Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

Abstract

In this article, I take the case of data centers as a powerful tool and infrastructure of multinational digital capitalism, analyzing the ways in which understanding these and other data infrastructures through their energy frameworks allows us to theorize the implications of planetary environmental impacts of digital data for contemporary subjects beyond individual data technologies themselves. This is especially true in data centers’ function as energy vacuums and in their carbon and extractive footprints and other environmental externalities. I demonstrate that data centers organize an assemblage of environmental relations whose operations reproduce uneven systems of capitalism enacted through energy and environmental politics. While this article is by no means comprehensive, and by necessity must be selective in its engagement with key texts in a number of overlapping fields, it broadly draws from media studies, geographical, and sociological approaches to data infrastructures to unravel the entanglements of digital systems and the environment. Data centers and their energy connections represent multivalent sites and indications into the global supply chain of data infrastructure, and their extractive dynamic as networked infrastructure fundamentally changes how we need to see their impacts and the impacts of datafication more broadly.