ABSTRACT

This article develops the notion of a thermopolitics of data to describe an ongoing infrastructural integration of the platform economy with energy politics through the mediation of heat. Building on fieldwork conducted at a data centre owned by a major Russian digital platform that, since 2016, has been the main source of heating for the Finnish town of Mäntsälä, the article analyzes the ways in which the materialities of heat and data get mobilized by different actors to produce a new object—the data centre as a thermal urban infrastructure. Situating these processes in a history of shifting scientific and popular understandings of future fuels, and of the relation between information and energy, the article extends emergent scholarly literature on the cultures of thermal manipulation that underpin digital media. An enquiry into the thermopolitics of data illuminates the ways in which bodies and spaces are silently integrated and infrastructurally organized to simultaneously function as objects of quantification, commodification and differentiation, and the provisioning of thermal regulation and human care for these practices. In the formation of these relations, new regulatory, ethical and epistemological questions about the relationship between data, agency and energy arise.

摘要

本文发展了数据热政治的概念，以描述平台经济与能源政治通过热中介持续进行的基础设施整合。基于在俄罗斯主要数字平台拥有的数据中心进行的实地调查，自 2016 年以来，该数据中心一直是芬兰 Mäntsälä 镇的主要供暖来源，本文分析了热能和数据的重要性通过以下方式调动的方式：不同的参与者来生产一个新的对象——作为城市热基础设施的数据中心。将这些过程置于科学和大众对未来燃料以及信息与能源之间关系的理解不断变化的历史中，这篇文章扩展了关于支撑数字媒体的热操纵文化的新兴学术文献。对数据热政治的调查阐明了身体和空间被默默整合和基础设施组织的方式，以同时充当量化、商品化和差异化的对象，并为这些实践提供热调节和人文关怀。在这些关系的形成过程中，出现了有关数据、代理和能量之间关系的新的监管、伦理和认识论问题。