Silicon Forest and Server Farms

The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest

Download PDF

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. doi:10.13016/m2y2pi-xdei CultureMachine.net

Abstract

Access to inexpensive hydro-resources, such as hydro-electricity and water for cooling, cheap land, and proximity to undersea networks have created a spatial sweet spot for large data firms in the Pacific Northwest. These factors are leveraged as “natural” reasons for the growth of the data center industry in the region, often accompanied by promises of new jobs and economic development and a rhetoric of economic transition from forestry to data. However, the realization of these benefits is often not realized, or it is split unevenly across urban/rural divides. Drawing on content analysis of media, marketing materials, industry journals, and state and city level policies and plans, this essay seeks to identify the logics of extraction and exploitation that shape data infrastructure geographies. In the first section, we show how nature is constructed as both a resource and a greenwashing strategy for data centers. Then, we use 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 discuss in the third section, highlighting how this mode of capital accumulation is leading to new fractures and inequalities in cities like Seattle. We end by posing a series of provocative questions for future scholarship on data infrastructures.

Summary

… nature is reduced to the nature that digital capital finds useful: cheap energy, cheap water, cheap land, and green imagery.

The cloud didn’t escape the old extractive economy—it plugged into it. In this essay, we follow Pacific Northwest data centers from dammed rivers and former industrial lands to Seattle’s tech-driven redevelopment. Behind the promise of a clean digital future lies a familiar arrangement: cheap resources, public subsidies, and private accumulation.

Just as Facebook and Google use rural Oregon for their ‘natural’ resources, they use cities and agglomerations of ‘users’ to extract data.

Rural landscapes supply power and cooling; urban social life supplies the data. These aren’t separate stories but connected frontiers of extraction.