ABSTRACT

The past decade has seen the accelerated growth and expansion of large-scale data centre operations across the world to support emerging consumer and business data and computation needs. Built out rapidly, these emergent digital infrastructures carry the promise for new local industrial futures, all while their paths to obsolescence are shortened. Their lifespans are dependent on financial speculation, shifting corporate strategies, and advances in consumer technology. In this article we track the promise and afterlife of an abruptly abandoned data centre constructed by the global telecom giant Ericsson in Vaudreuil-Dorion, a town near Montréal, Québec, Canada, in order to expand emergent debates about digital ruination. Employing site visits, press reports, and qualitative interviews with architects and staff involved with the data centre's development in Sweden and Canada, we propose ‘cloud ruins’ as a sensitising concept to capture some of the specific meanings and material articulations that the abandonment of global data infrastructures may evoke in local contexts. Simultaneously familiar and novel, cloud ruins anticipate an emergent landscape of post-digital ruination that unfolds in the built environment in peripheral communities, part of the global logistical cities from within which our contemporary understandings of digitalisation are produced.

摘要

在过去的十年中，全球范围内的大型数据中心业务加速增长和扩展，以支持新兴的消费者和业务数据以及计算需求。这些新兴的数字基础设施快速建立，为缩短本地过时之路带来了新的本地工业未来的希望。它们的寿命取决于金融投机，不断变化的公司战略以及消费者技术的进步。在本文中，我们追踪了由全球电信巨头爱立信在加拿大魁北克省蒙特利尔附近的沃德勒伊-多里翁市（Vaudreuil-Dorion）建造的一个突然废弃的数据中心的前景和来生，以期扩展有关数字毁坏的新兴争论。利用现场访问，新闻报道以及对与数据中心有关的架构师和员工的定性采访 在瑞典和加拿大的发展中，我们提出“云废墟”作为一个敏感的概念，以捕获废弃全球数据基础架构可能会在本地环境中引起的一些特定含义和实质性表述。同时熟悉且新颖的云朵废墟预示着后数字化破坏的新景象，它将在周围社区的建筑环境中展开，周边社区是全球后勤城市的一部分，从中我们产生了对数字化的当代理解。