Microsoft’s transition to being both a cloud company and a carbon neutral company occurred at the same time and with common structuring logics. Cloud computing, carbon offsetting, and renewable energy provisioning share place-agnostic structures and practices. This article examines these trends together, analyzing how global forms of mediation and management mutually reinforce one another across the cloud’s carbon and data flows. This analytic affords more than just a tale of a commodity and its (mis)managed environmental externalities, but rather an analysis of the structures of fungible mediation common to both alike. Understanding this concept and its resistance to place-based accountability not only better captures the empirical and aspirational actions of cloud computing, it also allows for more efficacious forms of green media critique
