Paper Short Abstract:

In American suburbia, the hum of cloud infrastructure is harming the mental and physical health of nearby residents. This multimodal presentation ethnographically reconstructs their sonic experiences, revealing echoes of settler colonialism & racism in their discourses & grassroots organizing.

Paper Abstract:

In American suburbia, the hum of cloud infrastructure is disturbing residents who insist that they are victims of noise pollution. Bolstered by media attention, they have successfully organized against the noisy data center arguing that they have an inalienable right to silence. Enumerating the myriad harms to their physiological and mental well-being that prolonged exposure to data center noise creates, residents have successfully motivated city officials to regulate the sonic output of the data center. Drawing on ethnographic research in a suburb of the greater Phoenix metro areas in Arizona USA, this multimodal presentation highlights some of the paradoxes and politics of sonic experiences and subjectivities, revealing how echoes of settler colonialism and sonoracism pervade the discourses of affected residents. Splicing field recordings with dramatizations of ethnographic interview data, this presentation invites participants to share in the sonic experiences of Chandler residents as they seek justice for their grievances. It also raises an important political, historical, and ethnographic question: what is noise and who gets to define it?