Presentation short abstract

Planetary datafication generates an ‘infrastructural overload,’ as data centers remake infrastructural networks at a planetary scale, with infrastructures serving infrastructures rather than residents.

Presentation long abstract

This paper develops the notion of ‘infrastructural overload’ to better theorize how datafication—the collection, processing, storage and circulation of data across nearly all pillars of contemporary society—has become a new frontier in the expansion of planetary metabolisms that depend on escalating forms of resource extraction. The notion of ‘infrastructural overload’ brings attention to how data centers, as the material backbones of datafication, are emerging as critical new, often domineering, consumers of other infrastructural networks. It showcases a shift in how infrastructures relate to each other, and to the people they are supposed to serve, with critical infrastructures such as water and electricity increasingly primarily serving the needs of data infrastructures irrespective of the consequences for residents in surrounding areas. On the one hand, data centers can literally ‘overload’ existing grids due to their extractive demands. On the other hand, they ‘overload’ environments with the construction of new critical infrastructures that unevenly remake landscapes to fit their operational needs. Such ‘infrastructural overload’ is happening at a planetary scale, with data centers proliferating across all regions of the world giving rise to a new planetary datafication with unprecedented extractive dynamics that prioritize infrastructures for infrastructures with little regard for adjacent lives. Data centers are thus not only a new frontier for resource extraction, but a driver of fundamental changes in planetary flows of energy and materials.