Thermopolitics of data : cloud infrastructures and energy futures

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Thermopolitics of data: cloud infrastructures and

energy futures

Julia Velkova

To cite this article: Julia Velkova (2021): Thermopolitics of data: cloud infrastructures and energy futures, Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.1895243

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Thermopolitics of data: cloud infrastructures and

energy futures

Julia Velkova

Department of Thematic Studies– Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

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 onfieldwork 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.

KEYWORDS Thermopolitics; information; data centres; energy futures; decarbonization; heat

Sensing media, platforms and algorithms have intensiﬁed data capturing and processing over the past decade. In parallel, diﬀerent technology companies have been constructing data centres at an accelerating pace and scale across the world to support these practices with computing and storage power, and to enable the creation of new symbolic commodities out of data. A cooler climate and state-reduced prices of electricity have attracted‘Big Tech’ com-panies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple), along with a number of smaller actors, to build their European data centres in the

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDer-ivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distri-bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

CONTACT Julia Velkova julia.velkova@liu.se https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895243

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Nordic countries. As multiple urban and rural locations in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway have been turned into nodes of‘cloud’ computing, local energy providers and city administrations have started to re-imagine data centres as thermal infrastructures that can lead to a fossil-free future on the local, national and planetary scale.

In the spring of 2019, the head of Stockholm Data Parks announced his vision to phase out fossil fuels in Stockholm by 2040 using the discarded heat that servers emit in the process of computing and storing data (Rylander

2019). In a joint effort between the local heating utility Stockholm Exergi and the city of Stockholm, Stockholm Data Parks zoned urban areas where data centres could be built and where new pipelines could be put in place to enable the commodification and traffic of their residual heat into residential areas. In the Finnish capital of Helsinki, the local energy monopoly Helen ima-gined data centres as part of a transformation in urban district heating-and-cooling services and as a complement fuel to the coal and wood used to produce heat for the city (Uitto2019).

In the meantime, the Finnish city of Mäntsälä, a town of 20,000 inhabitants located 65 kilometres north of the capital of Helsinki, was already proclaimed decarbonized by its local district heating and energy monopoly, Nivos (Muukka 2018), with the help of a data centre launched in 2016 and owned by Yandex, the major Russian platform for internet search, geoloca-tion and transportageoloca-tion services commonly known as‘the Russian Google’. The heat generated by this data centre reduced the city’s usage of Russian natural gas, which led Nivos to suggest that, in this way, the city exceeded the European climate goal far ahead of the 2030 deadline set by the European Union (Muukka2018), thus winning it the 2015 European Heat Pump Associ-ation Award and the 2016 Finland Climate Act Award.

As local energy companies and city administrations redefine data centres as thermal urban infrastructures capable of bringing about carbon-free energy futures, they draw the platform economy into energy politics. Having transformed the crucial fields of public concern in the areas of health, education, transport and housing (Dijck et al.2018), platform infra-structures, such as data centres, are currently entering and reshaping the urban systems of energy provision. My aim with this article is to trace some of the historical legacies, cultural assumptions, politics and tensions that underlie these practices in the local contexts in which they are situated. Taking the Yandex data centre as a main empirical case, I analyze the ways in which the materialities of heat and data are mobilized by different actors to produce a new conceptual object—the data centre as a thermal urban infrastructure.

In this enquiry, I join and extend emergent scholarly work on the cultural politics of thermal manipulation that underpin digital media (Parikka2011, Mulvin and Sterne2014, Starosielski2016, Beregow2019), and likewise the

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cultural studies of‘energopolitics’ (Boyer2011) that focus on how institutions and corporations use the transformative power of energy and convert it into heat, lighting, or electricity to exercise power over life and the population (Strauss et al.2013, Howe and Boyer2015, Wenzel2017). Infrastructures are never neutral technologies. Rather, they connect and disconnect the traﬃc of matter between diﬀerent geographies, while producing, or reproducing, the infrastructures of ‘carbon democracy’ (Mitchell2011, Barry2014). Simi-larly, processes of thermal manipulation are more than just technical activi-ties—they are cultural practices that enfold normative assumptions about what kinds of material transformations can and should take place in society (Starosielski2016).

Taking heat as an empirical object, I analyze the thermopolitics of data, or the ways in which mediations of heat align and bring human bodies, digital data and energy into new infrastructural and temporal arrangements. As I suggest, the thermopolitics of data is crucially contingent on the practices of dematerialization and disconnection, or the symbolic rendering of energy, bodies and spaces as immaterial, and therefore unrelated to each other, a process that helps to install a new conﬁguration of economic and social relations that can serve simultaneously computing machines, the plat-form economy and old energy monopolies, while not necessarily breaking apart from the carbon regime. In the formation of these relations, new regu-latory, ethical and epistemological questions about the relationship between data, agency and energy arise.

In order to develop this discussion, I draw on empirical work in the Yandex data centre in Mäntsälä, Finland, which I conducted during 2018 and 2019. During this period, I visited the data centre on three occasions and engaged in participant observation, visual ethnography and interviews with data centre employees, security guards and outsourced workers. I inter-viewed repeatedly the head of the local energy monopoly company Nivos, the municipal oﬃcial who supported the project institutionally and the data centre manager. In Moscow, I also interviewed the Yandex head of infra-structure responsible for envisioning and constructing all the data centres of the company, including the one in Mäntsälä.

The article proceeds in several steps. I begin by contextualizing the ima-ginaries of data centres as fuels of a carbon-free future in a historical context in terms of how the materialities of energy and information came to be imagined and related to each other, particularly in relation to ideas of overcoming scarcity and constraint. I emphasize the political and mediat-ing role of heat in this historical context and connect it to scholarly debates on the environmental impact of digital media. In the subsequent sections, I analyze the ways in which the potential to mediate data centres’ heat has produced diﬀerent meanings and agendas in Mäntsälä. I further discuss how these meanings have inﬂuenced the local understanding of the

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materiality and aesthetics of natural gas and data processing, rendering them simultaneously as material and immaterial, clean and dirty, as well as how human bodies have been implicated and made invisible in this process. I then proceed to reﬂect on the contingency of the data centre as a thermal infrastructure destabilized by multiple intersecting temporalities, among which are global geopolitics, energy and data. I conclude with a discussion of the broader implications and limits of imagining data exhaust as the new fuel for a carbon-free future.

Fuels of the future

Raymond Williams (1977) wrote about the relationship between emergent, dominant and residual cultural ideas. Emergent cultural processes are always shaped in relation to the residues of ideas that have been formed in the past, but that are still active as effective elements of the present. In the emergent imaginaries that connect data processing with a carbon-free future, we canfind traces of a longer trail of the scientific and political imagin-ation of future fuels—from coal to information—in relation to overcoming scarcity and material constraints.

Going back to early modernity, emergent fuels that could bring about desired futures have been connected to ideas of endless growth. For example, in nineteenth-century Britain, coal was identiﬁed as a ‘cornucopian force’, representing a ‘gift from the underground’ that promised to overcome the limitations of the main material constraint at the time, theﬁnitude of agri-cultural land, through the production of steam (Mitchell2011, Jonsson2019). Later on in early modernity, thermodynamic experiments with radiation posi-tioned radioactive materials as limitless sources of energy that evoked visions of future possibilities, as well as of new kinds of social and creative life (Clarke and Henderson2002), that could alleviate the dominant sense of stagnation of both creative and physical energy. More recently, oil, natural gas and wind are calling forth renewed imaginaries of endless growth, the limits of which remain ungraspable and incalculable to modern science (Mitchell2011, Hög-selius2013, Howe and Boyer2015).

Information has also long been conceived as the future fuel of societies, seen as bringing endless growth and social development. Information and energy came to be closely related, and, at the same time, disconnected from each other, through the physics of heat. The laws of thermodynamics postulate that all energy converts into heat and that all such output is always an excess of a system, carrying it into a state of entropy, or an endless proliferation of disorder. Under the inﬂuence of cybernetics, which saw the world as a system of interconnected elements that operate on the basis of signals and feedback, control and communication, the mathematical apparatus of the laws of thermodynamics were translated from the spheres of

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energy into Shannon and Weaver’s theory of communication (Clarke and Henderson 2002). In energy, excess heat, or waste heat, is the common denominator for the thermal excess of the used energy, but in the process of its mathematical translation to communication theory, heat took on the meaning of noise, or an excess of‘useless’ signal traﬃc.

After being disconnected from energy through mathematical abstraction, information was re-conceptualized into yet another fuel of the future, to a great extent through the inﬂuential work of the social theorists of post-indus-trialism (Touraine1971, Bell1976, Kumar2005). Initially, the notion of infor-mation as fuel was used metaphorically to reﬂect the transition towards a more ethereal driver of industrialization, namely‘knowledge’, which prom-ised to put an end to the age of ‘big’ energies and the mechanical forces of early modernity. Clarke and Hendersson (2002, p. 2) summarize this shift as a partition from the time of‘big energy’ of early industrialism:

With the development of electronic information systems, the heavy technol-ogies of the earlier industrial period and their accompanying images of monu-mental energies gradually shifted toward the lighter structures of high technologies and the increasingly transparent media of the computer screen and network interface.

Like fossil fuels in the early days of their discovery, information was con-nected to ideas of abundance, promising‘as the fabled magic pot … to pro-liferate endlessly’ (Hayles 2002, p. 235). The environmental cost and materiality of this proliferation could not be imagined at the time. As Gleick (2011, p. 279) documents, it was as if information belonged to‘a par-allel universe, an astral plane, not linked to the universe of matter and energy, particles and forces’. These ideas arguably culminated in Manuel Castells’ (1996) seminal work on the information society, in which, extending upon the trope of post-industrialist thinkers, he no longer refers metaphorically to the immaterial materiality of information, but considers it as an actual rupture that introduces a ‘discontinuity in the material basis of economy, society, and culture’ (Castells1996, p. 29).

The introduction of the discontinuity between information and energy can be seen in a longer trajectory of scientific, cultural and economic rethinking of the materiality of different kinds of matter, which oscillates between materi-alization and dematerimateri-alization, quantification and measurement. Going back to the nineteenth century, literary scholar Steven Connor describes how, in the wake of industrialization, matter became ether and the reverse:

Increasingly, the material world was immaterialized, with the growing depen-dence on invisible gases, vapors and substances, from steam (or, more strictly, water vapor), to coal gas, to the ether of space that provided such an indispu-table and indispensable ground for nineteenth-century physics. At the same time, previously immaterial qualities, most particularly light and time, became

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increasingly subject to processes of stockpiling, investment, division, mensura-tion and quantiﬁcation that seemed to reduce them to, or make them coexten-sive with, the realm of material extension. All that was solid was melting into air, to be sure: but all that had previously been air was becoming newly palpable and tractable (Connor2010, p. 122).

With information, the material and economic foundations of industrial pro-duction seemed to be ‘liqueﬁed’ (Bauman 2000) and ‘softened’ (Thrift

2005), while previously immaterial objects, such as social relations, intimacy and affect, came to be quantified and made tractable with the new paradigm of‘datafication’ (van Dijck2014). However, the rupture of information with energy regimes is a misconception.

The recent turn to new materialisms has illuminated the extent to which information technologies—ranging from electronic circuits at the level of micro-components in computers, to carbon emissions and electricity needed to support streaming media and backup cultures—are still very much contin-gent on energy-intense and heat-mediating practices, creating new forms of pollution, scarcity of minerals and social diﬀerence (Parikka 2011, Gabrys

2013, Starosielski and Walker 2016). As information became ‘big’ data, its storage and processing came to be increasingly centralized in data centres across the world (Andrejevic 2007), raising the electricity consumption of whole countries while relying on coal as their dominant fuel (Cubitt et al.

2011, Cook2017, Vidal2017, Danish Energy Agency2018). Hence, information never really became detached from the‘big’ energies and fuels of early mod-ernity, and neither could it be abstracted from the politics of managing heat. As information moved into data centres, the heat emitted from computing servers began to concentrate and scale up in dense warehouse spaces packed with server racks. Mulvin and Sterne (2014, p. 2500) describe this effect as a result of outsourcing: ‘As the physical footprint and profile of home and mobile computing grow smaller and the ‘cloud’ expands, individual users not only outsource data storage, they outsource heat management from their own devices to massive server farms that are hungry for clean air, cool temperatures, and cheap energy’. Once in the data halls, heat required care in order not to cause damage to computer equipment. Data centre oper-ators then mobilized the elements— water, air and wind—to act as ‘natural’ coolants in an attempt to offset the effects of heat accumulation in the server halls (Hogan 2015, Vonderau 2019). In the process, some industrial actors went a step further; they started imagining heat not just as a threat to com-putation but also as a possible resource that could be used to expand the range of commodities produced by data processing while offsetting the increasing criticism of environmentalists towards the industry (Velkova2016). In this context, heat can be seen as what Steven Connor (2010) calls ‘mediate matter’, being both mediated and mediating. It actualizes the potentials of different materials— minerals, gases and substances—and

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converts them into mediating forms (Starosielski2016) through the practices of calculation and measurement, but it also persists as the result of such mediations. It does and undoes bodily boundaries by setting the limits of what bodies can and cannot do, while also destabilizing the certainty of these limitations (Beregow 2019). Thus, heat can be both a threat for servers and a commodity that can be sold, an object of imagination and speculation, a source of sensory pleasure for people and thermal comfort for machines, thereby shaping relations between subjects and objects.

What heat does, and where it does it, is in part a result of its physical prop-erties, and in part the result of the work of decisions that determine its proper place, source and distribution. In data centres, decisions about thermal mediation are required in order to keep the digital economy of computing global data traﬃc operational, but they also form the political ground from which multiple actors craft new conﬁgurations of relations between infor-mation, bodies and energy use. Tracking the ways in which these distinct pro-cesses intersect and interfere in particular geographic locations ultimately illuminates how the politics of thermal mediation—what I term here the ther-mopolitics of data—bundles global media infrastructures together with other large sociotechnical systems, transforming the meaning of digital distribution and energy provision, while assigning new roles for citizens, industries and states through infrastructural interconnections.

Imagining thermal data infrastructures in mäntsälä

Infrastructures are always simultaneously material and discursive construc-tions. They operate in the domain of the mythical and promise to materialize speciﬁc futures, often associated with ideas of progress and normative assumptions about what it means to live a modern life (Larkin2013, Anand et al.2018). Similarly, in Mänstälä, Finland, heat emitted from data processing became an object of the infrastructural imagination through which the domi-nant local energy and broadband utility in the city Nivos, the local city council and Yandex nurtured ideas of continued industrial growth and future local welfare.

For several years, the continuous national and European-wide decentrali-zation of electricity production had threatened the power position of Nivos (Altmann et al.2010, Greenpeace2012, Kampman et al.2016). Environmental concerns and the growing possibilities for consumers to produce electricity mobilized an aﬀective politics that Nivos perceived as a threat to its current monopolist market position. In an interview, the head of Nivos explained to me:

Emotions… how I feel … Do I believe you more than this one? … this is a com-pletely new situation for energy companies… We had a district heating

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network, everybody was forced to join as a customer. All of a sudden now, all the people making diﬀerent laws, the decisions on how and what kind of energy they want to use has completely changed the situation.

Further pressure was put on Nivos through a legislative change in 2010 when the Finnish government increased the tax on natural gas in Finland as a way to cover a growing deﬁcit in its national pension system (Proposition2010). In eﬀect, the price of natural gas increased ninefold in the course of six years (Muukka2018). Major Finnish cities responded to the change in tax by switch-ing to burnswitch-ing coal or wooden pellets to generate cheaper heat for the local district heating. In contrast, Nivos imagined thermal waste—the excess heat produced from biofarming and data processing—as fuels that could be used for the district heating of residential buildings in the city. As byproducts of other forms of industrial production, these new ‘fuels’ would not only be cheaper than natural gas, Nivos’s CEO reasoned, but would also likely gain public approval in the long run, due to their perceived environmental friend-liness. Hence, for Nivos, mediating heat from data processing represented a possibility to stabilize its fragile economic and power position and maintain its relevance as a utility monopoly.

Yandex, in turn, did not face pressure to reinvent itself at the time but pursued its own ideas of an infrastructural future. The company had doubled in size over the past six years from under 5,000 employees in 2014 to nearly 10,000 in May 20191, in the process of re-orienting its mode of value production from data and digital services towards‘surveillance capit-alism’ (Zuboff2015). A major portion of its new employees in Russia were formed into different software development units to develop platform ser-vices. They demanded computing power in order to run tests and support their everyday operations in the‘cloud’. In effect, Yandex needed to quickly extend its computing and storage infrastructure to support its growing com-putation needs. The company imagined that a large-scale data centre in Män-tsälä, Finland could represent an ‘economic and logistical solution’ to this need, its infrastructure manager explained. The solution would be‘logistical’ because the new data centre would interconnect with an expanding low-latency fiber-optic cable network surrounding Mäntsälä and the existing transnational road infrastructure, which would speed up the ground trans-port of computing equipment between Russia and Finland. Yandex further saw the solution as ‘economic’, as it could use the naturally colder Finnish air as a coolant for its server racks, thus reducing the costs for cooling and maintaining the machines. The possibility to distribute and sell heat from the data centre to the local energy utility and the city of Mäntsälä had never been part of Yandex’s infrastructural plans or needs. However, when this opportunity was suggested by the local energy utility, Yandex agreed to try it as an experiment in reducing the cost of its investment in building

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and maintaining the data centre. The Yandex management reasoned that dis-tributing its server heat through the energy grid in Mänstälä would bring in additional income, while the data centre would serve its overarching purpose of supporting and intensifying Yandexﬂows of capital produced by comput-ing online data.

The two distinct future visions of Nivos and Yandex could not be realized without the support of Mäntsälä’s local city council, which had its own ration-ale to justify the construction of the data centre. In the public imaginary, Män-tsälä is a non-place. Nevertheless, it had remarkably managed to double its population over the course of the past 30 years, mainly due to the activity of the local municipal council, which had worked to convert it into an impor-tant infrastructural node in Finland. Since the 1970s, the main natural gas pipeline from Russia into Finland has come to Mäntsälä, where it distributes gas further in the country for district heating and industrial purposes. The city is also part of the European fiber-optic backbone and peers to the main subsea-cables that channel high-speed internet traffic between Germany and Russia. A new railway station opened in 2006, and a developed road network brought Mäntsälä closer to the Finnish capital, Helsinki, making it a logistical throughway. For the city, the construction of the Yandex data centre therefore represented a possibility to add a new infrastructural layer, maintaining the centrality of Mäntsälä as a logistical hub in the hope that it would implicitly contribute to the welfare of the local community. The local administration was aware that a data centre would not bring jobs to the local economy, but hoped that it could generate an inflow of property taxes and that the potential use of its excess heat could reduce the cost of heating for the city dwellers, as the municipal representative responsible for attracting foreign investments explained to me.

In effect, at least three different agendas intersected in the construction of the Yandex data centre in Mäntsälä and in imagining its heat exhaust as a future energy source. The pursuit of a quantified and datafied society was enmeshed in concerns about shifting power reconfigurations in the energy sector and social pressures towards a carbon-emission-free life. These were further reinforced with ideas of the welfare state, which, for two decades in Finland, has been related to digitization and information technologies (Cas-tells and Himanen2002) and to a belief in the benefits of infrastructural devel-opment to local economies.

In order to align and materialize these different futures crafted around heat and data in Mäntsälä, entities had to be re-classified and categorized. For example, in the process of constructing the Yandex data centre, the main building that hosts the servers—a four-storey house made of concrete and steel—was classified as ‘equipment designed for a special purpose’, as the data centre administrative manager explained. Its main special purpose was said to be cooling the machines rather than providing space for them,

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a difference that was significant for how the building would be taxed. A different form of taxation was deemed necessary by the municipal council as a way to offer ‘a proper discount, in a proper space, and a proper way’ to Yandex, as one of them explained, in order to keep the economic costs for running a data centre in Mäntsälä low and thus ensure that the building would be built and materialize in the city.

Classification is a mechanism used to align different agendas and form relationships between disparate actors (Bowker and Star 2000, p. 287). The classification of the data centre as cooling equipment was part of the work of alignment required to bring together and cohere the different futures ima-gined by Nivos, Yandex and the city council of Mäntsälä. However, in doing so, these imagined futures also changed. Classifying the data centre into cooling equipment materialized it in the city, but it no longer represented a significant source of tax income for the local community, as it was no longer seen as part of the built infrastructure. This change re-defined the meaning of the data centre for the city. The city council reconsidered its importance for the local community in terms of the purchase of ‘local’ electricity supplied by Nivos and the production of carbon-free residual heat for the district heating. However, the electricity was neither local nor carbon-free. Less than 10% of the electricity to power the Yandex data centre came from Finnish renewable sources, while most of it arrived from the European grid as an energy mix of different fuels, including coal and nuclear power.2

Imaginaries about infrastructural futures are always imperfect (Willim

2017). Like elusive frontiers, they can never be transgressed or fully reached, as once they are approached, they change:‘Our images, dream pro-jections, calculations, and prophecies may give form and substance to the beyond, but as they do, they destroy it; for, as they construct it, they assure its displacement’ (Crapanzano2004, p. 14). The very pursuit of techno-logical and energy futures already alters and redeﬁnes them, changing exist-ing infrastructures, and re-evaluatexist-ing and reconﬁguring relations implicated in them.

Dirty gas, clean data and the invisibility of bodies

Infrastructures represent material forces of connection and disconnection that can be material or symbolic (Bowker and Star 2000, Edwards 2003, Larkin2013). When Nivos decided to replace the source of heat in the city with the thermal exhaust produced in the Yandex data centre, it discursively classiﬁed the natural gas from Russia, which had been used as a source of heating the city until then, as polluting. However, natural gas had been ﬂowing into Finland and Mäntsälä since the 1970s precisely because of its perceived cleanliness and environmental friendliness.

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The technology historian Högselius (2013) documented how Soviet natural gas was imagined in the 1950s as a hygienic substitute for coal to power the future Soviet and European industrial growth. The benefits of natural gas were considered both in terms of its combustion properties and in relation to its perceived cleanliness, as it only emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal. These qualities had made it a desired fossil fuel across all of Europe, and Finland was among the early builders of a trans-mission infrastructure for importing the Russian gas that came to Mäntsälä as a‘clean’ source of heating, a ‘future fuel’ of the 1970s. This understanding persists even today, as manifested through ongoing Finnish-Russian colla-borative projects on constructing new gas pipelines in the Baltic sea, such as Nord Stream. Hence, the change in the taxation on natural gas in Finland in 2010 did not change its physical properties, nor did it shift its cul-tural meaning as a‘clean’ fossil fuel. It just made its use for heating unprofi-table and, as such, undesirable by Nivos, who reclassified it symbolically as a pollutant.

In the process, Nivos imagined that a data centre and its heat production would be clean because the source of heat would be a seemingly immaterial object—data—and that it would just exist there as a byproduct of another activity:‘You need to make a lot of investments if you want to make a gas or coal heat infrastructure, while the data centre is just there. A data centre is a by-product, which is why it is much cheaper to use it as a heat source. It is so wonderful, it takes and heats the air with servers, everything is rather clean, rather ecological. And on top, we are re-using the heat. It is a great story,’ explained the Yandex infrastructure manager.

However, turning data heat into a form of a natural resource required work on the air, temperature and architecture of the data centre. The main server building of the Yandex data centre was designed as an airplane wing oriented towards the South, from where the wind most often blew. The building cap-tured cool air from the atmosphere (Figure 1).

Several sets offilters purified it, blended it with hot air, and blew it among the servers to cool them down. In the server space itself, the air was heated again and trapped in an enclosed room where it gravitated towards the top of the building. On the rooftop, a commodification process occurred in par-allel to the thermal one. A designated heat pump increased the temperature of the unprofitable 30 C hot air incoming from the server space to the 82 C required to make it valuable for use in district heating. A black pipeline had been constructed into the data centre by Nivos to pick up the new com-modity and then traffic, sell and distribute it to the private homes of the resi-dents of Mäntsälä. The use of the elements to regulate the climatic conditions of data computation emphasized the cleanliness of data processing and the mediation of its heat exhaust, suggesting that their entangled flow was ‘natural’ by being part of the flows of wind and air circulation. In the same

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way that minerals are culturally differentiated and produced through the thermal processes of manipulation into media (Starosielski 2016), so also are the elements—water, wind and air—differentiated and mobilized to regulate the climatic conditions of data computation and preservation, pro-ducing seemingly natural commodities through the manipulation of air flows and temperatures (cf. Durham Peters2015).

However, ideas about cleanliness and pollution that put too much emphasis on material objects distract attention from the social and moral aspects of a situation (Douglas 2002, p. 171). As the pipes of Nivos began to traﬃc the residual heat from the data centre into residen-tial buildings, the private spaces and bodies of the citizens of Mäntsälä became part of the thermal infrastructure that cooled down the servers of the Russian data capturing practices. Thus, the citizens were made to pay for this process, albeit at a cost that was said to be 12% lower than using Russian natural gas for heating. Several videos produced by Nivos and Yandex and circulated through social media portrayed the excess heat of the data centre as ‘recycled’ matter that sets a ‘leading example in sustainable tech infrastructure’ (Yandex 2019, p. 201), promis-ing a ‘better future’ (Mäntsälän Yrityskehitys Oy 2016) and a ‘cleaner environment’ through ‘heat by data’ (Nivos 2016). In these videos, shown primarily at energy expos and seldom to the local public, people are either absent or portrayed as a passive and faceless category of Figure 1.The Yandex data center in Mäntsälä, Finland, main server module.

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recipients of a supposedly low-carbon heating service derived from every-day internet consumption.

Following the older practices of the forceful connection of consumers to district heating networks, the new thermal infrastructure of the Yandex data centre connected Finnish private homes to the Russian platform economy, not through recycling but through re-routing ‘clean’ heat into their homes and mediating it through their bodies. As Hayles wrote in relation to information’s symbolic detachment from energy, ‘it is not scarcity and market relations that are transformed [in the process], but the subjects who are constrained and deﬁned by how they participate in them’ (Hayles

2002, p. 235). Similarly, in the Yandex data centre, it was neither the planet nor people, but machines, that became the main object of sanitation and environmental care through the needs and capacity of human bodies to mediate heat. While human bodies are the new fuel of the data economy that propels it with more data, mediations of heat, such as those in Mäntsälä, further implicate them to act as a stabilizing infrastructure that sustains the thermal architecture and the‘natural’ ﬂow of heat in the data centre, which is required to support the uninterrupted computation of data.

The citizens of Mäntsälä knew little about the history of gas in Mäntsälä, and even less about the fact that their homes and bodies were being turned into heatsinks for an online platform, giving value to its thermal exhaust. What diﬀerence would it make if they knew that they were hosting, valorizing and stabilizing the exhaust of Russian data capturing and processing practices? Would it be morally or environmentally better to heat a city with the exhaust of U.S. or Finnish data? Such ethical questions were suppressed by the silent integration of domestic space and bodies into the thermal infrastructures of the platform economy.

The body’s capacity to mediate and regulate temperature has been histori-cally part of creating urban temperature regimes in Finland (Schönach2019). The mediations of heat employed in the Yandex data centre created social diﬀerence through infrastructural interconnections. Bodies and domestic spaces were made infrastructural to the platform economy through the dis-course of decarbonization, cleanliness and local prosperity. In the process, people were also diﬀerentiated into producers of data in Russia, and consu-mers of the exhaust of data production in Mänstälä, a distinction that was imposed on them infrastructurally, leaving little possibility to opt out or even to know about it.

Uncertain infrastructural futures

With its decision to replace Russian natural gas with excess heat from Russian data computation, the energy utility in Mäntsälä turned the Yandex data centre into an important part of the energy infrastructure of the city, which

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could proclaim itself as decarbonized while stabilizing the position of Nivos as an energy and heat provider. The infrastructural bundling of energy and data processing rested on the assumption that the data centre was in Mäntsälä to stay and that it would keep producing heat from crunching data. However, since 2015, the geopolitics of the Russian state had been quickly shifting the conditions for processing information beyond the country’s national borders, including the development of data infrastructures abroad. A 2015 Russian law about data residency limited the possibilities for the storage and processing of Russian online traffic and personal data outside of the country. A year earlier, international economic sanctions were imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014, devaluing the rouble and raising the operational costs for Russian companies that have parts of their digital infrastructure abroad. These events had a direct impact on Yandex, which had to limit the range of intended uses of its data centre already at its inauguration in 2016. The main building, which had been designed for 300 staff, stood empty, populated by only 17 workers at the time of my visit in the fall of 2018, two years after its official inauguration (seeFigure 2). Plans for the expansion of the data centre with several more adjacent buildings had been delayed.‘Finland does not fill up as quickly now as our Russian data centres—because of the legislation and the exchange rate’, admitted a Moscow-based Yandex executive in the fall of 2019.

While heat from the servers keptﬂowing into the city by simply keeping the computers on, irrespective of whether they processed data or not, the

Figure 2.An emptyﬂoor in the main administrative building of the Yandex data centre in Mäntsälä.

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future of the data centre as a whole remained uncertain. The Yandex execu-tives in Moscow emphasized the contingencies of integrating a data centre with the district heating systems of a city:‘The town must be independent from the data centre heat. Because the data centre can leave, it can break down, we might lower the power there, we might change the IT equipment to some other that has completely diﬀerent heat properties. It can be any-thing.’ This comment additionally reﬂects the reality of fast-paced technologi-cal replacement and obsolescence within the digital tech industries, of which data centres, however monumental and future-looking, are not exempted (see also Velkova 2019). The additional prospect of rapid devaluation or even relocation of the data centre due to the geopolitics of the Russian state, besides that of technological replacement, had remained understated in the plans of the local energy utility that had placed a bet on the stability of the digital industries:

I can put it this way—if it would be like a saw mill, which goes up and down and is a very risky business when it comes to the economical terms, I would have never built this kind of partnership. But if I look at the data center like Yandex—its own business is growing almost exponentially. People want to have more cloud services, and so on and so on. So I don’t see a very big risk that that kind of business would vanish in the world (Nivos representative). The disjuncture between the views of Yandex and Nivos on the reliability and longevity of the connections that they had made highlighted the temporal and geopolitical frictions created in the bundling of energy and data infra-structures. Energy infrastructures tend to be characterized by permanence, with pipelines and energy plants enduring over the life-span of generations once they are built. On the contrary, the politics of information distribution and technological obsolescence are part of the conditions within which the digital economy operates. As data and energy infrastructures merged in Män-tsälä, their temporalities interfered with each other, destabilizing the futures crafted and stabilized through the mediations of heat. Potential shifts in the global geopolitics that regulate informationflows could transform the flow of heat, its quantity and its distribution in Mäntsälä, and so could the rapid cycles of digital obsolescence. Paradoxically, as theflow of heat from proces-sing Russian data was trafficked within the Mäntsälä urban energy infrastruc-ture, it both stabilized computation within the platform economy and introduced a temporal instability to energy infrastructures through the very politics and economies governing digital media.

Thermopolitics of data

As different actors mobilized and aligned distinct imaginaries, classification practices and material arrangements in relation to Yandex, they reorganized the movement of heat, natural gas and data in Mäntsälä. In effect, the

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Finnish city was articulated as a thermal infrastructure that supported the Russian data economy, while information processing was constructed as elemental to Finnish urban decarbonization and district heat provision, creating new relations between transnational information and energy infra-structures, and the publics connected to them, through the mediation of heat.

The politics that undergirded these reconfigurations are what I call the thermopolitics of data, a form of biopolitics through which geographically separated bodies and spaces are infrastructurally brought together and made to function simultaneously as objects of quantification, commodifica-tion and differentiation, along with the thermal regulation and human care for these practices. The thermopolitics of data reveals how large populations of citizens are silently integrated into a common infrastructure through which they become differentiated as producers of data or consumers that valorize the exhaust of this production, thus powerfully demonstrating the extent to which infrastructures can organize populations and create regimes of governmentality that appear detached from traditional forms of governance (cf. Larkin 2013). Inevitably, such forms of techno-govern-mentality intersect with state geopolitics at multiple planes, ranging from the regulation of communication traffic, and its storage and processing, through energy provision arrangements and their regulation, to territorial claims, as my analysis of the politics surrounding the Yandex data centre in Mäntsälä has shown.

At the micro-level, the thermopolitics of data illuminates the processes of alignment between the imagined local futures brought by data, energy and societal welfare with cultural understandings of the materiality of heat, including its proper place, temperature, cleanliness and source of production. At a macro-level, thermopolitics highlights the extent to which the platform economy is intimately tied to the production of energopolitics (cf. Boyer

2011), through which people, heat and air are organized and regulated. The strategic efforts made by different actors to redefine the crucial aspects of the Yandex data centre and its operation—by classifying a building as equipment, by producing notions of cleanliness and pollution related to data and gas, by symbolically erasing people and their agency from the project and by rendering invisible the sources of energy that generate heat —can be understood as attempts to give permanence to these uncertain emergent infrastructures. Yet, the specific ways in which such permanence is produced only works to silence energy from cultures and politics (see also Trentmann2018), while raising ethical, regulatory and epistemological questions.

As mediations of heat silently integrate local communities and online publics in relation to their participation in the data and energy economies, the agency of these bodies gets suppressed and rendered irrelevant to the

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questions of energy provision, environmental ethics and data practices. Infra-structural integrations are justified under a well-trodden rationale of ‘efficiency’ and economic rationality that rests upon seeing data as an imma-terial object that is inevitable and ‘naturally’ produced, and therefore inex-pensive. It is, however, not more efficient to heat a town with a data centre than to produce heat through the direct combustion of fossil fuels, such as natural gas. Neither is it intrinsically environmentally friendly. The electricity that powers the Yandex data centre and turns into heat is sourced from other places in Europe, where it creates carbon emissions and possibly other forms of pollution. The city of Mäntsälä and its energy monopoly could re-imagine themselves as clean and carbon-free only through the infra-structural displacement of emissions and forms of pollution to other places. Hence, as data centres emerge as thermal infrastructures for urban heat pro-vision, their use as fuels requires regulation and debate in policy develop-ment contexts, just like any other fuel, as their implications go far beyond the local contexts within which they are produced. A thermopolitical ethics is therefore required to give voice to the silenced publics in the process of such carbon and data dematerialization, and to bring back on the agenda questions around energy sources and the materiality of data practices, their geographical situatedness and body politics.

In this article, these aspects and tensions have surfaced through an enquiry of just one empirical case. Yet, at the time of writing, many similar projects are taking shape in diﬀerent parts of Europe, in cities such as Amster-dam, Odense, London, Paris, Bordeaux and Stockholm, in partnership with platforms ranging from Facebook to emergent cloud service providers, local administrations and energy monopolies. Understanding the modalities and forms that thermopolitical arrangements take across geographies, in their particular cases and situated contexts, would be indispensable for better understanding the reconﬁguring relations between information and energy, digitalization and (post-) industrial futures. This article also contrib-utes to the growing literature on the infrastructural aspects of platforms, which has so far mostly discussed the logics of U.S. or Chinese technological companies (van Dijck2014, Plantin et al.2018). The analysis of the infrastruc-turing practices of the major Russian online platform further highlights the elemental, temporal and geopolitical forces that shape the operations of digital platforms. It would also be helpful in terms of paying attention to the thermal and geopolitical dimensions of the platform economy as it gets ever more entrenched in energy politics. Finally, and importantly, a ther-mopolitical perspective on platforms allows us to deepen our understandings of the platform economy by illuminating the crucial role that seemingly irre-levant actors, such as energy companies and local urban administrations, play in the production of value and distinction in digital capitalism.

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Notes

1. This information is based on data from the internal Yandex resource manage-ment system, which I consulted in May 2019 during my ﬁeldwork in the Yandex data centre in Mäntsälä.

2. Data from private email correspondence with representatives of Nivos in May 2019.

Acknowledgements

This article was researched and developed during my time as a post-doc at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. It has greatly ben-eﬁtted from comments by the two special issue editors, the participants in the work-shop on Dynamics of change: Novel approaches to energy consumption, as well as the joint workshop hosted by the EASA networks Energy Futures, and Technology Futures in 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

The work on this article has been partially funded by a grant of the Swedish Riksban-kens Jubileumsfond, as part of the project [P18-0654:1] Earth Stations and Data Centers: Network buildings as transnational infrastructures and logistical media.

Notes on contributor

Julia Velkovais a media scholar and an assistant professor / research fellow in Tech-nology and Social Change at Linköping University. Her current research explores the material and temporal politics of digital media infrastructures, with particular focus on mediations of heat and data through smart grids, data centres, and digitalizing energy infrastructures in the Nordic countries. She is currently co-editing a book on Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and the Politics of Knowing. Her work has been pre-viously published in journals such as New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society, and Big Data & Society, among others.

ORCID

Julia Velkova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1643-7392

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