Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland

Item Type Book Author Alix Johnson Place Oakland, California Publisher University of California Press ISBN 978-0-520-39636-4 Date 2023 Library Catalog Amazon Language English Abstract Where Cloud Is Ground offers an ethnography of the international data storage industry and an inquiry into the relationship between data and place. Based in Iceland, which is fast becoming a hot spot for data centers—facilities where large quantities of data are processed and stored—the book traces the fraught work of siting data’s material manifestations in relation to landforms and earth processes, local politics, national narratives, and still-open questions of spatial justice and sovereignty. Doing so, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity and offers a window into what it means to live with our data, in a place where more and more data now lives. Short Title Where Cloud Is Ground # of Pages 227