Cloud Ecologies: An Environmental Ethnography of Data Centers

Abstract

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography of cloud computing infrastructures and their wider environmental impacts in the northeastern and southwestern United States, Puerto Rico, and Singapore. Informed by participant observation among technicians and ethnographic engagement with the wider communities where data centers are sited, I situate the Cloud’s material, political, economic, and social resonances as local rather than global in scope. What follows is a comparative reckoning of the Cloud’s “metabolic rifts” (Marx 1863), defined by the particular geographic, climatic, economic, political, and social constraints and affordances in each of my field sites. Given that a significant portion of this fieldwork was undertaken during the height of COVID-19, the dissertation’s chapters are interrupted by experimental vignettes I call “precipitations”, which call for theoretical and methodological innovations amid pandemic lockdowns and the near-impossibility of human subjects research. In Chapter I, Cloud Temporalities, I document the quotidian rhythms of maintenance, repair, and thermal management in data centers that in turn rehabilitate the masculine subjectivities of technicians. The ‘emic’ temporal formations of uptime (success) and downtime (failure), are linked to the cold that assures the former and the runaway heat that brings bout the latter. Through deep analysis of technicians’ behaviors, speech patterns and discourses, I reveal how temporality (uptime and downtime), temperature (heat), and masculine expertise converge in data centers, introducing the terms “thermotemporalities” and “thermomasculinities”. Chapter 2, Cloud Clamor, ethnographically reconstructs the sonic experiences of Arizona residents located in close proximity to data centers. I excavate a shared lexicon of physiological and psychic harms articulated by residents exposed to data center “noise pollution”, tuned to wider sociopolitical disturbances amid the rise of “woke” and “anti-woke” discourses. I situate the experiences of Arizona residents within the larger history of noise regulation in the United States, linking their collective pursuit of “silence” to sonoracism and Allison Martin’s concept of “sonic gentrification.” Additionally, I introduce settler acoustics, a narrative complex in which the Sonoran Desert wilderness is repeatedly cast as “empty” and “barren” and is thusly figured as the preferred receptacle for the Cloud’s sonic waste (over suburbia), despite settler histories of dispossession and the ongoing presence of indigenous communities there. In Chapter 3, Cloud Hydraulics, I contrast the extreme work environments in the arid data centers of Arizona to their humid counterparts in the tropics of Puerto Rico and Singapore, revealing a temperate bias that pervades computational design and practice. I trace the hydraulic practices I document in data centers to deeper histories of air conditioning, speleology, and architecture. I turn to figuration to narrate the hydraulic paradox of the Cloud as simultaneously hydrophilic and hydrophobic, as part of the hydrological cycle and vulnerable to the deluges precipitated by hurricanes. Inspired by the work of Mél Hogan and Stefan Helmreich, I introduce “limit ecologies” as a framework for apprehending cloud computing’s turbulent expansion into submarine and extraterrestrial frontiers.