Desiloization and its discontents: the politics of data storage in the age of platformization

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores how desiloization strategies facilitate the emergence and increasing centralization of private platform power, rather than flattening and democratizing access to and control over data. Drawing on both an original genealogy of desiloization discourses and a case study of the World Bank’s evolving approach to desiloization, we show how the slipperiness of the notion of ‘silos’ obscures the way desiloization efforts reinforce the structural power of ‘Big Tech,’ a key characteristic of the emerging paradigm of platform capitalism. More specifically, we argue that concerns about interoperability often elide its reliance on the products and services of private, for-profit companies, engendering a mode of corporate centralization. In doing so, we build on an emergent interdisciplinary understanding of storage as an ‘infrastructural ecology,’ shifting attention from the biophysical environments to the political environments in which discourses and strategies of desiloization circulate and transpire.