Tag: data centers

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

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 Nubecene: Toward an Ecology of the Cloud

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...)