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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.”