From Paper Mill to Google Data Center: the role of network infrastructure and digital capitalism
ShinJoung Yeo
Last modified: 05-07-2011
Google processes 34,000 searches per second or 88 billion searches per month (McGee, 2010). These globally generated data are stored, indexed, exchanged and transformed into commodities. This process is emblematic of the “network economy.” However, the questions that are rarely asked -- where and how are these bits and bites actually traveling around the globe, processed and exchanged as commodities? There have been many studies on the role of ICTs in this “network economy” but less attention on changes of physical infrastructure behind it and its’ relationship to the development of capitalism.
Borrowing from the concept of digital capitalism (Schiller, 1999, 2007), political economy approaches to network infrastructure (Graham & Marvin, 2001), and critical geography (Harvey, 2001), this working paper addresses how physical IT infrastructures have been reconfigured to transcend territorial boundaries and to deepen global market economy. I will examine how Google data centers -- those large facilities that house thousands of servers which manage, process and store data, monitor Internet traffic, etc.-- are developed as strategic sites of digital capitalism.
Currently, Google operates 36 data centers globally --19 in the US, 12 in Europe, 3 in Asia, and one each in Russia and South America. One of Google’s recent investments was the purchase and conversion of a paper mill in Hamina, Finland. Though common perception is that the network economy defies geographical boundaries, the building of data centers is tightly connected to geographically dispersed markets, fiber trunks for network connectivity, IT labor supply, access to cheap energy etc. On the surface, this seems contradictory, yet I argue that it allies with capitalist logics and accumulation strategies of the ICT industry. This research seeks to expand the analysis of Google data centers beyond their technical infrastructure to examine their implications within political economy of network infrastructure.
http://www.lborolondon.ac.uk/study/institutes-programmes/institute-for-media-and-creative-industries/people/
http://informationobservatory.info/people/
Dear ShinJoung Yeo,
I am writing you to ask for a contribution to a publication Mondotheque[] that is the result of a two year collective process of work around the institutional politics, global machinations around the archives of Paul Otlet, a Belgian Utopianist and documentalist who was recently re-discovered as 'the father of the internet' or worse, 'the visionary inventor of Google on paper'.
We met a while ago in New York at the workshop '' and since I have followed your work with much interest. I was really happy to discover http://informationobservatory.info and your analysis of the Google Books verdict was much needed and important.
The publication Mondotheque contains contributions from artists, data-activists, developers etc. and will be published both as a wiki and in printed form. Inspired by Paul Otlet's imaginary thinking machine [2], the publication combines multiple formats: interviews, encyclopedic contributions, fiction, critical essays and visual work. Mondotheque is a snapshot from the ongoing collaborative work of a band of people trying to respond to the effects of pushing cultural infrastructures into the hands of global corporations following the convenant that the Mundaneum, keeper of Paul Otlet's archives, signed with Google and it's predictable outcome [3].
I imagined your contribution from either the perspective of data-aesthetics and the abolishment of the curation of archives (stumbled over your suggestive footnote in your text on Computational Vandalism), I started to think about your contribution though when you brought up the posthuman book for Braidotti's Posthuman Glossary. As we are preparing a re-edition of Otlet's Traité de documentation [4], this is art of the aim, to rethink the book as document, or a radiated library, beyond the limits of Otlet's 19th century visions. I suspect some of what you were referring to at the 'editorial meeting' could connect.
I am most interested in fiction for this so decided for the non-work e-mail but many things are possible; each contribution will eventually be a wikipage that contains an essay, or story, or collection of images, or image caption. Ideas for the publication will be discussed at the Mondotheque meeting that will take place on 2 October in The World Trade Center (!) in Brussels, on the afternoon before Dusan's event in Mons. Deadline is December 1 (I will be editing in Solitude this winter) but negotiable until mid-January, if that helps.
The book will be published in spring 2016 by Constant, the organisationf for arts and media in Brussels that I work for and with
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[1] http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/La_Mondoth%C3%A8que
[2] A preliminary index is here: http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/Publication
[3] https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/browse/mundaneum
[4] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:Otlet_-_Trait%C3%A9_de_documentation,_1934.djvu and http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php