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ABSTRACT
Big-Tech’s data centres have recently emerged as important socio-political figures in the ongoing digitalisation of the Danish state. Locating vast swathes of data in a country renowned for its renewable energy has prompted a series of questions about the nature of the relationship between these two actors. Our ethnographic interest resides in analysing how, and why, Denmark is rapidly becoming Europe’s primary US data centre location, and in exploring the transformative processes through which the Danish state is being reconfigured as digital. In doing so, we emphasise the role of infrastructures in digital state-making and draw upon a particular reading of anthropological exchange theory to conceptualise how the state is being reconstituted through exchange practices with data centre actors. We argue that as Big-Tech territorialises state land and resources, the state in turn reterritorializes the promising digital futures that come with Big-Tech, making visible its new digital frontier.
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Notes
1 See for example the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), where Denmark has been consistently ranked as the highest performing country in Europe. In addition, the EUs own website lauds Denmark as a European and world leader in digital progress, see https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/scoreboard/denmark.
2 This event was a three-day conference/tour that travelled around the country visiting the construction sites of Facebook and Apple’s data centres. It was organised by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (via Invest in Denmark) in cooperation with the Danish Data Centre Industry.
3 We think of digitalisation as the processes and practices through which digital assemblages transform societies, while datafication is the capacity of these digital assemblages to track, trace and produce quantifications of our digital interactions.
4 See Morita, Citation2016 for a discussion of layered infrastructures in environmental planning.
5 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian anthropology has further developed this point and brought forth the notion of ‘equivocation’ which assumes ‘the same representations and other objects, a single meaning and multiple referents’ (Viveiros de Castro Citation2004: 4). For Amerindians the human form is universally shared by different ontological worlds. Thus, famously, jaguars see themselves as persons and human blood as manioc beer.
6 As Strathern puts it;
When I write about exchange of perspectives, for instance, I have in mind the image of a Hagen man handing over an item (shells, pigs, money) with the expectation of a return gift and thus, with the counterflow contained in the same gesture (Citation1999:15).
7 It is important, of course, to note the many critiques that have addressed the various colonial contexts in which the ‘concerns of others’ have been foregrounded and given voice (Clifford & Marcus Citation1989; Marcus & Fisher Citation1999).
8 Right now, access to these data centre sites is extremely limited. For example, members of the Danish Data Center Industry and almost all the employees of the various municipalities cannot get permission to visit either one of Apple or Facebook’s data centres. At the same time only a very select few have an open communication channel to the corporate headquarters of Big-Tech. (See page 20–21 for a further elaboration of what this secrecy entails).
9 At the time of ethnographic fieldwork both Apple and Facebook’s data centres were little more than construction sites. The perimeter of these sites was tightly securitised and photographs were prohibited. The secrecy that envelops these projects also extends to a lack of visual representation, beyond official architectural renderings produced by the corporations themselves.
10 While the list of individual entities that constitute the industry-group is too extensive to detail, here is a small sample. Copenhagen Centre on Energy Efficiency, Gottlieb and Paludan Architects, the Danish District Heating Organisation, Danish Energy Group, Rittal A/S, Global Connect A/S, MT Højgaard A/S, Coromatic A/S Schneider Electric, Interxion.
11 This is not to suggest that the Danish state is unique in this manner. Emerging evidence from ethnographic work in Sweden, Iceland, and elsewhere shows similar forms of industry articulation in these locations.
12 Part of the reason why there is not more specification or elaboration of the practices of some of these actors in the following two sections is twofold. Firstly, these projects are only in the construction phase of development which means that there are no administrative officers on-site with which to discuss these matters. Secondly, and more importantly, a lack of more explicit detail is due to the fact that a wide array of these actors are still subject to non-disclosure agreements with Big-tech. This includes municipal employees and employees of state institutions, as well as the contractors, designers, and architects involved in the construction of these data centres.
13 According to our discussions with legal experts versed in the EUs GDPR, locating data within the EUs borders, while not necessary for US tech corporations in terms of the details of the legislation, does make sense in terms of the prohibitive consequences associated with lack of compliance.
14 Big-Tech is a common industry term for the western world’s top five technology companies. It refers to Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, but excludes Chinese companies. Having already secured deals with Apple, Facebook, and Google, IID is actively lobbying Amazon and Microsoft. In the rest of the paper, we will use the term ‘Big-Tech’ as a placeholder for the large US tech corporations locating data centres in Denmark. We have only generated ethnographic materials on the datacentres of Apple and Facebook, and while it is clear that there are many differences between these two corporations, it is also clear that a similar pattern is emerging in terms of their politics of data location. That is, there is a similarity in the practices and discourses that these corporations adopt when dealing with the Danish state. This is not only the case in terms of their political economy, their negotiation strategy, and their resource demands, it also includes the effects they are having on energy and digitalisation policy, as well as the economic and discursive impacts they are having in the parts of the country where they are located.
15 In an extended interview, the CEO of Global Connect used high-speed financial trading in the US as an example of why proximity is important. As trading becomes more algorithmic, micro second differences in transmission times can make all the difference to the profit portfolios of investment companies. As a result, financial services companies increasingly locate in close proximity to trading sites and technologies. The same logic is being deployed in Denmark in terms of data traders, managers, and brokers.
16 The term data-driven circulates widely within industry and the public sector. It designates companies, organisations, and institutions that heavily rely on the generation, accumulation, and analysis of data to run their business.
17 These processes are already beginning to play out. A new subsea fibre optic data cable - known as Havfrue (mermaid) – will be operational by the end of 2019 and will directly connect the US to Ireland and Denmark. It will increase Denmark’s digital capacity by a factor of six. The consortium behind the cable is made up of Facebook, Google, as well as an Irish and Norwegian infrastructure company.
18 See https://politiken.dk/indland/art5765405/Skaber-Apple-et-mirakel-p%C3%A5-en-mark-ved-Viborg, accessed 27 January 2018.
19 This was a meet and greet conference organised by Facebook’s main contractor MACE in May 2017. It brought together a range suppliers and sub suppliers within the construction, technology and business sectors.
20 One remnant of this ‘power’ is the location of one of the country’s two High Courts just outside the town.
22 https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/apple-inc-powered-by-100-renewable-energy/, accessed 26 January 2018.
23 Denmark has been ranked first in the world by the OECD for electricity security. As a consequence, Apple’s data centres will be built without back-up diesel generators, a first for the company, with estimated savings running into millions of dollars.
24 After the controversial phasing out of the PSO tax (an electricity tax used to fund much of Denmark’s green transition and, particularly, investments in offshore windmill farms) energy prices are now very competitive vis a vis other European states.
25 http://www.stm.dk/_p_14594.html, accessed 1 November 2017.
26 But such proclamations of full renewability are part of a series of displacements, as the carbon energy used in China to make Apple devices is cut out of the rhetoric of renewables that envelops their data centres in Europe and the US.
27 Another component of this legitimacy strategy is the emergence of Google’s Learning house in Copenhagen. This collaboration between Google and Copenhagen municipality facilitates digital event nights, where citizens are invited into municipal offices to upgrade their digital skills. It could be argued that such setups also facilitate local state institutions and big-tech in exchanging services for legitimacy.