Of dog kennels, magnets, and hard drives: Dealing with Big Data peripheries

Abstract

How did the 3.5-inch Winchester hard disk drive become the fundamental building block of the modern data center? In attempting to answer this question, I theorize the concept of "data peripheries" to attend to the awkward, uneven, and unintended outsides of data infrastructures. I explore the concept of data peripheries by first situating Big Data in one of its many unintended outsides—an unassuming dog kennel in Indiana housed in a former permanent magnet manufacturing plant. From the perspective of this dog kennel, I then build a history of the 3.5-inch Winchester hard disk drive, and weave this hard drive history through the industrial histories of rare earth mining and permanent magnet manufacturing, focusing principally on Magnequench, a former General Motors subsidiary, and its sale and movement of operations from Indiana to China in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. I then discuss how mobilities of rare earths, both as materials and political discourse, shape Big Data futures, and conclude by speculating on how using the situated lenses of data peripheries (such as this Indiana dog kennel) can open up new methods for studying the material entanglements of Big Data writ large.

Flying the skies to wire the seas: Subsea cables, remote work, and the social fabric of a media industry

“…Our work builds on and extends a recent infrastructural turn in media studies, including works that attend to the intersections of the territories, materialities, and political economies of media industries (Hu, 2015; Parks and Starosielski, 2015; Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019). This also includes critical analyses of cloud computing and data centers, as well as their land uses and energy disruptions (Cooper, 2021; Holt and Vonderau, 2015; Velkova, 2021). These kinds of infrastructural accounts extend beyond data centers, 5G towers, and internet exchanges to subsea cable infrastructure as well.…”

The Data Center Cannot Hold: Data Colonialism and the “Nimbus Project”

“…Thus, Data centers' acute materiality offers a more nuanced understanding of data colonialism, and of the different actors and stakeholders involved in the creation and sustainment of this global regime. Accordingly, the centers' concrete geopolitical location in a big data periphery (Cooper, 2021) that deems itself a global tech center, raises important questions around state vs. corporate sovereignty and power. Moreover, the fact that the Nimbus data centers are still on paper (or rather, in the cloud), and that they are currently half-built assemblages (Burrell, 2020), only highlights the sociopolitical drama around them, and make seen the oft-invisible ideational and political bolts and screws of such big-data infrastructure.…”