"This Has Nothing to Do With Clouds": A Decolonial Approach to Data Centers in the Node Pole

Abstract

The environmental impacts of Big Tech fall disproportionately on economically poor people and countries, meanwhile material wealth concentrates to the few at the top. This essay examines how cloud computing uses the logic of coloniality and extractivism to conclude that ‘post-extractive modernity’ is a conceptual fallacy. Using Facebook’s sprawling data center in the ‘Node Pole’ region of Sweden as an example, we’ll find how the data center’s waste heat effectively serves as a foil to Big Tech’s promise of a post-extractive vision. Furthermore, this will challenge the country’s veneer of colonial neutrality by underscoring how the data centers subsist on the ore fields of Norrbotten, effectively staging their progression from an industry that widely contributed to colonization. In sum, this discussion highlights how cloud computing is a form of dissociation from the materiality of data, that creates distance from the impact of cloud consumption in deliberate, albeit dangerous, ways.