Retrofitted data centres: a new world in the shell of the old

Jacobson, Kate; Hogan, Mél

doi:10.13169/workorgalaboglob.13.2.0078

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Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation

Volume 13, Issue 2

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Retrofitted data centres: a new world in the shell of the old

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Author(s): Kate Jacobson , Mél Hogan

Publication date (Print): 1 January 2019

Journal: Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Keywords: data centres, infrastructure, the cloud, retrofit, capitalism, investments, servers, maintenance, labour, gender

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Abstract

This contribution looks specifically at the process of redeveloping data centre infrastructure: how the value of past capital investments in the built environment can be preserved and multiplied through further capitalist development. We argue that, while the majority of data centres are not placed in these retrofitted industrial buildings, the ones that are indicate a specific spatial logic within the neoliberal order. We show that retrofitting industrial buildings into data centres is about more than putting inactive capital back to ‘work’; it is also about the use of industrial infrastructure as a casing to obfuscate the origins, structure, and workings of the neoliberal project, as metaphorised by the data centres that help to constitute its subjects.

Content

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.2307/j50010512

Journal ID (jcode): workorgalaboglob

Title: Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN: 1745-641X

ISSN: 1745-6428

Publication date (Print): 1 January 2019

Volume: 13

Issue: 2 ( doiID: 10.13169/workorgalaboglob.13.issue-2 )

Pages: 78-94

Article

Publisher ID: workorgalaboglob.13.2.0078

DOI: 10.13169/workorgalaboglob.13.2.0078

SO-VID: 15e2ac60-01d5-4343-bc3e-e5ef4b264397

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All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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lang eng

ScienceOpen disciplines: Sociology,Labor law,Political science,Labor & Demographic economics,Political economics

Keywords: investments,gender,labour,maintenance,servers,capitalism,retrofit,the cloud,infrastructure,data centres

REFERENCES

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Amoore, L. (2018) ‘Cloud geographies: computing, data, sovereignty’, Progress in Human Geography, 42 (1):4-24.

[2] Banks, D.A. (2015) ‘Lines of power: availability to networks as a social phenomenon’, First Monday, 20 (11). Accessed from https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6283/5117

[3] Barney, D. (2017) ‘Pipelines’, in I. Szeman, J. Wenzel & P. Yaegar (eds.), Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, New York: Fordham University Press.

[4] Beer, S. (1979) Heart of the Enterprise, New York: Wiley.

[5] Benjamin, W. (2005) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1 1927-1934, ed. M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland & G. Smith, trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge: Belknap.

[6] Boellstorff, T. (2010) ‘Culture of the Cloud’, Journal for Virtual Worlds Research, 2 (5):6.

[7] Brenner, A., R. Brenner & C. Winslow (2010) Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s, London: Verso.

[8] Burrington, I. (2015a) ‘Seeing networks in New York City’, Seeing Networks: A Rough Field Guide to Network Infrastructures, January 29, 2015. Accessed on October 17, 2019 at http://seeingnetworks.in/guide/

[9] Burrington, I. (2015b) ‘How railroad history shaped internet history’, The Atlantic, November 24.

[10] Carruth, A. (2014) ‘The digital cloud and the micropolitics of energy’, Public Culture, 26 (2): 339-364.

[11] Charles, E. (2016) White Mountain (16mm film). Accessed from https://vimeo.com/152102082.

[12] Cronon, W. (1991) Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York: W.W. Norton.

[13] Cubitt, S. (2016) ‘Against connectivity’, in/between: cultures of connectivity: NECS European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, Potsdam, July 28-30.

[14] Diamanti, J. (2016) ‘Energyscapes, architecture, and the expanded field of postindustrial philosophy’, Postmodern Culture, 26 (2). Accessed from doi:10.1353/pmc.2016.0006.

[15] Donoghue, A. (2017) ‘Beyond lights-out: future data centers will be human-free’, Data Centre Journal, September 19.

[16] Easterling, K. (2016) Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, London: Verso.

[17] Fehrenbacher, K. (2015) ‘Google to build a big data center at an old coal plant in Alabama’, Fortune, June 14.

[18] Gibson, W. (1988) Mona Lisa Overdrive, London: Victor.

[19] Glanz, J. (2017) ‘How the internet kept humming during 2 hurricanes’, The New York Times, September 18.

[20] Graham, S. & N. Thrift (2007) ‘Out of order: understanding repair and maintenance’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24 (3):1-25.

[21] Harvey, D. (1975) ‘The political economy of urbanization: the case of the United States’, in G. Gappert & H. Rose (eds.), The Social Economy of Cities, Beverly Hills: Sage.

[22] Harvey, D. (2001a) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, New York: Routledge.

[23] Harvey, D. (2001b) ‘Globalization and the “Spatial Fix”‘, Geographische Revue 2.

[24] Harvey, D. (2007) The Limits to Capital, Oxford: Verso Books.

[25] Hatherley, O. (2010) Militant Modernism, Winchester: Zero Books.

[26] Hogan, M. (2018) ‘Data center’, in L. Schintler & C. McNeely (eds.), Encyclopedia of Big Data, Springer, Cham. Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Online ISBN 978-3-319-32001-4 Link: https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_299-1

[27] Holt, J. & P. Vonderau (2015) ‘“Where the internet lives”: Data centers as cloud infrastructure’, in Parks, L. and N. Starosielski (eds) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

[28] Hovsgaard, L.N. (2014) (Re)configuring Green Data Storage: An Ethnographic Exploration of an Icelandic Industry in the Making. Dissertation, University of Copenhagen.

[29] Howe, C., J. Lockrem, H. Appel, E. Hackett, D. Boyer, R. Hall, M. Schneider-Mayerson, A. Pope, A. Gupta, E. Rodwell, A. Ballestero, T. Durbin, F. el-Dahdah, E. Long & C. Mody (2015) ‘Paradoxical infrastructures: ruin, retrofit, and risk’, Science Technology & Human Values, 41 (3):1-19.

[30] Jeffery, R. & B. Levin (2016) ‘Lost in the cloud: the representation of networked infrastructure and its discontents’, Spheres, 1 (3):6.

[31] Johnson, A. (2019) ‘Data centers as infrastructural in-betweens: Expanding connections and enduring marginalities in Iceland’, American Ethnologist: Journal of the American Ethnological Society. Accessed from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/amet.12735

[32] Judge, P. (2017) ‘Powered by people’, Data Centre Dynamics, April 24.

[33] Kirsch, S. & D. Mitchell (2004) ‘The nature of things: dead labor, nonhuman actors, and the persistence of Marxism’, Antipode, 36 (4):687-705.

[34] Kyriakodis, H. (2015) ‘Indestructible at Broad and Callowhill’, Hidden City Philadelphia, November 4.

[35] Lefebvre, H. (2009) State, Space, World: Selected Essays, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[36] Levy, S. (2012) ‘Google throws open doors to its top-secret data center’, Wired, October 17.

[37] Malm, A. (2016) Fossil Capital, London: Verso.

[38] Manaugh, G. (2015) ‘Infrastructure as processional space’, BLDGBLOG, April 9.

[39] Mandel, E. (1990) ‘Karl Marx’, in J. Eatwell, M. Milgate & P. Newman (eds.), Marxian Economics, London: Palgrave MacMillan

[40] Marx, K. (1956a) ‘The aggregate turnover of advanced capital, cycles of turnover’, in F. Engels (ed.), Capital Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital, Moscow: Progress.

[41] Marx, K. (1956b) ‘The time of circulation’, in F. Engels (ed.), Capital Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital, Moscow: Progress.

[42] Medina, E. (2014) Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, Cambridge: MIT Press.

[43] Mitchell, T. (2013) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso.

[44] Ozaru, T. (2015) ‘Last load of coal delivered at TVA's Widows Creek plant’, Times Free Press, September 19.

[45] Parker, M. (2017) ‘What is the cloud vs. what existed before’, The People's Cloud. Accessed from https://www.earthkeptwarm.com/the-peoples-cloud/.

[46] Pasquale, F. (2016) The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

[47] Phillips, L. (2015) Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff, Winchester: Zero Books.

[48] Pickren, G. (2017) ‘The factories of the past are turning into the data centres of the future’, The Conversation, January 3.

[49] Rothstein, A. (2015) ‘How to see infrastructure: a guide for seven billion primates’, Rhizome, July 2.

[50] Russell, A. and L. Vinsel (2016) ‘Hail the maintainers’, Aeon, April 7.

[51] Starosielski, N. (2014) ‘Signal tracks’, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 10(1).

[52] Strutt, S. (2012) ‘Data center efficiency and IT equipment reliability at wider operating temperature and humidity ranges’, The Green Grid. Accessed from https://www.thegreengrid.org/en/resources/library-and-tools/383-WP

[53] Taylor, A.R.E. (2017) ‘The technoaesthetics, temporalities and transparencies of data centre white space’, Imaginations Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies [revue d'études interculturelle de l'image], 8 (2):46.

[54] Toscano, A. (2014) ‘Lineaments of the logistical state’, Viewpoint Magazine, September 28.

[55] Ukeles, M.L. (2013) Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, September 28.

[56] Veel, K. (2017) ‘Uncertain architectures: performing shelter and vulnerability’, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies [revue d'études interculturelle de l'image], 8 (2):n.p.

[57] Velkova, J. (2016) ‘Data that warms: waste heat, infrastructural convergence and the computation traffic commodity’, Big Data & Society, 3 (2):1-10.

[58] Vestberg, N.L. (2016) ‘“There is no cloud”: toward a materialist ecology of post-photography’, Captures, 1 (1). Accessed from http://revuecaptures.org/node/448.

[59] Vonderau, A. (2017) ‘Technologies of imagination: locating the cloud in Sweden's north’ Imaginations 8-2: Location and Dislocation: Global Geographies of Digital Data, ed. A. Johnson & M. Hogan. Accessed from http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.LD.8.2.2.

[60] Wiig, A. (2015) ‘The urban, infrastructural geography of “the cloud”‘, Vantage, December 18.