Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and resource dependence of the NSA's Utah Data Center, I demonstrate how surveillance and privacy can never be disconnected from the material infrastructures that allow and render natural the epistemological state of mass surveillance. Specifically, I explore the NSA's infrastructure and the million of gallons of water it requires daily to cool its servers, while located in one of the driest states in the US. Complicating surveillance beyond the NSA, as also already imbricated with various social media companies, this article questions the emplacement and impact of corporate data centers more generally, and the changes they are causing to the landscape and local economies. I look at how water is an intriguing and politically relevant part of the surveillance infrastructure and how it has been constructed as the main tool for activism in this case, and how it may eventually help transform the public's conceptualization of Big Data, as deeply material.

As the quintessential digital archive, Facebook no longer requires an introduction; its user-base is currently estimated at one billion profiles. On the front end, it is the epitome of the postmodern living archive. Its underbelly, however, remains much less explored and theorized. What kinds of servers are required to host such large amounts of “free” information, offering up data so rapidly, across so many platforms? Taken together, these pragmatic questions inform an important theoretical intervention: these dislocated centers—existing in “enterprise zones” and arctic hideaways—not only effectively blind us to the potential environmental costs of our everyday obsession with self-archiving but also demand a serious revision of the preservation ideals that underpin the archive. This article offers up a series of provocations about data storage centers, as the archive’s underbelly, with the intent of reconnecting Facebook to the bodies and machines that enable it and the ideals that inform it.

This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to

In four exploratory theoretical gestures (appraise, dispose, hoard and mediate), I propose the ‘archive as dumpster’ as a framework for returning to the physical conditions of memory, where “picking through the trash” subverts traditional archival methodologies by insisting on the very material consequences of a culture inculcated in networked digital communications. I make an argument that by posing the archive as a mediatic question (Parikka 2013), we can begin to account for the ways in which the perceived immateriality and weightlessness of our data is in fact with immense humanistic, environmental, political, and ethical repercussions. It is also a means by which we come to understand who we are, looking forward. In both cases, pitting the archive’s orderly ambitions against the dumpster’s stinking mess reveals a ‘call of things’ (Bennett 2011); the slow and often distanced process of disposal and waste to remind us who we are, in and over time, in and out of our bodies, increasingly under the impression of a dematerialised engagement with our stuff.

This contribution looks specifically at the process of redeveloping data centre infrastructure: how the value of past capital investments in the built environment can be preserved and multiplied through further capitalist development. We argue that, while the majority of data centres are not placed in these retrofitted industrial buildings, the ones that are indicate a specific spatial logic within the neoliberal order. We show that retrofitting industrial buildings into data centres is about more than putting inactive capital back to ‘work’; it is also about the use of industrial infrastructure as a casing to obfuscate the origins, structure, and workings of the neoliberal project, as metaphorised by the data centres that help to constitute its subjects.