The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest
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Levenda, Anthony and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2019. “Silicon Forest and Server Farms: The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest.” Culture Machine 18: 1-14. MDSoar CultureMachine.net
Summary
We trace some of connections, displacements, and inequalities that are found along data infrastructures. If we follow from data centers in rural communities to smart cities produced in the image of large corporations, we find extractive logics all along the way. Choosing data centers and infrastructures as the site for investigation of the relationship between digital capitalism and nature is strategic. It reveals a complex relationship between urbanization as a planetary scale process linking urban and rural communities, facilitating flows of nature (energy, water, food, waste, etc.) in circulations and metabolisms that reproduce digital capitalism. In the first section, we showed how nature is constructed as both a resource and a greenwashing strategy for data centers. Then, we turned towards the metaphor of layering to understand how data infrastructures are a specific expression of digital capitalism’s secondary circuit at this historical-geographical moment. Growth in data infrastructures, as an expression of digital capitalism’s secondary circuit of fixed capital, is driven by the logic of exploitation of social production through digital means. Everyday life, subjectivity, and social knowledge become reduced to data resources for extraction by digital capitalists. This is the basis of third-wave urbanization, which we discussed in the third section, highlighting how this mode of capital accumulation is leading to new fractures and inequalities in cities like Seattle.
But there is still so much more to do. What inequities are arising in the uneven development of data infrastructures within and beyond cities? How might we extend analyses of data centers and data infrastructures to understand the relationship between computing and socio-natural change? And how might these mappings elucidate new areas for contestation and resistance? What are the possibilities for more sustainable and equitable alternatives in digital economies? This essay perhaps raises more questions than it answers, but our goal here is to provoke critical reflection on the interconnections between nature, urbanization, and computation. After all, paraphrasing Marx, nature builds no data centers.