Final Project - Hamsini

 

My final paper will build on my presentation in class a couple of weeks ago thinking through the materiality of the cloud. Specifically, I want to explore the environmental imaginaries (Peet & Watts, 2004) of digital infrastructures through a reading of the aesthetics and discourses of sustainability that permeate three facets of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure. How is this imaginary of sustainability (as a response to a particular problematization of environment) shaping and reshaping layered infrastructures of energy, data, and knowledge?

Powering Data Centers: The first project I want to look at is Microsoft’s efforts to increase the sustainability of its data center infrastructure through renewable energy goals and increased efficiency of computational processes, as refracted through the lens of its Story Labs “We Live in the Cloud” virtual datacenter microsite and related materials.

Cloud for Sustainability: Next, I will turn to how Microsoft markets its “Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability” tools, which allow clients to deploy Azure to standardize environmental monitoring data about their activities, increase the efficiency of IT infrastructures, and reduce environmental impact. (This includes reporting on the environmental impact of the Microsoft services these companies use.)

Planetary Computer: Finally, I want to probe the Microsoft AI for Earth “Planetary Computer,” which seeks to provide data infrastructure for conservation purposes, hosting “petabytes of environmental monitoring data” made accessible through APIs, a development environment, and partners’ applications. (Which, of course, makes no reference to the environmental impact of Azure.)

Literatures: This paper will draw on infrastructure studies (Edwards, Parks, Ensmenger, Hogan), looking at the ways in which digital data infrastructures are layered on non-digital infrastructures, such as power and water systems, emphasizing the materiality of these infrastructures even as Microsoft’s imaginary of sustainability abstracts from that materiality. I want to read closely the discourses and aesthetics of sustainability in these projects as a particular kind of “environmental imaginary” composed of an economic and efficiency-based model of environmental datafication and accounting; “nature” images of clouds, greenery, and Earth as the pale blue dot; and a kind of speculative, projected futurity to sustainability “goals.” To understand this imaginary, I will delve into work unpacking the cloud metaphor (Mosco, 2014; Hu, 2015; Peters, 2015), images of the planetary (Halpern, 2021), and the speculative elements of data and algorithms (Hong, 2020). In this, my paper builds on recent work by Pasek (2019) and Lukacz (2022) that respectively tackle Microsoft’s “fungible mediation” of cloud and carbon in its data centers and the infrastructuring of environmental data used in environmental research by Microsoft’s corporate logics.