Description | This final talk in the series brings us back to the Pacific Northwest and the intertwined human and natural histories of the Columbia River. An artery of indigenous commerce, a nexus of the fur trade, a power source for war work, and a water source for industrial-scale agriculture, the mighty Columbia is now home to one of the world’s most notable concentrations of data centers. These enormous facilities, owned and operated by the world’s largest technology companies, are the physical backbone that make cloud computing, social networking, and AI possible. Rooting the story of these centers in a longer history of the river and its human uses not only shows the material and political dynamics of today’s digital economy but also illuminates the connective tissue linking one era of American capitalism to the next. |
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