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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Können Rechenzentren Schwitzen?

Miriam Fahimi August 7, 2026
This content is also available in English.
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Kleine Tropfen benetzen meine Stirn. Langsam bahnen sie sich ihren Weg an meiner Schläfe entlang. Die Wetter-App auf meinem Handy zeigt Stufe rot. Seit Tagen befinde ich mich in der so genannten “Hitzewelle”, die im Juni diesen Jahres über Europa hinwegrollte. Was mein Gesicht benetzt und mir langsam vom Rand meines Kinns tropft, ist kein erfrischender Regen und auch kein kühles Wasser, es ist mein eigener Schweiß. Und nicht nur mir ist es zu heiß, auch den Servern und Chips in den Rechenzentren der Cloud geht es nicht gut. (read more...)

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Can a Data Center Sweat?

Miriam Fahimi August 7, 2026
Dieser Inhalt ist auch auf deutsch verfügbar.
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Small drops form on my forehead. Slowly, they make their way down along my temples. The weather app on my phone shows a red alert. For days, I have been caught in the so-called heat wave that swept across Europe in June of this year. Unfortunately, what slowly drips from the edge of my chin is neither refreshing rain nor cool water – it’s my own sweat. Yet, I am not the only one struggling under the weight of the heat. The servers and chips inside the data centers are suffering, too. (read more...)

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Is Edtech’s Stuckness a Kind of Fixation?

Martin Oliver, Jade Vu Henry July 9, 2026
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This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. If you are one of the millions of people who have watched Sal Khan’s recent TED talk, you might think AI is poised to rescue struggling education systems all over the world. The UK government certainly seemed to agree when it announced that it was investing £2m to develop an AI lesson-planning tool for teachers, describing this project as “…a perfect example of the revolutionary benefits this technology can bring.” We, like other critical scholars of “EdTech” (see Macgilchrist, 2021), are not convinced. (read more...)

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Delivering in Delhi: Ethnographic Reflections on Working with the Food Delivery Platform

Vageesh Vishnoi June 22, 2026
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It was 38 degree Celsius, another day of scorching heat in Delhi in the month of June when I decided to go out and book my first order for a popular food delivery platform. It came after weeks of procrastinating to work as a delivery rider following a growing body of research on platform mediated labour where researchers worked as riders to learn about the latent work realities of the platforms (Timko & van Melik, 2021). Moments before the commencement of work, I was enjoying myself cruising on the roads of South Delhi on my rented e-bike, when my excursion was immediately interrupted by the urgency-inducing notification informing me about the imminent order. As I accepted the order, I was directed to the ‘Bikkgane Biriyani’, a cloud kitchen  in South Delhi for collecting the parcel. (read more...)

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