ABSTRACT
Like much of the infrastructure that supports our daily life and global economies, the topic of data centers is one that is largely surrounded in mystery. The very banality of communication rarely compels our imagination to take the step into making the concrete abstraction of infrastructure something we might know and address. Ushered in with the proliferation of digital media throughout social life, and made operational on a planetary scale in the transition from mainframe computing to facilities able to accommodate multiple servers that support the digital economy of software-as-a-service (SaaS), the rise of data centers integrates society with an economy whose technical infrastructure is defined by storage, processing, and transmission. Think cloud computing or the low-latency networks required for high-frequency trading followed by other sectors further down the food chain of speed (military-industrial complexes, medical services, urban systems, and entertainment industries). But also consider the way institutional differentiation is increasingly hard to identify as a result of the limited backend options for organizations to combine and configure off-the-shelf software services. 1 So no matter that institutions potted across the world are indeed different, the computational architecture of their operations is increasingly the same, varying only according to the minimal options offered by parameterized systems—from logging, billing, visualization, data authentication, predictive analytics, business intelligence, search, conversion, publication, and backup. Situated within the new universality of computational regimes, the calibration of subjectivity and routines of organizational culture have become standardized. 2 It is no wonder, then, that we so frequently feel logged into another groundhog day. This is a defining feature of logistical media: Low-level demands prompted by minimal parametric variation are what make the world of supply chain capitalism turn around. Again and again. Such is the weird ambience of our logistical nightmares.
