Data plantation: Northern Virginia and the territorialization of digital civilization in “the Internet Capital of the World”

Abstract

Abstract Purpose The development of the Northern VA and the Washington, DC metro area as a key node in the globalizing digital urban system is well established. This essay investigates the growth of that technological geography in the 1990s and 2000s as a part of the planetary epoch of human transformation that some have called the “Plantationocene” (vs. Anthropocene). Approach A historical and critical interpretive analysis of race, landscape, and technology policy in the Northern VA area. Findings The paper establishes the region’s social attachments to its “bucolic” agrarian landscape, rooted in the US Civil War and vast inequalities of the reimposition of the plantation as an “afterlife of slavery” after Reconstruction’s failure. It then suggests that the conditions of the plantation economy within a kind of digital plantation economy—featuring resource monopolies, extractive forms of exploitation, and monocrop “ecologies”—based on the “Server Farming” (aka, data center) industry through which some 70 % of the world’s Internet traffic flows. It looks at this digital aspect of the Plantationocene as post-Bellum and insurgent, in which the manipulation of history, the accumulation and control of ‘arable’ (digital) land, and the dispossession of social processes under quasi-feudalistic property rights encourage unequal, unsustainable, and often violent cultures and political ecologies. Practical implications Researchers considering digital urbanism might use this approach to understand online and offline geographies of the contemporary media industry. Social implications It treats the contemporary anti-government and ethno-nationalist movements growing in digital mediation as part of a much longer and unsettled planetary conflict over the plantation system, racialized social inequality, and the abolition of slavery. Originality/value While some work on “data colonialism” implicitly connects digital urbanism to the mostly agriculturally-focused work on the Plantationocene, this essay makes the connection explicit, place-based in specific historical-geographical contexts, and focused on the roles of specific political economic actors.