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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Daily headlines tout the powers of Big Data to save the world: be it the dream of a wired ocean to save marine predators, or the aggregation of health data to cure diseases. Yet the promise of Big Data and its nesting within the technological sublime (Mosco 2009) rests equally on its capacity for mass scale processing and the mass ills of world that need fixing. For this panel, we aim to address how these social forces are related in the material impacts of the data centers that process Big Data.


The study of communications infrastructures and power have a long history (Schiller 1969; Innis 1951; Winsek 2007). What makes data centers unique are their growth within a liberalized political economy that depends on global acquiescence to privatized infrastructure and high tech industrial expansion (Blum 2013; Burrington 2015; Cubitt, Hassan & Volkmer 2011; Maxwell & Miller 2012; Pickren 2016; Reading and Notley 2015). This panel seeks to build on the deep histories of data centers by tracing their political, social, and environmental impacts in specific regions where they locate. Our intervention is show the local reverberations of data centers and their political economies despite their invisibility and lack of governing transparency.


This panel will explore the various impacts and implications of a rapidly growing data center industry, including the cloud’s infrastructural visibility, the shift in local economies and incentives for development such as tax breaks and proximity to existing infrastructure, ideal environmental emplacements and electricity and water consumption, public relations discourse and self-curated representations of data centers online, as well as policy debates and decisions in the industry. By investigating the data center and the vast infrastructures that enable the storage of Big Data, as it is embodied and emplaced, as well as curated and made visible, we aim to explore and illuminate connections between globalized geographies of data, information, and media distribution and localized impacts of IT on the ground. We ask: how is the economy of data storage organized, reprising old relationships and forging new ones? How is IT infrastructure built into local environments, shifting the political, social and natural terrain? How are these topographies experienced and envisioned by users and creators around the world?

Sub Unit

• Philosophy, Theory and Critique

Chairs

• Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

• Mél Hogan, University of Calgary

Individual Presentations

• The Data Center Surplus - Mél Hogan, University of Calgary

• Multiplier Madness: Lessons That Data Centers Take From Hollywood - Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

• Data Centres in an Expanded Field: Greenland and the Production of Global Climate Data - Rafico Ruiz, U of Trento

• Regulating Digital Infrastructure: Legal and Policy Challenges for Data Centers - Jennifer Holt, U of California, Santa Barbara