ABSTRACT

Whether it is high-frequency trading, Bitcoin mining, government administrative and service transactions, or the hosting of social media platforms and their economy of tracking, the question of centralized control remains key to the politics of data infrastructure. Rachel O’Dwyer frames this issue as follows: “Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure.” 1 David Golumbia makes a similar point about high-frequency trading: “Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control.” 2 These two observations on data politics are usually separated politically and analytically, but they in fact describe a continuum of common concerns brought into focus through the optic of logistics. Whether it is an anchor to the network of “flows” or a symptom of the inability of politics to govern the seeming ephemerality of transactional data specific to HFT, the infrastructural form and technical object of data centers render data politics with a materiality that otherwise eludes studies of digital culture and society. I finish this book with some concluding remarks on the reappropriation of infrastructure and the role of counter-imaginaries in the political geography of data. Counter-imageries are important because they address the question of how to recouple infrastructural design with new forms of collective governance. This is also a question of how to decouple and let go of the fetish of networking as a form of politics altogether.