Multiplier Madness: Lessons That Data Centers Take From Hollywood

• In Event: Data Centers and the Centralization of Data Production: Connected Communications Infrastructures Across Disparate Geographies

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, Hollywood has been successful in expanding the number of regions worldwide willing to participate in a race to the bottom to offer public financing and other incentives for local film economies (Mayer 2017). The location of film production, the lobbyists argue, multiplies the jobs of those directly hired by producers by increasing wages for all workers that the production relies on, including hotel concierges, taxi drivers, and caterers. Multipliers are thus a neat way to tie the positive impacts in one economic sector to a series of seemingly unrelated sectors without a labor theory of value. What entertainment industries have enveloped as a creative economy (Florida 2010), internet industries have foreseen as the new innovation economy (Moretti 2012). At the nexus of these economic headwinds, the growth of data centers seem poised to combine multipliers as the infrastructures for all labor linked to entertainment and technology. This paper is based on pilot study research in the Northern Netherlands as the site of what in 2017 will be the largest Google data center in Europe. Having exhausted the public and private infrastructures for data communications and storage in the region, Google launched a public campaign for its own private infrastructure based on the multipliers that the company would create in an economically depressed area of the country. Based on initial field work, this paper examines the Google public relations campaign in light of the real workers swept into the madness of the multipliers.

Author

• Vicki Mayer, Tulane University