Tomorrow: Mostly Cloudy
ISBN
978–90–76703–67–1
Type
book section
Date Issued
2025-06-01
Author(s)
Abstract
Water is of outmost importance for the operation of the digital sphere. More often than not, the essential physical infrastructures for „the digital“—like server farms, datacenters or bitcoin mining facilities—are powered by and cooled down with the liquid element. In the alpine regions of Switzerland, new material geographies are emerging because rising temperatures make glaciers melt and enourmous amounts of water available. Cheap hydropower is generated, attracting big tech companies and datacenter operators, who brand their digital operations as „green“ and „sustainable“. In this essay, I explore how alpine landscapes are reconfigured through water-hungry digital industries. How many dams are errected, artifical lakes constructured and new water tunnels dug in order to guide the pretious water flows into the right direction? What are the ecological and social consequences of server racks and military supercomputers embedded in alpine territory? How do liquifying glaciers feed into rivers of data? And how do these new liquid ecologies generate financial liquidity?
Language
English
Keywords
energy infrastructure
hydropower
data centers
critical infrastructure studies
hydromodernism
Book title
Machine Entanglements
Publisher
Noorderlicht–Platform for photography and lens-based media
Publisher place
Grontingen/Netherlands
Start page
19
End page
26
Pages
8
Contact Email Address
christoph.miler@unisg.ch
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Name
cmiler_water_flows_data_streams_noorderlicht.pdf
Size
280.85 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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