<div>'Don't talk about data centers'" -- this from a piece on data centers/cloud computing in the NYTimes architecture magazine (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?sq=data%20centers&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?sq=data%20centers&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all</a>). Yes, it's a bit over-dramatic and conspiratorial, but I think it usefully highlights the tendential omission of (infra-)structural issues in some of the discussions of the status of online activity. The repeated comparison in the article is suggestive: data centers are to the digital "revolution" what factories are to the industrial one. These are structures populated not by people, but by data about them ("We used to think that owning factories was an important piece of a business’s value...Then we realized that owning what the [social?] factory produces is more important.”). What I find striking about the article is the portrait it paints of the emergence of galloping privatization -- the commercial enclosure of information hithero unavailable (or stored in other forms), non-existent, or too expensive to systematically capture and sort. The energy statistics help to provide some indication of the scale of this rapidly expanding digital enclosure ("From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity."). </div>
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<div>The servers, of course, provide convenient and useful services, including the email application I'm using to compose and circulate this post. They also represent the privatization of the products of our communicative, social, and transactional data on an unprecedented scale. What economists call the "non-rival" character of this ownership (at least in some instances) creates a distinction in control over the product of our information-generating activity vis a vis industrial forms of production (one of the several reasons contributing to the growing salience of intellectual property law in the digital era). Obviously the fact that Facebook knows who my friends are doesn't mean that I don't. However, Facebook also has access to aggregate forms of data (as well as, increasingly, the means of sorting, searching, and manipulating the aggregate). At issue here are what might be described not just at a significant portion of the means of communicating, transacting, and accessing information, but also the means of data processing, of making sense of tremendous amounts of data, including conducting ongoing, large-scale, controlled experiments and interpreting the results. These means of data processing or sense-making (albeit in instrumental fashion) are inaccessible to the producers of the raw data, and the products they produce are equally inaccessible (I may know who my friends are, but I have no notion of the significance my pattern of interaction takes on against the background of millions of other patterns, the controlled experiments that generated them, and the results of aggregating, sorting, and querying this data). In this regard, products are generated based on the aggregate activity of data producers that remains inaccessible to them. The question of whether the data-producing activity is understood by participants as work, play, consumption, etc., while an important one in many regards, may not illuminate the complex process whereby private ownership/control of the means of interaction relates to private ownership of the technology, datasets, and algorithms for transforming the raw data into information products inaccessible to producers, products that appear to them only in forms that render their original contribution indistinguishable, invisible, untraceable. </div>
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<div>The enclosure movement and the eventual forms of real subsumption and technological transformation that accompanied it (the shift from expropriation of surplus product to that of surplus value, the rise of waged labor and the eventual transformation from piece-work rates to hourly wages) favored the emergence of factory space, not just to aggregate worker activity, but also, significantly to monitor and eventually rationalize it. In this regard, the server farms might better be described as server "factories" -- spaces where the productive aspect of monitoring is separated out from the range of monitored activities. The fact that these spaces are private, commercial ones, is neither natural nor necessary, but is the legacy of historical forms of enclosure -- the continuation of enclosure as a form of separation (of users from their date, data producers from the means of data processsing), what Massimo De Angelis has described as a process of continuous enclosure. </div>