Data centers as infrastructural in‐betweens:

• Published in: American Ethnologist
• Main Author: JOHNSON, ALIX
• Other Authors: National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, American-Scandinavian Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2019
• Subjects: Anthropology; Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/amet.12735; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Famet.12735; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/amet.12735; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full-xml/10.1111/amet.12735; https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/amet.12735; https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/amet.12735

ABSTRACT On Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula, a new industry is taking root in the ruins of a US military base: digital data storage. The new data centers, where transnational corporations pay to store terabytes of information, have been lauded as transformative for the region. But as they engage the military base's physical infrastructures, spatial orders, and affective resonances, they reprise and cement Reykjanes's former role as an infrastructural in‐between : a node in others’ networks, both built in and left out. Thus, while digital networks are often imagined as overcoming marginality through the “death of distance” or “compression of space‐time,” their layering amid imperial legacies means that on Reykjanes they perpetuate marginality. These conditions illustrate the unevenly emplaced impacts of cloud computing and unsettle the techno‐utopian ideal of connectivity. [ infrastructure, information technology, data centers, militarism, intermediarity, marginality, Iceland ]