Articulating infrastructure to water: Agri-culture and Google’s South Carolina data center

Abstract

This article draws from a critical discourse analysis of Google’s three-year process to gain permission to extract greater amounts of water from an aquifer in South Carolina located near one of its data centers. Through an account of this local conflict by analyzing local news coverage, we participate in ongoing academic research regarding how the conditions of media infrastructures – the otherwise banal and largely taken-for-granted facilities that help technologies like cloud storage and streaming to operate – need to be explored in terms of the particular, local conflicts that arise from major corporations like Google building infrastructure in places like Berkeley County, South Carolina. To advance this research, we offer what we call an agri-cultural approach, which emphasizes how digital culture is formed from conflicts over the relationships between natural resources like water and digital infrastructures like data centers.