Data Centers and Disposability

Abstract

Data centers tend to be associated with durability and permanence, while disposability refers to what is transient and easily discarded. This panel engages with the practices, politics, and geographies that emerge at the tension between the durable and the transient in data centers. It investigates the ability of such infrastructures to create new configurations of relations between people and things, but also to render people and things obsolete in the context of datafication, platform capitalism, and global extension of cloud capacities.

The panel focuses on the transient nature of exhaust, repair and disrepair, obsolescence, in a context of data centers planning and building, operation, and dismantle. It zooms into different objects, practices, and ecologies that are generative of or operate with disposability. It reveals the heterogeneity of what is disposable in the data center industry, as it can concern its workforce, its technical components, and even the building itself. Motivations for making data centers disposable are also plural, such as answering a neoliberal logic or acting as a strategy to disrupt existing actors. Finally, who decides what is made disposable is a political question, that a colonial or climatic history of disposability can reveal.

Altogether, this panel contributes to the study of infrastructures by looking at the constantly shifting definition of what is made disposable, the power relations involved in deciding what is repaired or discarded, and the supply chains that emerge around elements made disposable.

Discussant

• Brian Beaton, California State University

Individual Presentations

• Ecologies of Disposability: Work in the Shadow of Data Centers - Vicki Mayer, Tulane University

• Platform Logic Meets Data Centers: The Strategic Value of Disposability - Jean Christophe Plantin, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Recent Experiments with the Creation of Subsea Saltwater Data Centers in the Pacific Ocean - Tonia Sutherland, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

• Digital Development and Imperial Debris - Alix Johnson, University of Florida

• Disposable Data Spaces and Data Ruins - Julia Velkova, University of Helsinki, Finland

Session Organizers

• Jean Christophe Plantin, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Julia Velkova, University of Helsinki, Finland