Cloud ruins: Ericsson's Vaudreuil-Dorion data centre and infrastructural abandonment
云废墟：爱立信沃德勒伊-多里永数据中心与基础设施弃置
Author: Patrick Brodie（帕特里克·布罗迪）, Julia Velkova（朱莉娅·贝尔科娃）
Source：《Information Communication & Society》2021 Volume24 Issue6
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 Montreal, Quebec, 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.
文摘：过去十年中，全球范围内大规模数据中心业务加速增长与扩张，以支持不断增长的消费者及企业数据与计算需求。这些新兴数字基础设施虽然建设迅速，并承载着当地产业未来的希冀，但其走向过时的路径却在不断缩短。它们的生命周期取决于金融投机、公司战略的转变以及消费技术的进步。在本文中，我们追踪了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-多里永镇建设的一个突然遭到遗弃的数据中心，探寻其曾经的承诺及其“死后生活”，以此扩展关于数字荒废的新兴辩论。通过实地考察、新闻报道，以及对瑞典和加拿大参与该数据中心开发的建筑师和工作人员进行定性访谈，我们提出了“云废墟”这一敏感性概念，用以捕捉全球数据基础设施弃置在当地背景下可能引发的特定含义与物质表达。云废墟既熟悉又新颖，预示着一种正在显现的后数字荒废景观，这种景观在作为全球物流城市一部分的边缘社区建筑环境中展开，而我们当代对数字化的理解正是在这些环境中产生的。
Keywords: cloud infrastructure; data centres; digital ruins; big tech; digital wastes
编译：刘鑫
