After the Cloud: Rethinking Data Ecologies through Anthropology & Speculative Fiction
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
iPres 2022
Thrumming at the speed of light, a tangle of devices and infrastructures like data centers conjure a weightless fantasy we abbreviate as the Cloud. In recent years, scholars, journalists, and activists have revealed, however, that the Cloud is far from ethereal. The digital is a material and ecological force. As the digital divide closes and data production accelerates exponentially, the need to realize a sustainable future for data storage is crucial for collective survival. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork in data centers, this keynote explores the ways that data centers and other digital storage infrastructures contribute to climate change, desertification, noise pollution, and the proliferation of toxic e-waste. Amid forecasts for a tenfold increase in data storage capacity by 2030, data storage industry professionals are striving to bring about carbon-neutral or climate-neutral data center designs and practices. This keynote surveys a range of data centers of the future, thinking with artists, futurists, speculative fiction writers and engineers to sketch what sustainable data storage might look like at the end of the decade and beyond. Topics will include proposed underwater or extraterrestrial data centers, 5d memory crystals, data gardens powered by synthetic DNA storage capabilities, and emerging quantum computing technologies.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a PhD Candidate in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an ethnographer of data centers and his dissertation surveys the diverse ecological impacts of computing and digital data storage in New England, Arizona, Puerto Rico, and Iceland. His writing appears in Popular Science, Scientific American, The Wire, MIT Press Reader, Anthropology & Humanism and the interdisciplinary journal, New Media & Society. Steven holds an MA in Anthropology from Brandeis University and a BA in Feminist Anthropology from Keene State College. He is also a speculative fiction writer and filmmaker.
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