̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Division of Social Anthropology

'Extreme sleepover #20' – welcome to dataworld

lw355 — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 13:22:29 +0000

I’m standing 100 feet underground in a fluorescent-white room. In the centre, stand four rows of server cabinets. I’m following Matej, a data centre technician, as he carries out some diagnostic tests on the facility’s IT equipment. To get here we had to go through several security checks, including a high-tech biometric fingerprint scanner and a good old-fashioned, low-tech massive door.

̽��ֱ��IT equipment is distributed over multiple floors, each going deeper and deeper below ground into the seemingly infinite depths of the data centre. There is a constant hum of electrical voltage down here; it’s the kind of vibratory, carcinogenic sound you would normally associate with pylon power lines and it makes you think you’re probably being exposed to some sort of brain-frying electric field. I ask Matej about this and he tells me, “it’s probably ok.”

When Matej is finished in this room we head downstairs. Our footsteps sound hollow and empty on the elevated metallic walkways. A complex highway of thick, encaged cables runs above our heads, along with large pipes circulating water around the data centre for cooling purposes. As we descend the galvanised steel stairway, it’s like boarding a spaceship that’s buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

̽��ֱ��room we enter is almost completely white. ̽��ֱ��only other colour down here comes from thousands of server lights blinking rapidly like fireflies behind the electro-zinc-coated ‘Zintec’ doors of the server cabinets. We have entered the realm of data, an alien world of tiny, undulating lights that seem almost alive. These iridescent lights flash as data travels to and from the facility through fibre-optic cables at speeds of around 670 million miles per hour, close to the speed of light.

Take a walk inside a data centre with Alexander

This building has been designed with the sole purpose of providing optimal living conditions for data growth and survival. An ambient room temperature of around 20–21°C and a humidity level of 45–55% must constantly be maintained. In this sterile, dustless world of brushed metal surfaces, data live and thrive like precious crystals. Server cabinets become stalagmite formations sparkling frenetically with the digital activity of millions of people doing their daily things in that exact moment all around the world.

Virtually all our daily activity – both online and offline – entails the production of data, with 2.5 billion gigabytes of data being produced every 24 hours. This is stored in the 8.6 million data centres that have spread acoss the globe. Yet, few of us realise that we are using data centres.

Data centres now underpin an incredible range of activities and utilities across government, business and society, and we rely on them for even the most mundane activities: our electricity and water accounts are located in data centres, a single Google search can involve up to five data centres, information from the train tickets we swipe at turnstiles are routed through data centres. These places process billions of transactions every day and extreme efforts are made to ensure that they do not fail.

One such effort is the increasingly common practice of storing data underground in ‘disaster-proof’ facilities – in the same way that seed and gene banks store biological material that is essential for human survival. What does this say about the importance of data to our society? This is what I am down here researching. Working with data centres, IT security specialists, cloud computing companies and organisations that are trying to raise awareness about the vulnerabilities of digital infrastructures, I am exploring the cultural hopes, fears and imaginations of data as it pertains to what many are calling our ‘digital future’.

My fieldwork has led me to focus on the fears of disaster and technological failure that motivate data centre practices and discourses, from routine Disaster Recovery plans to storing hard drives in Faraday cages to protect them against electromagnetic threats. ̽��ֱ��current mass exodus into ‘the cloud’ is raising important questions about our increasing societal dependence upon digital technology and the resilience, sustainability and security of the digital infrastructure that supports our online and offline lives. Fears of a ‘digital’ disaster occurring in the future are also reflected in cultural artefacts such as TV shows about global blackouts and books about electromagnetic pulse events. In an age of constant and near compulsory connection to computers, tablets and smartphones, how would we survive if they all suddenly and simultaneously ceased to function?

Data centres are being configured as infrastructures critical not only for supporting our data-based society, but also for backing up and even potentially re-booting ‘digital civilisation’, if it should collapse. My fieldwork is not all doom and disaster, though. In fact, sometimes it’s quite spectacular. Right now I am standing in a heavily air-conditioned aisle flanked on each side by large, monolithic cabinets of server racks.

“This is one of my favourite things,” Matej says, as he flicks the overhead lights off and plunges us into an abyssal darkness punctured only by server lights, flashing like phytoplankton all around us. For a moment, we watch these arrhythmic lights flickering, beautiful and important, some vanishingly small.

But these little lights have immense significance. Something huge is happening down here. It feels like you are witnessing something incomprehensibly vast, something so massively distributed, complex and connected to all of us that it’s hard to even know what you are seeing take place. It’s like looking at the stars.

Alexander is a PhD student at Fitzwilliam College with the Division of Social Anthropology. His research is supervised by Dr Christos Lynteris, and is funded by the Cambridge Home and EU Scholarship Scheme.

Alexander Taylor provides a sensory snapshot of his fieldwork in high-security subterranean data centres exploring fears of technological failure in our data-dependent society.

There is a constant hum of electrical voltage down here; it’s the kind of vibratory, carcinogenic sound you would normally associate with pylon power lines and it makes you think you’re probably being exposed to some sort of brain-frying electric field

Alexander Taylor

A.R.E. Taylor

Data centre

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Yes

'Extreme sleepover #19' – Living beside Uruguay’s ‘Mother Dump’

jeh98 — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 08:30:55 +0000

Returning to Uruguay’s largest landfill (cantera), ‘Felipe Cardoso’ in Montevideo, to conduct fieldwork for my PhD, I was delighted when local social worker and missionary Jorge told me that I could live at his home, in a housing cooperative overlooking the landfill.

I had worked as a labourer in the construction of the cooperative in 2010 and knew that most of the occupants were relocated residents of an infamous shantytown built on top of an old landfill.

I could use the house as a base for exploring Montevideo’s formal and informal waste trade, since many neighbours were urban recyclers, known locally as clasificadores or classifiers. I’d be able to accompany them as they left in the morning to recover value from the trash at sites nearby, often returning in the afternoon on motorbikes, trucks or horse-drawn carts laden with an impressive array of plastics, metals and cardboard, as well as food, clothing and electronics for domestic consumption or neighbourhood sale.

Waiting to move in and impatient to start fieldwork, I had eagerly accepted when one neighbour offered to host me temporarily in his yard. As it transpired, I lived for a week in the most densely populated accommodation I have ever experienced, sharing a shack with his teenage son and the flapping wings and loose bowels of 22 birds. Now, though, Jorge’s house would be my home for the following year. Initially a concrete block lacking windows and doors, I set about making it habitable, mostly using materials scavenged from the landfill.

Of course I could do nothing about the sights, sounds and smells of the landfill itself. It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist.

Each day, some 60 trucks roll into the compound filled with urban rubbish. At the last count (in 2008, and likely to be an underestimate), around 5,000 waste-picking families make a living from Montevideo’s trash, attempting to recover all that is valuable, usable or edible. Their role in a city where waste management has reached crisis points in the past has been lauded as a lesson to society: they help to reduce the environmental and financial cost of landfill and find value in something that might be surplus to some but not others.

Like my interlocutors who recovered materials from there, I had ambivalent feelings about the cantera which, because of its reliable provision, was nicknamed “the mother”. On the one hand, it was an intriguing site for fieldwork where, under the supervision of Dr Sian Lazar, I focused on processes of labour formalisation, the socio-cultural dynamics of the waste and recycling work, and the history of waste infrastructure and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was also a place of hazard, police violence and a smell that lingered on clothes and skin, getting into hair and under fingernails.

I never slept at the dump but this was previously a common practice: clasificadores would camp there for days or weeks at a time, always at the mercy of the feared mounted police who would set tents alight, showing little tolerance for intruders.

̽��ֱ��closest I came to the apparently boisterous atmosphere of these encampments was joining clasificadores of the Felipe Cardoso recycling cooperative as they spent the last nights in a building the municipality had ceded them for facilities but which some had appropriated as a residence. With the exception of veteran clasificador Coco, who lived there permanently, the space seemed to function as a temporary refuge for male clasificadores who had been kicked out by their wives! On the night of my visit, we sat and played cards, listened to cumbia music, drank into my supplies of Scotch, and discussed the impending closure of the site and the workers’ relocation to a formal sector recycling plant.

With the municipal government’s attempted formalisation of Montevideo’s recycling trade, it is possible that the days of such precarious, autonomous, clasificador spaces are numbered, to be replaced by hygienic and technologically provisioned infrastructures. Yet at the end of my research trip, many of my neighbours were still making their way to the cantera to classify the tons of waste dumped there daily.

Uruguayan priest Padre Cacho once described clasificadores as “ecological prophets” and I can see what he meant – they have long functioned as ‘prospectors’, mining the urban waste stream for valuable materials that consumers have been happy to discard, and municipal governments to landfill or incinerate.

Now back in Cambridge as an intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), I am helping to organise a workshop on the ‘circular economy’ to explore the ways that government and industry are increasingly reconceptualising waste as recoverable resource. At a global level, it is important that shifts in policy benefit rather than dispossess informal sector recyclers, the long-time ‘artisanal miners’ of the waste stream.

Just before leaving Montevideo, the annual landfill clasificador Christmas social afforded me an enduring image of slumber amidst the scraps: an old, intoxicated and weary recycler lying on a recovered floral mattress, his sweated brow resting on a large folded rubbish bag, surrounded by thousands of pesos worth of scrap metal.

Patrick’s policy internship at CSaP is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Cambridge Doctoral Training Centre.

In a new podcast, Patrick O’Hare describes his time with the clasificadores – the families who scavenge Montevideo’s pungent ‘wastescape’ to recover and classify anything that is valuable, usable or edible.

It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist

Patrick O'Hare

Patrick working with the clasificadores in Montevideo

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Opinion: There’s no such thing as a natural-born gambler

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 15:04:35 +0000

̽��ֱ��fight to recruit online gamblers in the UK is at fever pitch. If you googled “play live blackjack” in March, it cost an advertiser £148.51 to be the first ad that came up. In fact, 77 of March’s top 100 most expensive keywords were about gambling. With this relentless clamour to grab attention, you might think gambling was hardwired into human nature; that we were doomed to cave in to the enticements of bookmakers and casinos.

In truth, huge swathes of the planet just didn’t gamble. No cards, no dice, not even a coin flip, and we’re not talking about a thousand years ago either; in some areas it is just 50 years since gambling arrived. We can say with confidence that 150 years ago betting on contests was absent from the indigenous peoples of most of South America, almost all of Australia, most of the Pacific Islands including the vast islands comprising New Guinea and New Zealand, most Inuit and Siberian peoples, and a great many peoples of southern Africa.

My own fieldwork in Highland Papua New Guinea showed the introduction of gambling occurred in the 1950s – in other words, within living memory. If whole populations don’t or didn’t gamble, well it can’t very well be a universal human trait. So why didn’t they?

Those looking for an easy answer would say that these people were isolated and marginal, but we know that was not the case at all. For instance, there have been huge polities spanning the Amazon, and trade networks that bridged the Pacific well before Captain Cook. How easy it would have been to pick up some dice, or make them when you got home.

On a roll. Christa Lohman/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Risk aversion

You might well counter that these people were just isolated from “us”. In fact, contact with the West and the presence of gambling just don’t correlate.

But lets say that non-gamblers were too far removed from the great gambling traditions to pick it up directly, despite the evidence. ̽��ֱ��enormous variety of gambling and the breadth of forms it has taken across the world both in the past and today strongly suggests that gambling is not a hard idea to invent. ̽��ֱ��real question should therefore be why was gambling not worth inventing or adopting? Under what conditions is gambling a silly idea?

Another piece of common wisdom says that gambling is more prevalent among people who face greater risk in their lives, but this is not the answer either. While the correlation holds for some people in some countries that already gamble, many of the peoples who didn’t gamble at all had a far riskier time of things than peoples who do.

So there is nothing innate about gambling that simply must bubble to the surface, but this doesn’t mean gambling addiction is not real or serious either. Many of those indigenous peoples who once didn’t gamble now have very high levels of problem gambling. It is one thing to say gambling is not in our genes, and quite another to say that some people aren’t predisposed to develop a dependency on gambling when it is around them.

Gambling… Summer Fete style. David Edwards/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

If it wasn’t isolation, and it wasn’t lack of risk, or lack of imagination, why have many of us gambled so much while many others who didn’t at all have now taken it up so quickly? Simple. We have money and a stratified society with a lot of economic inequality and they didn’t.

Easy money

Money may seem a self-evident thing, but it is surprisingly hard to make a hard and fast distinction between what we all know to be money and things like shell currencies. Like money itself, its definition can easily slip through our fingers. What people who have adopted money tell anthropologists, however, is that what matters is that money has more uses, is more portable, more easily hidden, and easier to spend. Many people in those societies that were new to money took up gambling as a way to access or direct this slippery new kind of wealth.

Inequality is another good indicator for gambling, both statistically and on the ground. Where I did my fieldwork, gambling arrived with the return of the first migrant labourers, young men who, along with a knowledge of gambling, brought back what seemed like huge wealth, and who had the potential to upend traditional hierarchies.

As with so many non-gambling societies, it was new inequalities that made gambling seem a good idea for some. And for all its problems, one has to admit that it is a very exploratory, profound way to engage with money. In gambling, by mutual agreement, players pit their monies against each other, making less into more (or more into less) while cutting out the laborious market system. This also explains why Mao Tse-Tung and the leaders of so many other communist (read anti-inequality) uprisings made banning gambling a first priority.

Turning in his grave.. Steven Woodward/Flickr

Joining the game

What does all this tell us about our lust for online gambling, which seems so lucrative for Google as well as the betting firms? We have been gambling for a long time, long enough for it to seep into our collective psyche and appear completely natural, but as recently as medieval times our kings blamed our gambling on French influence.

We have gone through fits and spurts of gambling, but probably the most important was in the 17th century, when mercantilism upset the economic order of the day, while new forms of accurate measurement and a more widespread currency system spurred us to think more in numbers, bending our minds towards gambling.

It is certainly profitable for the gambling industry that we think of ourselves as a nation of instinctive gamblers. But think again. That the risk taker in us becomes an online gambler tells us much more about how we internalise present day economic inequality and the way technology makes money ever easier to spend than it does about our animal instincts.

Anthony J. Pickles, Research Fellow in Anthropology at Trinity College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Anthony Pickles (Division of Social Anthropology) discusses why gambling is a relatively modern invention.

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Yes

Social anthropologist recognised by Queen's ̽��ֱ�� Belfast

pbh25 — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 15:36:28 +0000

Professor Henrietta L Moore, William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology, is to be recognised for her outstanding services to the social sciences.

̽��ֱ��Fellow of Jesus College will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Social Science (DSSc) degree from Queen’s ̽��ֱ�� Belfast.

Queen’s awards honorary degrees to individuals who have achieved high distinction or given significant service in one or more fields of public or professional life, and who serve as ambassadors for the ̽��ֱ�� and Northern Ireland around the world.

Professor Moore will receive her award alongside several other notable individuals, including the Nobel Prize winning physicist Peter Higgs, singer Katie Melua, Irish rugby player Brian O’Driscoll and the Irish businessman Dermot Desmond.

̽��ֱ��graduation ceremony will take place on 3 July.

Image credit: Hannah J Taylor

Professor Henrietta L Moore to receive honorary degree.

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Yes

Africa: the coming revolution

sjr81 — Wed, 21 May 2014 08:38:57 +0000

Professor Keith Hart, a former Director of Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies, returns to the university tomorrow (Thursday) to deliver the annual Audrey Richards lecture – a showpiece of the Centre’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Hart will use the lecture to contend that conflict, poverty and extremism on the African continent should not divert attention from the long-standing strengths of the informal economy in Africa’s cities and the continent’s new embrace of the digital revolution in communications. Professor Hart will show how such social dynamics may have surprising lessons to give to the troubled market economy in the 21st century.

“In the present decade, seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies are African,” said Hart. “It was never the case that a national framework for development made sense in Africa and it makes even less sense today. ̽��ֱ��coming African revolution could leapfrog many of the obstacles in its path, but it will not do so by remaining tied to the national straitjacket worn by African societies since they won independence from colonial rule.

“ ̽��ֱ��world economy is precarious in the extreme, but Africans have less to lose. Africa’s advantage in the current crisis is its weak attachment to the status quo.”

During the lecture, Hart will also consider the role played by free trade and protection in the revolutions that made modern France, the United States, Italy and Germany, as well as examining the organization of international trade in Southern Africa and reviewing the prospect for greater integration of trade regimes on the continent as a whole.

Professor Hart’s original research in Ghana in the 1970s is renowned for coining the notion of the informal economy. It has been widely applied to account for economic activities that are not recorded by conventional measurements such as the gross domestic product. He has more recently published influential studies on how new forms of money may entail more emancipatory possibilities than has been the case in capitalism’s historical forms.

Professor Hart is currently the co-director of the Human Economy Programme in Pretoria ̽��ֱ�� and Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His lecture is given as the Audrey Richards Annual Lecture in African Studies. It pays tribute to Richards (1889-1984), a Cambridge social anthropologist, who founded the Centre of African Studies in 1965.

Hart’s lecture today inaugurates the Centre’s 50th anniversary events that will highlight half a century of excellence in African Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s new Africa initiative builds on this legacy of African Studies.

̽��ֱ��lecture, Waiting for Emancipation: ̽��ֱ��Prospects for Liberal Revolution and a Human Economy in Africa, takes place in room SG1 & SG2 in the Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, at 5pm Thursday. All are welcome to attend.

Africa’s fastest-growing economies could offer a radical alternative to the West’s current reliance on national capitalism according to an academic who helped coin the term the ‘informal economy’.

̽��ֱ��world economy is precarious in the extreme, but Africans have less to lose.

Keith Hart

Globe by Hans Olofsson

Yes

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