LONG QUOTE FROM HERE :: The Cloud Is Not the Territory By Ingrid Burrington

“Shortly before I ventured on this trip, I got a message from a friend saying that he might have found an Amazon data center in Virginia. He sent me some coordinates and provided an outline of his methods, which involved geolocating IP addresses found via the command-line tool traceroute (borrowing a page from the artist James Bridle) and an errant label somehow still on Google Maps: a building in Sterling, Va., bearing the name “Amazon-Vadata.” (Vadata is a legal entity owned by Amazon, essentially the corporate handle for its data centers.)

Although I thought of this as one of the more intimidating sites on my itinerary, it proved to be the smallest and the closest to a semblance of civilization. It was next to a pet resort, down the road from a mall and a short drive away from Raytheon offices. No signs identified the building’s tenant. The only logos I noticed were those of Caterpillar, which were on the generators, and Allied Barton, which was on the badge of the security guard who eventually asked me to stop taking photos. This more or less concluded the day’s expedition.

What is probably an Amazon data center in Sterling, Va. (WNV/Ingrid Burrington)

I returned home and retraced my steps with my phone, which had been quietly collecting my location data all day and sending it to a Google server somewhere, possibly in northern Virginia. While I had struggled to seek out pieces of the cloud, the cloud kept a pretty good pulse on my location.

Users accept this information asymmetry in part because of a misunderstanding: They believe that the Internet does not take up space and, since it doesn’t take up real space, that our data isn’t really somewhere else or in the hands of someone else. But by placing our data in the cloud, and in the hands of private companies that readily comply with national security directives and sell our data to third parties, it’s effectively no longer ours.

Data takes up space. The space it takes up — and the water, land and electricity that get used in taking it up — remains, for the most part, out of sight, out of mind and utterly uninteresting to actually look at. There are exceptions to this inaccessibility, in particular the Internet Archive, which has installed its servers within its public community space. Such exceptions to the rule illustrate that the veneer of secrecy around data center geography is a choice, one that further estranges users from their own data.

Lifting the fog that surrounds the cloud isn’t a matter merely of locating many nondescript buildings but of looking at all the other elements that make its many particles crystallize. Mass surveillance in the United States is a complex public-private partnership, and the data-industrial complex is but one of its sprawling pieces. Beneath headlines about the spooks of the surveillance state are normal, non-spooky humans in normal, non-spooky places — engineers working at colocation centers used by defense contractors, county economic development offices looking to expand the local tax base, real estate companies looking to get into a new market, energy companies that welcome the profits born of an industry that uses more electricity than some small nations.”

The Cloud Is Not the Territory By Ingrid Burrington

Please excuse the long quote. its a really interesting and a really great piece. i have a half finished film documentary proposal along very similar lines // JAY