Ecologies of Disposability: Work in the Shadow of Data Centers

• In Event: Data Centers and Disposability

Abstract

Both liberal and critical accounts of high tech labor emphasize its unique qualities in driving employment trends and shaping the future of work. These accounts emphasize workers’ high value in the new economy while raising the specter of shortages for the future (Moretti 2012, Srnicek 2015). They also focus on how workers’ survival in high tech careers has been largely individualized, responsibilities in assuming risk, acting entrepreneurial, forging their personal brand, and constructing a portfolio of experiences across a lifetime (Gershon 2017, Neff 2012, Pein 2017). Rarely do they speak of how governments and employers see these same workers as utterly disposable.

Drawing on eight months of ethnographic field work in the Netherlands, a European crossroads for data infrastructure and multinational high tech investment in data centers, this paper examines the discourses that organized data center labor as disposable in two senses: first, as single-use investment, and, second, as a consequence of excess. The articulation of disposability was different from obsolescence, another common argument about automation (c.f. Mosco 2017). In this way, the discourses around high tech labor might be more closely related to other objects, such as bottled water (Hawkins 2015) or mobile screens (Maxwell and Miller 2015), which circulate for a short time in a ecology based on use and disposal.

Author

• Vicki Mayer, Tulane University