Winthereik, Brit Ross

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The	greenest	place	on	earth.	A	data	center	fairytale.	 Contribution for Our Lives with Electric Things @ Theorizing the Contemporary  Brit Ross Winthereik, IT University of Copenhagen  Once upon a time there was a piece of land on which a castle was to be built. A fence surrounded the land, for people had to stay away from this castle that was built for books of faces. In those days, the data that made such books held tremendous value.  The prospect of having a construction site and a castle that no one could enter did not bother those, who lived nearby, not in the least. They had high expectations as to what the building of the castle could offer to them, to their town, and to their nation. The reason for building the castle was that the electricity of this place was the world’s greenest. Wind would power the cooling equipment in the halls of this castle. The cooling needed an exceptional amount of electricity, but how exactly this would be organized was quite impossible to know about. Speaking to the foreign king of the castle was out of the question. It was a question of infrastructural security. The amount of green electricity that the castle would need was beyond the imagination of most, but the citizens trusted in the wind turbines to harness the wind, and they trusted in the powers that be when they said that there was enough green electricity to keep these books cool.  All these preparations brought hope, talk of jobs and prosperity, but some kept wondering how the king of the castle knew that the electricity would indeed be green, when so much of it was needed. The also wondered if a local prince perseveres when he is doing business with a data king? Can a local prince ask a foreign king to erect wind turbines when all the green electricity is gone? The answer, my friend…      Electricity is old infrastructure and part of futures yet to arrive.  Fenced field near Odense, birth place of Hans Christian Andersen, purchased by Facebook for the construction of a 56.500 m2 data center that is said to be running on green electricity only.     		

The Greenest Place on Earth:An electric fairytale

https://pure.itu.dk/ws/files/83010321/The_greenest_place_on_earth_Cultural_Anthropology.pdf

The Greenest Place on Earth:An electric fairytale

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