Short abstract:

This presentation unpacks industrial literature surrounding the growing overlaps between data infrastructures and fish farming, demonstrating the increasing integration of digital infrastructure, energy systems, and more-than-human ecologies towards “sustainable” planetary management for capital.

Long abstract:

Fish farming has seen a recent “cloud” and AI boom, as companies seek to innovate their cultivation and extraction measures by applying data-driven and machine-learning technologies to their operations. At the same time, the material components of the cloud – especially data centres – are increasingly looked to as circular solutions for industrial activities, as their energy-intensive facilities are used as thermal and electrical supports for fish farming operations. As “data farms” and “fish farms” thus coalesce at the intersection of digitalisation and decarbonisation, this presentation confronts the material and epistemological re-shaping of the planet, its ecologies, and its food systems for data-driven, “green” capital.

Using critical discourse analysis of industrial literature, I focus on three areas of application: 1) use of cloud and AI technologies by fish farming corporations; 2) employment of data centre electricity infrastructures and climate systems in integrated ways with aquaculture projects; and 3) monitoring and “streaming” of farming operations remotely via data-driven and video technologies. By each of these mechanisms, digital technologies are ordering the planet towards the production of fish for “sustainable” harvesting, wherein the energetic processes of the atmosphere (e.g. solar and wind power), are being integrated into fish production mediated by data-driven technologies. Far from the metaphorical “cloud,” these processes provide material insight into how corporate capital instrumentalises the intersection of “nature” and “culture” towards maintaining and intensifying its grasp within planetary systems, representing a potent point of critique (and contestation) surrounding the contours of eco-modernity on a “damaged planet.”

Long abstract:

In the digital era, data has become one of those critical “hyperobjects” that are negligible in size but have enormous temporal and spatial extensions and can permeate every corner of the planet. A sheer volume of data is generated every day, flowing through devices and networks, producing huge economic profits and opportunities for both public and private sectors. In the global assemblage of digital flow, the data center is a social structure of critical importance, acting as the storage, fermentation, and pumping organ of the digital society. Here, one of our planet’s most precious resources is processed, allocated, and utilized. Consequently, data centers have captured the attention of many scholars, who have portrayed data centers as exploitative, even toxic infrastructures. Drawing inspiration from Annemarie Mol’s empirical philosophy, this essay aims to present data centers as an ongoing endeavor of complex actors instead of an inevitable end of technological development. Specifically, this essay will follow Annemarie Mol’s ontological multiplicity, presenting how different realities of data centers are enacted by various actors in practice and how these realities overlap, coordinate, and clash with each other. By looking at the historical development and current actor-network of data centers in China, this essay aims to unveil how different ideas and power structures are reflected, reified, and reproduced in the multiplicity of data centers and how seemingly recalcitrant realities work together to form a seamless web that sustains crucial social functions in daily life.

Long abstract:

This paper considers the planetary data infrastructures of air pollution monitoring through an anticolonial, feminist media, science and technology studies approach. I argue that contemporary efforts to (re)calibrate global data infrastructures of air pollution monitoring must take into account the socio-technical historical constructions of data reliability and toxic exposure. This shift also engenders a shift from thinking globally to thinking at a planetary scale. I apply this argument to a political aesthetics analysis of the United Nations Environment Programme’s 2021 air pollution exposure calculator, following Brian Larkin’s assertion that “political aesthetics sutures the material and the figural, showing how both are engaged in a constant reciprocal exchange” (2018).

In analyzing the technologies and metrics of the UNEP data visualization tool, I unpack the sociohistorical contexts that shape two core components of the calculator’s artificial intelligence-enabled live mapping interface: data reliability and toxic exposure. My historical overview of data reliability and toxic exposure fold in concepts from data justice and sovereignty studies, environmental justice, and ecofeminism. This overview encompasses the ways in which social inequities are entangled in processing the raw data of air pollution produced by governments, crowd-sourcing, and satellites, as well as their aggregate data banks.

In considering future avenues for air pollution metrics and technologies, I reflect on speculative measures using historical source material. I conclude by briefly analyzing how the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity accomplishes a perceptual recalibration through Going to Water (2021), their multimedia installation remediating air pollution surveillance video.

Short abstract:

I examine appeals to data continuity following the “discovery” of the “Ozone hole” over the Antarctic in the context of efforts to mount a stable, on-ice labor force, highlighting gendered labor regimes and automation as key issues materially entangled with maintaining planetary data infrastructure.

Long abstract:

STS researchers are well-positioned to study the material dimensions and embeddedness of knowledge and data infrastructures undergirding global environmental processes. This paper proposes doing so in relation to one of the most celebrated episodes in the history of environmental science, the “discovery” of the “Ozone hole.” In the years prior to the publication announcing the discovery, the ongoing collection of Ozone data in the Antarctic was called into question by the UK government. Rhetorically and politically, the significance of and subsequent press surrounding the identification of seasonal Ozone depletion above the Antarctic came to retrospectively justify a logic and practice of data continuity that the station retains into the present. This logic and practice are closely entangled with the struggles of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to assemble seasonal or 1-2 year long labor forces to infrastructurally maintain the conditions of data collection on the ice. Drawing on a mix of archival and interview materials, this paper situates Ozone data continuity in the context of various dramatic transformations in the labor composition of Halley: first, the much-resisted introduction of women into the on-ice work of BAS in the 1980s and second, the ongoing automation of Antarctic scientific observation that’s been accelerated in the context of rapidly shifting environment conditions, the pandemic, and UK budget cuts for scientific activity. In doing so, the paper makes a case for examining social labor and labor struggles in making sense of the material entanglements of planetary data infrastructures.

Long abstract:

This submission will untangle and reassemble the planetary data infrastructures that underlies global supply chains – now understood to be both tangible and virtual, aiming to answer the question: how do we combat the embodied ethos of extraction that belies their making (and breaking)?

While the COVID-19 pandemic rendered physical supply chains visible for the first time during a time of global disruptions (embodied by the trapped Ever Green, a container ship that became stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021), their digital counterparts have only seemed to stretch the term’s scope and breadth. Growing understanding of ‘software supply chains’ (and ever-increasingly: “AI supply chains”) appears to acknowledge the breadth of techno-social infrastructures belying web-based technology (Widder 2023). Indeed, the (software) maintenance movement and growing need to support (open source) infrastructures through various funding coalitions recognises the inherent fragility of both supply chains (see: Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund; The Maintainers; Right to Repair).

But despite this recognition, this shift begs questions as to what other logics this conceptual expansion is sustaining. What other epistemologies does a ‘supply chain’ approach to software perpetuate? That of friction(less) processes, of worldwide (planetary) scales, extractive infrastructures, and ‘just enough and just on time’ (also known as ‘agile’) methodologies? After venturing from shipping containers to spreadsheets and back again, this submission will suggest ‘poetic tactics to counter extraction’ across these physical and digital supply chains, building off of an ongoing “School of Commons” fellowship by the same name.

Long abstract:

This conversation circle invites participants to share their everyday computing rituals to cultivate a more reciprocal awareness of how digital communication forms part of our shared ecosystem and our “culture scape” (Greeno & Gough 2014). By increasing our awareness of our computing routines, we delve into the interconnected cycle of perception, experience, and language, which plays a crucial role in shaping our digital interactions within the ecosystems we inhabit. The intricate entanglement of international and local markets is broadly recognised in contemporary globalised economies. Open discussions about our experiences, challenges, and aspirations, we explore the materiality of computing and gain insights into its environmental impact (for instance, the carbon footprint of sending an email). We contemplate how we navigate our personal computing infrastructure and our expectations around these conventions: the customs of sending and receiving an email, the provenance of hardware, file formats, directories/folders, the minerals and vessels we keep our data in and the space, and the lands these may occupy. Through our exploration, we will expand our understanding of digital infrastructure as a dance of computation for a more holistic, aesthetic and culturally informed relationship with digital technology. Focusing on our vernacular computing rituals reveals the intricate relationship between real and fictional spaces we co-create with our computing devices. We will also discuss the challenges of preserving complex cultural heritage to nurture the value of such counter-expertise. Critically examining possibilities and limitations of the permacomputing movement and how such alternatives can adequately address on-the-ground complexities.

Long abstract:

„They just want to cuddle their servers”, the university data centre operators told us. “They” are the scientists who are reluctant to install their servers in the new “operator-less” data centre and to exclusively supervise and operate their servers remotely.

Data centre studies have repeatedly shown and problematized the serious planetary effects of these vastly power consuming, water spending and rare and precious metal extractive data processing plants (e.g. Edwards, Cooper & Hogan, 2024). It remains, however, difficult to experience the planetary relations of data processing.

Feminist server projects are a key inspiration to generating such experiences. They develop a visceral, kinetical experience of servers by assembling the hardware (e.g. Mauro-Flude & Akama, 2022). Rather than a distant ocular and consuming view of servers’ hard, smooth, and shiny surfaces, they explore servers’ inner parts by touching the metal of circuit boards and assembling servers. Touching the metal is a bodily experience of servers, and of their planetary matter.

With inspiration from feminist server projects, the presentation discusses a speculative project developing a virtual reality (VR) application to experience the “cuddling with servers”. Contrary to making generating rational awareness or moral sensitivity towards the planetary harm of data centres, the VR application experiments with generating bodily experiences of the planetary matter transformed into sound of processors and fans, and the whirling of disc drives. The presentation discusses processes and potential of generating experiences of the planetary relations of data processing through a VR application.