book project

Land of Data: Land Use Politics and the Limits of Digital Growth

Key words: digital economy, digital infrastructures, land use, digital labor, data centers, environmental media studies, critical data studies, digital geographies 

As the digital transformation of society continues to expand exponentially, so too has the demand for digital infrastructures. But construction of industrial-scale digital infrastructures to support these activities occurs in uneven patterns with uneven consequences for local and globally dispersed communities. Through an ethnography of digital expansion in Northern Virginia and Southern Inland California, where digital industrialists have been aggressively expanding to support their data-intensive operations, this book shows how local policymakers, developers, and digital industrialists form coalitions to prioritize their vision of digital growth while overlooking the long-term and geographically expansive impacts. Building on work in environmental media studies, science and technology studies, and critical digital geographies, this book presents the concept of the "digital growth machine" – a social, political, and infrastructural project which prioritizes short-term economic growth over long-term environmental and social impacts of digital expansion. The digital growth machine exploits local political conditions to convert land from rural and agricultural land to make way for digital expansion; controls and commands workers through digital infrastructures to meet the demands of digital growth; and obscures the widespread environmental impacts of digital growth through regulation gaps and narrow industry reporting.

Digital growth boosters rehearse familiar arguments to justify their continued expansion: uninterrupted global connectivity, exponential economic growth, increased production efficiencies, provision of new jobs and careers, and reduction in environmental impacts due to advancements in new technologies. And yet, while digital growthism has become naturalized in our social relations, it is far from settled. Opponents of the digital growth machine create data friction through land use protests, resistance to datafied labor processes, and through targeted policy interventions to slow the harmful environmental impacts of misguided digital growthism. By attending to moments of tension and rupture in local politics around land use decisions, environmental and energy policy, and data-driven workplace practices, this book reveals how our misguided commitment to limitless digital growth can be overcome through collective action and refusal. As more of our digital tools, platforms, and devices are being built upon these core digital infrastructures, it is crucial we understand how the logics of the cloud and imaginaries of endless digital growth increasingly collide with the politics of land, labor, and waste.