Thermopolitics of data: cloud infrastructures and energy futures

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article develops the notion of a thermopolitics of data to describe an ongoing infrastructural integration of the platform economy with energy politics through the mediation of heat. Building on fieldwork conducted at a data centre owned by a major Russian digital platform that, since 2016, has been the main source of heating for the Finnish town of Mäntsälä, the article analyzes the ways in which the materialities of heat and data get mobilized by different actors to produce a new object—the data centre as a thermal urban infrastructure. Situating these processes in a history of shifting scientific and popular understandings of future fuels, and of the relation between information and energy, the article extends emergent scholarly literature on the cultures of thermal manipulation that underpin digital media. An enquiry into the thermopolitics of data illuminates the ways in which bodies and spaces are silently integrated and infrastructurally organized to simultaneously function as objects of quantification, commodification and differentiation, and the provisioning of thermal regulation and human care for these practices. In the formation of these relations, new regulatory, ethical and epistemological questions about the relationship between data, agency and energy arise.