Automating Labour and the Spatial Politics of Data Centre Technologies

Item Type Book Section Author Brett Neilson Author Ned Rossiter Editor Mascha Will-Zocholl Editor Caroline Roth-Ebner URL https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80327-8_4 Place Cham Publisher Springer International Publishing Pages 77-101 ISBN 978-3-030-80327-8 Date 2021 Extra DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-80327-8_4 Accessed 2025-01-14 15:46:06 Library Catalog Springer Link Language en Abstract Data politics traffics through data centres. A primary function of data centres over the next decades will consist of supporting the transition to automated economies with the integration of artificial intelligence,artificial intelligence machine learningmachine learning and roboticsrobotics into processes of capital valorisation and accumulation. Stemming from a project that investigates data centres in Asia, this contribution positions the age of automation in terms of the spatial politics of data infrastructures. Singapore is renowned as a growth centre for data storage facilities in Asia. Yet the policy literature on smart nations lacks narratives that address the political and social problem of job loss precipitated by automated futures. Because data centres are themselves automated environments and provide infrastructure that enables automation in workplaces spread across geographical scales, they offer a strategic object for research on the varied implications of automation for labour. The extent to which data centres make worlds and reconfigure regions bears upon conceptualisations of sovereign power harnessed to the state. This contribution maintains that an emergent sovereign form registers in the operational logic of computational machines special to data centres. Book Title Topologies of Digital Work: How Digitalisation and Virtualisation Shape Working Spaces and Places