Dustin

Certain life paths have led me to study the entangled senses of damage caused by data-intensive platforms. There’s community damage: Amazon, for example, has threatened to seize land owned by African-American communities in Virginia to construct high-voltage power lines to feed their nearby data centers with electricity. There’s environmental damage: through its surveillance operations that intercept data from several social media platforms, the National Security Administration’s Utah data center uses billions of gallons of water every day as part of its operating procedures to track and trace our every move (Hogan, 2015). And there’s colonial damage, which we discussed ealier in this webtext: Facebook’s decision to build a data center along the Rio Grande River in New Mexico on land that sits only a few miles away from the Isleta Pueblo whose people have lived along the river for centuries.

You see why I use entangled—it’s damage all the way down.

I’m entangled in this story, too. I grew up in Silver City, New Mexico, a small town in the southern part of the state. I grew up relatively poor, in a trailer, and without what my dad called “city water.” For a time, we got our water from a well drilled on my family’s property, but when I was about 10 years old, it went dry. And so every week my dad would load a plastic tank into his pickup truck and haul water—city water—from my grandma’s line. When the shower started to spit air, it was time to repeat the process. Rinse (quickly) and repeat.

It is this experience—and countless others (driving over dry river beds, watching neighborhood kids perform rain dances in early summer droughts, seeing smoke fill the skies as forest fires tore through bone-dry trees, and feeling in awe and a bit uncomfortable in water-rich areas like my current home in Florida)—that brings me into this research. How can Facebook justify the placing of its infrastructure in an ecology that is incompatible—inhospitable—to its needs? How can Facebook justify using water pumped from desert aquifers along a river that’s headed toward a permanent drought to satisfy its cooling needs? How can Facebook justify deploying narratives of regional economic prosperity in a deeply impoverished state when, in fact, it will only employ a few dozen employees?

My story says it can’t.