"Digital Materialities" seminar: Steven Gonzalez Monserrate on "The Cloud’s (In)Security: The Perils of Terraforming Environment for Computation"

Date: 08.04.2025 16:00 - 18:00
Lecture / presentation
Format: hybrid
Location: Paris, France
Event Fee: Free

Organizer(s):
The Center for Internet and Society (CIS)

Data centers are highly secure facilities. As the computational engines of digital capitalism, significant resources are devoted to ‘protecting’ these infrastructures and ensuring the unceasing continuity of their operations. Security, conceived in this way, might refer to the military logics, geopolitical dynamics, and imperial histories that insulate or heighten the vulnerability of data centers. However, while the threats of cyberwarfare significantly influence the siting and operation of data centers, security considerations extend to Nature as both a threat and opportunity, a resource and an obstacle for ubiquitous computation and ‘artificial intelligence’. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, this intervention offers a comparative survey of data centers operating in different environments. Case studies include a data center in the arid southwestern United States, another in the arctic chill of Iceland, and a final case in the humid tropics of Singapore. With a focus on the materiality of computation and the pragmatic challenges that different climates pose for servers, I frame the Cloud’s expansion as an act of terraforming. By attending to both the environmental impacts of computation and the required inputs for the metabolism of data, the intervention concludes by asking how the Cloud’s terraforming threatens as much as it assures continuity.

https://cis.cnrs.fr/materialites-du-numerique/#sem-matnum

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein