerging sound pollution problem into focus. (read more...)

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The Nubecene: Toward an Ecology of the Cloud

Steven Gonzalez February 14, 2018

Imprints of computing are etched into the surface of the earth. Fugitive traces remain captive in its lithic tissues, its waters, and the very air we breathe. Roiling in the most abyssal depths of the seas, coursing through fiber optic cables thinner than human hairs, the amorphous Cloud and its digital ganglia enshroud our planet. By way of its sheer magnitude and complexity, the Cloud eludes human imagination. It is what Bruno Latour might call a “black box” (1987) – a market fantasy of infinite storage capacity, immateriality, and feel-good “green” slogans like “go paperless.” While envisioned by many to be ether, suspended above matter, the Cloud remains a material ensemble of cables and microchips, computer servers and data centers, electrons and water molecules, cell towers and cell phones, spindly fiber coils undersea and underground that firmly tether communities and consumers to the ground, not the sky. (read more...)

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Country in the Cloud

Daria Savchenko February 10, 2015

We are accustomed to think of the “cloud” as a place-less, formless mass of data floating “out there.” It has even been argued that new computer technologies and the movement of companies’ data “to the cloud” might so transform our inherited notions of time, space, and power that it could mean the end of history, geography, and power. The case of “e-Estonia,” however, challenges this notion: Estonia is a country which, unlike people and companies going “to the cloud,” hopes to actually move itself “into the cloud,” with profound implications for how we understand both the cloud metaphor and geopolitics in the digital age. e-Estonia Estonia is a small former Soviet Republic in northern Europe, with a territory of only 45 thousand square kilometers and population of just 1.3 million. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it has made a number of moves towards building a digital state, or, as it is often referred to, an “e-Estonia.” As a Research Fellow with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies of the European University at St. Petersburg, I have been studying how with e-Estonia the “the cloud” actually becomes a new type of space, the contours of which affect other concrete spaces and feed into a new type of nation-building project. (read more...)

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What’s Up in the Cloud(s)?

Casey O'Donnell July 16, 2013

In May, Adobe prompted me reflect on the “Cloud.” Adobe announced that it’s widely used “Creative Suite,” which includes things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and many other software products would be transitioning to a subscription-based, web-based and cloud-based product, the “Creative Cloud.” My first (and clearly cynical) thought was, “Well, at least I don’t have to install their bloated software anymore or have Acrobat update every other day.” At the same time, the reality of what that would mean for people who use these products for their jobs, encouraged me to consider it further. It also prompted me to return to a 2008 discussion between Richard Stallman and Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian. I should also disaggregate the cloud infrastructure from products that deliver their services via the cloud. These are often conflated in accounts of the trend. The cloud infrastructure is/are computers and the networks that connect them and them to (read more...)

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The MQ-9 Reaper Amid Environmental Crisis: Weapon of War or Humanitarian Tool?

Georgia Butcher November 5, 2024

On Saturday of Labor Day Weekend 2020, a situation was rapidly deteriorating north of Fresno, California. Sometime around 6pm on September 5, the Creek Fire started, gained momentum, and burned north (Gabbert 2020a). The fast-moving fire blocked the road from campgrounds in the area, stranding hundreds of campers visiting Mammoth Pool Reservoir. Quietly circling overhead was an MQ-9 Reaper, observing the apocalyptic looking situation. The sensors attached to the bottom of the MQ-9 Reaper could see through the billowing clouds of smoke. The California Air National Guard crew flying the MQ-9 was looking for something: a landing spot for evacuations (Solman 2020). (read more...)

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Geoengineering: De Facto Environmental Governance and Alternative Future Making

Cody Skahan September 24, 2024
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I first heard about Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)—a form of geoengineering meant to address climate change through planetary cooling—during the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, at a networking lunch for youth working in environmentalism. My Master’s thesis in Anthropology at the University of Iceland focused on Ungir Umhverfissinnar (English translation: the Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association), which I (from the United States) had joined the board of both as a climate activist and engaged anthropologist. During my interviews and participant observation with the organization, geoengineering had never come up until my colleague from Ungir Umhverfissinnar and I were approached by representatives from Operaatio Arktis (OA). Intent on “ the polar ice caps and preventing global tipping points,” OA has followed prominent research advocates in fostering discussion around an SRM technique called Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). (read more...)

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Lo Que Se Perderá: Un Gato, un Hombre con un Caballo y la Batalla en la Corte

Carolina Angel Botero June 25, 2024
This content is also available in English.
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Este ensayo une el trabajo de campo etnográfico con un guion gráfico para explorar futuros especulativos que surgen de procesos de despojo y pérdida en las estribaciones de la cordillera de los Andes en Chile Central. En 2022, activistas locales y miembros de la comunidad de Putaendo llevaron a Los Andes Copper, la empresa minera responsable del proyecto Vizcachitas, ante el Tribunal Ambiental de Chile. Alegaron que la empresa no había tenido en cuenta la presencia del gato andino en sus estudios de impacto ambiental. Un descuido que podría tener consecuencias graves e irreversibles para el ecosistema local y las fuentes de agua que sustentan a la comunidad. (read more...)

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What Will Be Lost: A Cat, a Man with a Horse, and the Battle at Court

Carolina Angel Botero June 13, 2024
Este contenido también está disponible en español.
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This essay joins ethnographic fieldwork with a visual storyboard to explore speculative futures that arise from ongoing processes of dispossession and loss in the foothills of the Andes mountains in Central Chile. In 2022, local activists and community members from Putaendo took Los Andes Copper, the mining corporation responsible for the Vizcachitas mining project, to the Environmental Tribunal in Chile. They claimed that the corporation had failed to consider the presence of the Andean mountain cat in their environmental impact studies. This oversight could have serious and irreversible consequences for the local ecosystem and the water sources that sustain their community. (read more...)

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