PROJECT 02: MEDIA, POWER, AND ECOLOGY AT THE GOOGLE DATA CENTER IN THE DALLES, OREGON

Abstract

The climate emergency and the accompanying ecological and cultural crises challenge existing modes of critique in the humanities. Described by terms such as Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene, these crises are distributed across large scales of space and time and confound simple notions of causality, requiring new paradigms for research in the humanities. Recent work in media studies engages these concerns by examining the ecologies of media and media infrastructures. The Internet is arguably the most critical media infrastructure. Media studies augments cultural analyses of the Internet by focusing on the materialities of this Internet, foregrounding ways that information, infrastructures, cultures, and materialities are—and always have been—intimately entwined.Data centers—the massive server farms that store data, perform cloud computing, and host much of the Internet—are critical sites of the Internet’s computational power. Project 02: Media, Power, and Ecology at the Google Data Center in The Dalles, Oregon contributes to existing work on data centers by focusing on Google’s first hyperscale data center—named “Project 02” in early permitting documents. In media studies, Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau’s “Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure,” and a series of articles by Mel Hogan address the imaginaries of data centers, the discourse around them, and the ecologies they produce. While this work on data centers is foundational, it relies on insights derived primarily from promotional materials and brief site visits. These methodologies address data centers as static objects rather than emergent processes, circumscribing scholars’ ability to address ongoing changes in an industry defined by rapid change and constant growth. Further, these studies often tacitly accept the data centers’ own definition of their spatio-temporal boundaries rather than challenging them. Because data centers are inherently relational, it is necessary to apply a similar network logic to defining the data center itself—as an assemblage of infrastructural relations rather than a self-contained object with discrete connections to the world. My research addresses these methodological and conceptual concerns through a longitudinal study of Google’s first hyperscale data center. Project 02 will be the first book-length study of a single data center, drawing on repeated site visits over four years, talks and publications by Google, and extensive research into government archives. The Introduction, Where the Internet Lives, contrasts this data center’s role in Google’s global network with phenomenological accounts of its ever-expanding security perimeter. Chapter 1, Secrecy, Sustainability, and Security, traces shifts in Google’s discourse, from secrecy to promoting sustainability, through a survey of publications, talks, websites, video tours, and maps. Chapter 2, Territorial, Temporal, and Material Processes in The Dalles, examines political and ecological implications of changes in network topologies and the implementation of artificial intelligence-focused Tensor Processing Units. Chapter 3, Rocks, Water, Salmon, Treaties, and Networks: Making Space for The Dalles data center, frames the data center on an expansive scale of time and space, situating it within the ongoing process of settler colonialism in the northwestern United States. Chapter 4, The Bonneville Power Administration Film Archives: Ecologies of Infrastructural Media from 1939 to the Present, investigates the data center’s source of electrical power, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), through an archiveology of the films and photographs produced by the BPA from 1939 to the present. This survey of BPA films attends to a central infrastructure of settler colonialism, while highlighting Indigenous activists’ success in producing changes to the operation of BPA dams. The Conclusion, An Owner’s Manual, considers potentials for analogous infrastructural activism at the Google data center and foregrounds instabilities within the immense power embodied in Google’s corporate infrastructure. This book project informs—and is shaped by—a multimodal research practice that engages contemporary and archival media related to the data center and the infrastructures that support it. Project 02 interweaves videos produced by Google with photographs and films from the archives of the Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Bonneville Power Administration alongside my own video, audio, and photography of the data center and a series of related sites. This media-centric methodology builds meaning from a dual conception of media ecologies as both relations among media objects and as ecologies produced by—and alongside of—these media objects. This method of working through multiple flows of media attends to the expansive spatio-temporal scales of the data center’s ecological, political, and cultural entanglements. In parallel to the book, Project 02 has two multimodal realizations. The media exhibition frames the data center in relation to the last 150 years along a fifteen-mile stretch of the Columbia River. Media produced by Google is interwoven with materials from government archives and my own video and audio of the data center, The Dalles Dam, active Indigenous fishing sites, and the Columbia River. The exhibition immerses the audience in a disparate body of media emerging from, and around, the Google data center, leading the audience to consider long-term implications of the Internet’s central role in our culture. The second multimodal project is a feature-length documentary film which leverages a haptic approach to the data center, cinematic engagements with surrounding environments, and affective encounters with archival media to produce a narrative that spirals outward from the data center to attend to the infrastructural relationships that support it. The book, film, and media exhibition contribute to a broader reckoning with the substantial power accumulated by Google. My research grounds concerns over Google’s monopolization of critical infrastructure in an environmental history of Google’s oldest hyperscale data center. At the hydroelectric dams that power this data center, the New Deal era dream of “power for the people” has evolved into a complexly negotiated system incorporating salmon ecologies, Indigenous land and water rights, and emerging challenges of climate change into the management of an aging network of dams. Project 02 considers analogous potentials for Google’s technological and engineering contributions to be rethought and reconfigured, informed by logics and concerns beyond their original intent. These potential reconfigurations are critical to reimagining the Internet, democratizing the production of knowledge, and bolstering our ability to navigate the ongoing crises of the Anthropocene.