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Data Centers, Transnational Collaborations, and the Differing Meanings of Connection

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, Felipe Figueiredo  April 15, 2025

Data centers are in the news. You have probably read or heard about them. It’s as if with the snap of a finger the news cycle has changed, and the latest trend is to focus on the need to develop infrastructure to power data centers, in the US at least, where one of us is writing from. A data center is a facility where data is processed or stored, or where computer power is redistributed, where “the cloud touches the ground” (Johnson 2023: 6-7). By focusing on the history of the data centers we research, our goal in this piece is to demonstrate how they are built on top of existing infrastructures, and do not exist in thin air. (read more...)

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

 Madelyn Zander  August 13, 2024

 Listen to a reading of this post.

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...)

Thinking with a Database

 Zehra Hashmi  May 6, 2021

In 2019, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority notified television channels that they were not allowed to host the Pakistani Senator Hafiz Hamdullah on air. The reason: Hamdullah had been declared a “confirmed alien,” and his identity card had been “digitally impounded” by Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). NADRA began operations in 2000 by launching a biometric (fingerprints, facial, and iris recognition) computerized national identity card (CNIC). At NADRA, custom-made software integrates and verifies data from individuals as well as kin units, determining who is and is not a Pakistani citizen. (read more...)

Data Swarms Revisited – New Modes of Being

 Christoph Lange  March 2, 2021

Editor’s Note: The new Platypus Thematic Series entitled “Data Swarms Revisited” will feature posts form computer science, philosophy and anthropology and connect to the Thematic Series Anthropos Tomorrow: Transhumanism and Anthropology inaugurated by Jon Bialecki and Ian Lowrie on Platypus in 2017. The posts will deal with overarching questions of the so-called “human condition” in times of accelerated computation, digitalization and technological infrastructures. Herein, the figuration of the Data Swarm serves as a playful and slightly ironic approximation to the threats and promises embedded in these on-going controversies. Part of the Data Swarms Series are: Human as the Ultimate Authority in Control by Anna Lukina Angelology and Technoscience by Massimiliano Simons Multiple Modes of Being Human by Johannes Schick Swarming Syphilis: On the Reality of Data by Eduardo Zanella On Drones and Ectoplasms: Breath of Gaia by Angeliki Malakasioti Fetishes or Cyborgs? Religion as technology in the Afro-Atlantic space by Giovanna Capponi At the end of September 2019, it was already the fourth time that both the Research Lab of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne and the Collaborative Research Center 806 “Our Way to Europe” had invited an interdisciplinary group of international graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to meet at the Cologne Summer School of Interdisciplinary Anthropology (CSIA). For an entire week, the participants delved into the many controversies about the so-called “human condition” and what it actually means to “be human” in the 21st century. After three years of discussing the latest material and practice turns along the Phenomenality of Material Things, in 2019, the CSIA relaunched its inquiries in new modes of being and humanism(s) under the theme of Beyond Humanism: Cyborgs – Animals – Data Swarms. With an apparent elective affinity to Donna Haraway (Haraway 2016b), we picked up where the last CSIA left by taking a closer look at what trans– and posthumanist agendas actually imply and how they relate to classic understandings of the human condition. Our goal was not simply dismissing these new modes of humanism(s) as mere social phenomena in an age of accelerated technological and cultural transformations but to take them seriously in order to better understand the shifts in contemporary concepts and controversies about being human. Through historically tracing back modes of humanism and their counterparts, as well as excavating their ontological and epistemological conditions, we identified three relational contestations of what it no longer means and three figurations of what it nowadays means to be human. The contestations are: (1) the distribution of human subjectivity and cognition, (2) the disintegration of human individuality, and (3) the dissolution of humanity as a unique ontological category. (read more...)

‘Dynamic Totalities’: Data Surveillance as a Paradigm

 Ravi Chakraborty  June 16, 2020

In the zeitgeist of academia, surveillance has clearly an ominous connotation. However, is surveillance not fundamentally a way of looking? More formally, a way of looking at totalities. Whatever is studied, observed, or measured is part of a definitive totality. A virus is part of a sample. Families are part of a community. Workers are part of the factory. A scientist is part of a laboratory. One reason we are cautious about speaking of totalities is because we are scared of being reductive. But what if we could dynamically measure parameters defining the totalities which concern us. What if we could define our totalities at will and observe phenomena within its boundaries, track phenomena flowing out of it, or ingressing it? If this sounds like an uncanny ‘intelligent’ camera or rather a poetic job re-description of the individual in the CCTV room, then it is meant to be so. Data surveillance can offer perhaps a fresh paradigm for observation and analysis irrespective of the actual use of computers that enable it. (read more...)

Clinical Data in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: Ethnographic Engagements

 Peter Taber  June 11, 2019

By: Peter Taber, Nicholas Rattray, Lauren Penney, Megan McCullough and Samantha Gottlieb This post emerged from a 2018 Society for Applied Anthropology panel on anthropological engagements with health data in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Serving over 9 million enrollees with a current federal budget of USD68 billion, the VA is an important testing site for digital healthcare infrastructure, as it has been for several decades. The panel brought our VA research and quality improvement (QI) efforts targeting the electronic health record (EHR) and other digital infrastructure into dialog with existing work on the social lives of data and algorithms, as well as the broader concerns of medical anthropology and STS in an era of the “datafication of health” (Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017). Extracts from our conversation, presented below, are taken from a follow-up video call exploring these issues. (read more...)