Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Contemporary geographies of the internet have so far mostly gathered perspectives from urban and regional studies, cultural studies, and geopolitics/security studies. Within these domains, the internet has been primarily understood as the infrastructural base underpinning a new vision of urbanization, a factor of production in regional innovation systems, an arena for cultural practices, and a new frontier of (inter)national sovereignty and security. Our aim with this paper is to explore a spatial understanding of the internet which challenges the hylomorphic divide between the natural spirit of the internet as flows of creativity through urban space and the natural body of the internet as the peripheral data center. The techno-managerial perfection captured in the images of these post-modern Cathedrals exemplifies what Alix Ohlin has referred to as “the contemporary sublime,” where the simultaneously intimidating and attracting qualities once found in the vastness of nature are now found in (post)-industrial spaces. We explore how the invocation of the internet makes possible the formation and consolidation of a particular political-ecological conception of space, materially crystallized in the aesthetics of the Silicon Valley office and the Arctic data center. Thus we do not accept an understanding of the internet as the inevitable configuration of digital communication infrastructure, but rather as a catalyst for the peculiar values which bring to life a certain spatial understanding which juxtaposes the creative, fluid, and immaterial urban with the technical, fixed, and material periphery.