Mark Andrejevic's Presentation as part of The Internet as Playground and Factory

Editor's Notes

1. On the one hand, we are confronted by the overlay of physical space with interactive capabilities – space as interface: the grafting of the interactivity associated with the virtual enclosure of the internet onto the physical spaces of daily life. On the other, we are witnesses to the unprecedented construction of giant data-centers around the globe. Rather than a “cloud,” the spatial formations associated with digital enclosure are vast data repositories – so-called “server farms” – sprouting up in locations where land and electricity are relatively inexpensive: along the Columbia River Basin in Washington State and Oregon, in Texas, North Carolina, and elsewhere. Google has reportedly budgeted some $1.5 billion in 2006 as part of a project to build “a worldwide string of data centers” nicknamed “Googleplex” (Markoff & Hansell, 2006) and its rivals Microsoft and Yahoo have embarked on similar data warehouse construction projects. For a business that seems to have no tangible products, Google relies heavily on very real “bricks-and-mortar” facilities. As one analyst put it, “Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine…They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable” (Markoff & Hansell 2006, p. 1). The physical corollary of computing as pervasive and invisible as air is the concrete condensation of information represented by the construction of such data enclosures on a giant scale – acres of “air-conditioned warehouses filled with thousands upon thousands of computer servers” (Harden, 2006). These loom on the landscape like depopulated afterimages of industrial-era factories, inhabited not by workers, inmates, or patients, but by the combined data doubles of all of them: enclosures not of people, but of information about people assembled for the purposes of both assisting them and managing them more effectively.
2. The essence of the proposal is to identify sensitive subjects that advertising companies should not keep track of. Here is the list: 1) Certain medical/health conditions– HIV/ AIDS status Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction) Psychiatric conditions Cancer status Abortion-related 2) Certain personal life information– Sexual behavior/orientation/identity (i.e., Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender) Criminal victim status (e.g., rape victim status)