TOPIC

This talk is about data and heat, and new forms of distinction produced in the digital economy as it increasingly inte-grates with energy politics. In 2014, Russian internet platform, Yandex, a.k.a. “the Russian Google” opened a data centre in Mäntsälä, Finland. Its main production locally has been heat generated from powering thousands of computers that analyse Russian online consumption. This heat has since been re-routed into the heating network of Mäntsälä, replacing Russian natural gas as heating fuel, causing the local energy company to proclaim the decarbonisation of the city. Similarly, 2% of Stockholm city has been heated with data practices exhausts under the belief that data and its residue – heat – can bring carbon-neutral futures. In Paris, social accom-modations are increasingly heated with ‘smart heaters’, or ‘cloud’ computers, synchronising the politics of speed and large scale-data computation with the intimate spaces of everyday life, through heat.

Drawing on one-year long ethnography-informed research of these practices in Finland, France and Sweden, I will discuss the politics of data and heat, as they inform different ima-ginaries about energy and urban futures. These prac-tices and their politics are first contextualised against a history of scientific and cultural ideas about the materiality of fuels that could power the future, and relate them to ideas of over-coming scarcity through de-materialisation. Second, taking heat as a political medium, the role of the energy sector and of digital economy platforms of new forms of distinction and value will be foregrounded. Opening up a new, thermo-political dimension to the work of platforms and of the digital economy, I point to the emergence of new regulatory, ethical and epistemological questions about the relationship between data, agency and energy.

BIO

Julia Velkova is a media scholar and post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the Uni of Helsinki. Her interests are in digital culture, technologies and media infrastructures. Involved in several research projects related to data infrastructures in a Nordic context, including “Earth Stations and Data Centers: Network buildings as transnational infrastructures and logistical media”, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond), and partially supported the fieldwork presented in this seminar.

Her doctoral dissertation (2017), on the politics of making digital media production infrastructures, was 2019 awarded the second prize of the Swedish Assoc. of Media & Communications Researchers.