Digital Development and Imperial Debris

• In Event: Data Centers and Disposability

Abstract

In recent years, Iceland has emerged as a hot spot for international data storage. The island’s cool climate and renewable energy make it an appealing site for developers, facing increasing pressure from analysts and advocates to reduce their environmental impact. However, close attention to data centers’ making and maintenance reveals an unsettling inheritance: digital development in Iceland is flourishing in the footprint of a Cold War American military base. In this paper, I trace how Iceland’s history as an American outpost shapes its emerging digital industry. Specifically, I argue that waste left behind by the military (and continuing to impact the surrounding community) is precisely what allows new data centers to pick up the mantle of “clean” and “green.”

Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic and archival research, this paper will follow the case of one cluster of data centers being built on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula. Through close attention to the material remainders of military presence, it will make the case that Reykjanes’ occupation created the infrastructural, economic, and social conditions that attracted data centers and allow them to thrive. Data storage, despite being pitched as an environmentally responsible new industry, here takes its traction from “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008). The Reykjanes case, then, in drawing together these temporalities, extends analyses of waste and digital infrastructure, and complicates the progress narrative of this future-oriented industry.

Author

• Alix Johnson, University of Florida