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Cabling
Cloudcrafting: The Anthropology
of Data Centres
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CNet Training recently welcomed
Alex Taylor, an anthropology PhD
student from the University of
Cambridge, on to its Certified Data
Centre Management Professional
(CDCMP®) education programme.
Alex recently researched the practices
and discourses of data centres. In
this article, he outlines his research
in more detail and explains how the
education programme contributed to
his anthropological exploration of the
data centre industry.
Data centres as anthropological
field-sites
Traditionally, anthropologists would travel
to a faraway land and live among a group
of people so as to learn as much about their
culture and ways of life as possible. Today,
however, we conduct fieldwork with people
in our own culture just as much as those
from others. Data centres pervade our lives in ways that
many of us probably don’t even realise
and we rely on them for even the most
mundane activities, from supermarket
shopping to satellite navigation. These
data infrastructures now underpin such an
incredible range of activities and utilities
across government, business and society
that it is important we begin to pay
attention to them.
As such, I am currently working alongside
people from diverse areas of the data centre
industry in order to explore how data centre
practices and discourses imaginatively
intersect with ideas of security, resilience,
disaster and the digital future. I have therefore spent this year navigating
the linguistic and mechanical wilderness
of the data centre industry: its canyons
of server cabinet formations, its empty
wastelands of white space, its multi-coloured
rivers of cables, its valleys of conferences,
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expos and trade shows, its forests filled with
the sound of acronyms and its skies full of
twinkling server lights.
While data centres may at first appear
without cultural value, just nondescript
buildings full of pipes, server cabinets and
cooling systems, these buildings are in fact
the tips of a vast sociocultural iceberg-of-
ways that we are imagining and configuring
both the present and the future. Beneath
their surface, data centres say something
important about how we perceive ourselves
as a culture at this moment in time and
what we think it means to be a ‘digital’
society. Working with data centres, cloud
computing companies and industry
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