Author: STS Vienna

by Carsten Horn

On the morning of 10 March of 2021, players of the online chess application Lichess, visitors to the website of the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, the organizers of the Paris fashion week, a group of cybercriminals and a number of businesses were in for an unpleasant surprise. Data that they had thought to be safely stored in “the cloud” was gone! The reason: Around midnight, one of the four data centers operated by the market-leading French telecommunication and internet provider OVHcloud in Strasbourg, close to the German border on the river Rhine, had gone up in flames and another one had been severely damaged. The fire destroyed the servers which constitute the main infrastructure for part of the internet in the French internet domain and host the data of the data centers’ clients. More than two years later, despite the – typical – secrecy of the data center industry, information about the fire and the efforts to extinguish it were published. The fire had started in a power supply room and quickly spread throughout the five-storey building, leading to the devastating outcome.

In most cases, the fire probably had no long-lasting repercussions. The data stored in data centers is typically mirrored in multiple locations, leading to what Alexander R.E. Taylor (2018) calls an “infrastructural excess”. In my fieldwork, I learned for example that the streaming provider Netflix has its entire library mirrored in almost all co-location data centers worldwide. Yet, I cannot help but take the fire as an opportunity to think about what this event can teach us about our contemporary digital societies.  “Event” takes on a quite specific, and deeply philosophical meaning here. The event, as Mike Michael and Maja Horst (2011, p. 286) understand it, “is characterised by the fact that the interactions of it its constitutive elements change those elements”. In other words, in an event all actors that are part of it are transformed, they become otherwise.

From a Burning Data Centers to Fire Objects

What are these transformations and how can we make sense of them? There is by now an emerging field of scholars in STS that engages with flammable objects, such as batteries. In a world that is getting increasingly hotter and is increasingly using highly-flammable objects, these scholars argue, we must come to terms with such fires. This would be a fitting approach; the Strasbourg fire shows that data centres are yet another highly-flammable object. That is why so much effort is spent on constructing fire extinguishing systems that put out fires but do not damage the servers and, consequently, the data stored on them (typically such systems thus use gas instead of water). But this is not what I’m after. At the cost of being too ironic and making use of what one could call a form of conceptual serendipity, I suggest we can think about the actual fire in Strasbourg in the spring of 2021 through the metaphor of the “fire object” coined by John Law and Vicky Singleton (2005) in a study on alcoholic liver disease (ALD). In this study, Law and Singleton find that none of the previous notions of what an object is can help them to think about the dynamics of their object of research. It is not as stable, or rather, as stabilized as the quasi-objects of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). But neither is it as neatly and continuously changing as the “fluid object” in the famous case of the Zimbabwe Bush Pump.

By contrast, ALD is a relational object in multiple versions that are juxtaposed and interrelated at the same time. That is, each version is part of a present reality that co-exists with the absent realities of other versions of alcoholic liver disease. The authors call this a “fire object” because they liken it to the flames of a fire. These flames that we may observe in the present are likewise related to the absent presences of fuel and ashes. Unlike the fluid object where we can observe a somewhat continuous flow of the same reality of the object, even where it transforms, the transitions between the different realities of the fire object are discontinuous. They “jump” (Law & Singleton, 2005), p. 347) and, with the flip of a switch, a present reality is transformed into an absent present reality and makes way for another present reality.

Lessons from the Fire at the Strasbourg Data Center

What I suggest is that the event, that transpired in the night from 9 to 10 March on the banks of the River Rhine in Strasbourg, helps us to understand that “the cloud” is a fire object in a way akin to how Law and Singleton theorize ALD. The actual fire at the data center marks precisely the moment when the metaphorical fire object and its reality abruptly and brutally shift. This is, I suggest, more than a typical case of infrastructural breakdown. For STSers, infrastructural breakdown occupies a privileged epistemological position because it is here that we see the work that infrastructure(s) invisibly do. This is why infrastructure scholars speak of breakdown as a form of “infrastructural inversion” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). The fire at OVHcloud is more than just infrastructural breakdown because the very reality of the cloud, the fire object, changed with the fire. For users, the cloud overnight transformed from an ethereal domain into a very real building at the outskirts of the capital of Alsace in France.

I want to dwell on three aspects of the new reality that emerged in the event of the fire because I believe it can tell us something about contemporary digital societies and the possibilities for them to be otherwise.

1. We are not really used to thinking about our data. It is just there – after all, this is the etymological root of the term itself (from Latin datum, given). This is what the cloud is for, right?! We use it to safely store our data, never to worry about it again because it is just there (Brennan, 2016). Digital technologies and infrastructures have made it possible to store everything at a click and without thinking twice. This has changed how we archive things. Our ‘archives’ have become “dumpsters” (Hogan, 2015) just because they have become technically so easy to produce at little to no (financial) cost.

The fire at OHVcloud changes this. It suddenly creates a chance for a more conscious relation with our data. Data is not just given and will always be there when we need it. If you were playing chess on Lichess in March of 2021, there is a real possibility that your progress was lost – quite literally – in the flames. Can the fire thus perhaps be the start of a new form of data and data infrastructure literacy where we consider more consciously what we store and where we store it?

2. Relatedly, the reality of “the cloud” itself changes. Consider, this insight from an article titled “Europe’s data treasure burns on the Rhine” from the German news outlet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ): “[O]f course, the cloud is just a metaphor”.  As scholars of science and technology know all too well, language is performative, metaphors do work. In this case, they render invisible what it actually means to store data “in the cloud”. It surely does not mean that we transfer our “data treasure” to some kind of ephemeral and immaterial realm. This is why the argument that when we speak of “the cloud” we actually mean a global, very material network of digital infrastructures is well-rehearsed in the literature on data centers. Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau (2015, p. 75), for instance, want to study data centers as the places “where ‘the cloud’ touches the ground” and as “the physical presence of this imaginary space”. The fire at OHVcloud might have achieved this. It has, at least for a short moment in time, generated a reality in which the material ingredients of ‘the cloud’ are visible. Beyond the methodological commonplace that infrastructure (only) becomes visible upon breakdown, this may be the point of departure for political debates around data centers. To quote again from the above-mentioned article in the FAZ: “The accident shows that there urgently needs to be a public discussion about where, by whom, under what conditions and how securely our data is stored”. I would add that this public discussion must not neglect the massive environmental costs data centers have due to their energy and water consumption, the raw materials necessary to construct the servers they house and the ruins and e-waste they leave behind.

3. There is a final lesson we can draw from the data center fire (object). It points us to the new fragilities of the digital age. In an article published by Vice News on the day of the fire, Lorenzo Fraceschi-Bicchierai remarks that the fire “shows how things we often think of as ‘cyber’ have a very real physical infrastructure that can be attacked, impacted by disasters, or otherwise messed with”. This insight follows from what I have written above. If “the cloud” is not ethereal but very material and on the ground, it is at risk of whatever kind of catastrophe we can imagine, for example, a fire. It is not for nothing that, as I have learned in my fieldwork, that data centres in Vienna are not built in the approach path of the airport, as the however-improbable risk that a plane crash may destroy our valuable data is too large. What does this fragility entail? Irish poet Jessica Traynor writes that data centers have become our “memory machines”. Our collective memory is now stored digitally and, hence, at risk of our new digital fragilities. Traynor puts it succinctly: “Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.” Lo and behold, this also concerns the data that keeps our administrations going, that pertains us as citizens. OVHcloud also housed French government data. Some businesses lost parts of their data forever – as illustrated by lawsuits against OVHVcloud. So, given the ever-growing dependency on digital technologies and growing geopolitical tensions, what risks are we willing to take, what fragilities are we willing to bear, when it comes to our cultural memories?

The story I tell about the fire at OHVcloud could easily be one repair and maintenance (Denis, Mongili & Pontille, 2016). After firefighters had extinguished the flames, the damages could be assessed, servers could be replaced, and operations could continue – almost seamlessly. In this story, the fire would have been but a noise in the system. The event would have been tamed before it would have become durable. We would have easily gone back to the old reality, perhaps before even noticing a reality shift. Indeed, the architecture of digital infrastructures and labor inside data centers aim to prevent downtime at all costs. Failure and breakdown thus lose their epistemological significance because they are so easily glossed over (Taylor, 2021).

The notion of the “fire object” makes us aware that the reality that would thus have been restored has lost its innocence. It is haunted by the spectre of the absent presence of the alter-reality the fire brought about. “Fire object” entices us to look for the absent presence of this alter-reality, of which the (metaphorical) ashes of the fire in Strasbourg serve as a reminder; of a glimpse we caught in the days following 10 March, 2021. It also points us to the difficulties of bringing the multiple realities we live in together. For instance, there has been a long investigation of the causes of the fire and, as I mentioned above, several lawsuits as clients have sued the company for the data loss (in the absence of backup-storage policies). Ultimately, the notion of the “fire object” calls upon us to keep the event open. A cloud can catch fire. If and when it does, it presents an opportunity to become more aware of the (environmental) fragilities of digital societies and to make digital infrastructures more democratic and sustainable.

Carsten Horn is a doctoral candidate in the ERC-funded research project “Innovation Residues. Modes and Infrastructures of Caring for our Longue-durée Environmental Futures” at  the STS Department. He investigates the residues of digital practices, digitalization and datafication at the interface of digital and environmental concerns. In his dissertation project “Datafication and its Discontents”, Carsten studies the emerging controversies around data centers in Austria, France and Ireland.

References

Brennan, S. (2016). Making Data Sustainable: Backup Culture and Risk Perception. In N. Starosielski & J. Walker (Eds.), Sustainable Media (pp. 56–76). Routledge.

Denis, J., Mongili, A., & Pontille, D. (2016). Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 6(2), Article 2.

Hogan, M. (2015). The Archive as Dumpster. Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 4(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.39565

Holt, J., & Vonderau, P. (2015). “Where the Internet Lives”. Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructures. In L. Parks & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Signal Traffic. Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (pp. 71–93). University of Illinois Press.

Horst, M., & Michael, M. (2011). On the Shoulders of Idiots: Re-thinking Science Communication as ‘Event.’ Science as Culture, 20(3), 283–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2010.524199

Law, J., & Singleton, V. (2005). Object Lessons. Organization, 12(3), 331–355. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508405051270

Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134.

Taylor, A. R. E. (2018, May 19). Failover Architectures: The Infrastructural Excess of the Data Centre Industry. Failed Architecture. https://failedarchitecture.com/failover-architectures-the-infrastructural-excess-of-the-data-centre-industry/

Taylor, A. R. E. (2021). Standing by for data loss: Failure, preparedness and the cloud. Ephemera: Theory & Politcs in Organization, 21(1), 59–93.

On the mission to bring fresh life into “Reflections” and keep it closer to every day life at Vienna STS, there is now—in addition to the possibility to spontaneously submit posts—a preliminary schedule including all department members in the yearly blog-cycle. But how did the editorial team come up with such a schedule? Considering that a certain degree of chance and “luck” are inherent to life and work in academic research (Davies & Pham, 2023), what could be a more fitting way to schedule blog submissions than via a tombola! 

Last Thursday, the “Reflections” team came together to make the final draw: An Excel spreadsheet assigning numbers to members of the department staff (including blog editors, off course!) was used as the basis. Then, the team carefully numbered and folded paper slips and mixed them together in a ceramic bowl to ensure the utmost fairness and discretion. Members of the team took turns drawing numbers—two for each month of the ongoing year. The numbers were read aloud and the colleagues assigned to them were added to the respective cell in the spreadsheet. You can review the final product below, as well as documentation of the joyful process above.

The “Reflections” team is looking forward to working with all of our blog contributors this year! The team will soon reach out to those scheduled for the next months. In the meantime, we kindly ask department members to contact us via email in case there are any questions or concerns.

*** 2025 Blog Schedule ***

February Sarah and Alessandra

March Bao-Chau/Katja and Rafaela

April Jule and Noah

May Joseph and Sara

June Fredy and Philipp

September Carsten and Ulrike

October Roman and Livia

November Inge and Ariadne

December Sarah and Anastasia

January 2026 Max and Ange

February 2026 Millar and Nina

Reference

Davies, S. R., & Pham, B.-C. (2023). Luck and the ‘situations’ of research. Social Studies of Science, 53(2), 287-299. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221125438

by Sarah R Davies

I am thrilled to announce the publication of a new book, titled Science Societies: Resources for Life in a Technoscientific World. As I write in the acknowledgements, this volume is inspired by my experiences teaching Science and Technology Studies (STS) to different audiences, and is an effort to draw together STS research on science, technology, and society to present an accessible account of how this knowledge can act as ‘resources for life in a technoscientific world’. My hope is that by synthesising scholarship on topics such as expertise, public participation in science, science in crisis and disaster, and the governance of science readers will be inspired to explore STS further and to critically engage with the role of technoscience in society. 

If you’re interested in these topics, the book is out in paperback and can be purchased at this site. You are also welcome to write to sarah.davies@univie.ac.at for further details!

by Carsten Horn

10…9… Before leaving the premises, you have to undergo a radiological control measurement. If your hands and feet are correctly placed on the probes, the countdown will begin.

Nuclear energy: Once the harbinger of a new era of unlimited energy supply and prosperity has come under attack by environmental and anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s. While at one point radioactive materials made inroads into everyday life as an ingredient in toothpaste and cosmetics, for instance – consider the Thorium-X-based toothpaste Doramad or the Tho-Radia line of radioactive beauty products – we are currently dealing with the impacts and residues of the everyday use of radioactive materials in research, industry and medicine.

While after the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, related controversies have again increased in intensity and fierceness, they now seem to have taken another turn as policymakers and entrepreneurs consider expanding nuclear energy to respond to climate change. One prominent example of this is the taxonomy of sustainable investments of the European Union that classifies nuclear energy as a green energy source under certain conditions. This shift in debates conjures up questions about the long-term consequences of nuclear energy, not least the storage of nuclear waste. On a more general level, we are confronted with a crucial, yet disregarded question in science and technology-based societies: What remains of our innovations? What happens to technologies at the end of their lifetime? Such questions are often deliberately left in the dark (McGoey, 2019), and the damaging side effects of innovations are geographically or temporally displaced (Alexander & O’Hare, 2020). Against this backdrop, the European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project “Innovation Residues – Modes and Infrastructures of  Caring for Longue-Durée Environmental Futures” (INNORES) at the department develops a new approach for understanding self-proclaimed knowledge and innovation societies “in reverse”.

8…7…

A bus takes us to an inconspicuous office campus just outside of the municipality of Seibersdorf, not even an hour’s drive from Vienna. At first glance, the campus looks just like any other one: A large parking lot upfront, a fenced-off area, and several, largely grey office blocks matching the architectural aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s – nothing out of the ordinary, it appears. The only thing that tells us something is different about this particular campus is a yellow sign at the entrance. Large black letters above an orange light bulb tell drivers to stop when the orange light flashes. Beneath it is a black trefoil against a yellow background, the internationally recognized warning symbol for radioactivity. The campus is not just any office campus. It is the Tech Campus Seibersdorf, home to several research institutions and enterprises, among them the laboratories of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for example. On a cold but sunny Wednesday, it is the destination of a group of students on an excursion to round off the seminar “Of waste and value” taught by Ulrike Felt during the winter semester 2022/23.

6…5…

The group is there to visit Nuclear Engineering Seibersdorf (NES), a subsidiary of the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT). The AIT, at that time under the name Austrian Society for Atomic Energy Studies, had initially been established as a nuclear research institution, complete with a (now defunct and decommissioned) research reactor in Seibersdorf. Nowadays, the NES is commissioned by the Austrian government to collect and store the country’s nuclear waste. This may appear surprising, at first, because Austria does not have nuclear power plants in use. The plans to build three plants (Bayer & Felt, 2019) were aborted after widespread protests by the Austrian civil society, culminating in a referendum in 1978. The message of this referendum in which 50.5% of voters voted against the start-up of nuclear power plants: Nuclear energy should be kept out of Austria. The nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf that was finished but never went online is a material remnant of this history (Felt, 2015). But still, radioactive waste results as a by-product of activities in industry, research and medicine. The NES facilities in Seibersdorf are the designated locations for the processing, conditioning and storage of this low- to mid-level nuclear waste¹. Moreover, NES assists in decommissioning former nuclear research sites, such as other research reactors. This work has received broader attention in recent years because NES is only an interim storage facility and the European Union has opened proceedings against the Republic of Austria for infringing the directive to provide plans for the final storage of nuclear waste (similar searches for repositories, accompanied by public protest, for repositories, are currently going on, for instance, in France and Germany). Thus, an advisory board has been assembled in 2021 to guide the process of finding a location for Austria’s final nuclear waste repository to start operating in 2045 when the contract between NES and the Republic of Austria ends (to contribute expertise on this question from the perspective of STS, Ulrike Felt is a member of this board).

4…3…

After a brief video and presentation showing the history and the mission of NES  – including the required safety instructions – by the head of the testing center for radioactive activity, the group of students, now wearing grey coats and white overshoes, enters the facilities. Five students also carry portable dosimeters that, signaled by occasional beeps, measure the radiation exposure (which would stay at 0 for most of the visit). Guided by several employees who happily answer the many questions that arise throughout the visit, the group has to pass through several airlocks where both guides and visitors must step on probes to measure contamination upon leaving. These added security measures – probes, airlocks, depressurized buildings to contain potentially contaminated particles – distinguish the inside of the NES facilities from other factory-like working environments that it otherwise resembles.

The tour leads through different stages of the conditioning of nuclear waste. Conditioning is the process in which nuclear waste is brought into a solid form that can then be ‘packaged’ into containers, such as steel drums. Currently, a major project at NES is the reconditioning of nuclear waste that has been stored at the facilities since the 1970s. In the so-called source-processing center, where radioactive material is handled and processed, the group observes how technicians in ventilated protective gear resembling spacesuits (depicted in the image above) open the old steel drums and place the nuclear waste in new, 200l, concrete-enforced drums. The hot cell  in another part of the same building, separated by another set of airlocks, is the only place technicians at NES deal with highly radioactive materials. There, the waste is located (and temporarily stored) in a cubicle or chamber that resembles a bank deposit safe with 1m thick, high-density concrete walls and multi-layered lead windows. Workers handle it using robot arms that they control from the outside. Finally, the group walks to the storage facility, the so-called transfer storage. In a warehouse firmly anchored in the ground to withstand earthquakes, thick concrete walls to contain radioactivity and tailored climatic conditions to minimize the risk of corrosion, rows upon rows, shelves upon shelves, more than 12,000 drums containing the collected nuclear waste of Austria are stored.  Labeled with letters and numbers that convey information about the type of waste they contain or QR codes, each drum can be inspected individually (legally required once every five years at least), together with its documentation that contains information about the radioactive materials it holds and the processing activities it has undergone. As our guide explains, the goal of this interim storage is to store Austria’s nuclear waste until 2045 (when Austria’s final repository has to be found) without foreclosing other possibilities for dealing with nuclear waste that may emerge in the anticipatable future.

2…1…0… After a brief moment of anxious waiting, the measuring device displays the relieving words: “Not contaminated”. You are now allowed to return through the airlock.

Nuclear waste repositories, such as the one in Seibersdorf, are material rem(a)inders of one of the blind spots of innovation processes and discourses: the left-behinds or “residues” of innovations. As mentioned above, NES does not just store Austria’s nuclear waste as a residue of research and innovation. It is located at the site of Austria’s first research reactor – originally intended to make Austria fit for exploiting the benefits of nuclear energy – that has, since its decommissioning, become a material residue of earlier promises and visions of nuclear future(s). The grey concrete of the reactor is now a canvas for colorful artwork. Moreover, if and when a final storage for Austria’s nuclear waste is found by 2045, parts of the NES facilities at Seibersdorf will themselves become material left-behinds of the history of nuclear research in Austria.

The material presence of residues that we can experience in multiple ways in Seibersdorf demands an awareness of the different forms of overflows novel technologies create along their lifecycle, some of which are classified as waste. It urges us to be attentive to the material-semiotic consequences of the things we produce and the futures we leave behind for coming generations (Adam & Grove, 2011) – in some cases, as with the nuclear waste treated and stored in Seibersdorf, for many hundred years. In this sense, to not lose track of “innovation residues”, it may be more fruitful to conceptualize societies not only through what they produce as knowledge or innovation societies but also through how they discard their innovations and the by-products of innovation once they have ceased to be innovations: How they generate and take care of their waste(s)? What infrastructures of care do they create for their waste(s)?

This is not only true for nuclear waste, even though it is a particularly controversial type. The INNORES project opens up the discussion about what is classified as waste, when, how and by whom. It extends our view of the left-behinds to innovations that have only recently been officially acknowledged and addressed as possibly dangerous forms of waste (such as microplastics) or have not yet been linked to waste(s) at all (such as what the project calls “data waste”). We should think about microplastics that, as we increasingly realize, have become entangled with our bodies, thus exposing their permeable boundaries. We must think about the remnants of our digital devices that are shipped to the Global South and disassembled by informal workers. We urgently need to talk about the so-called “forever chemicals” – anthropogenic chemical compounds used in a variety of everyday objects that only degrade over long periods – that we also incorporate. We have barely begun publicly discussing the data waste our digital practices leave behind that ‘rots away’ in energy- and water-devouring data centers across the globe. A visit to Seibersdorf reminds us that it is high time to open discussions about how we discard, value and care for our waste(s).

¹ Based on its respective radioactivity and decay time, nuclear waste is typically classified into different groups whether they are low-, intermediate- or high-level, and whether they are very short, short, or long-lived*. The bulk of nuclear waste in the world falls into the categories of low-level or intermediate-level nuclear waste. Each of these categories requires different forms and temporalities of containment. The expected storage duration for low-level waste, for instance, is ‘just’ 300 years (which is, of course, vastly different from the hundreds of thousands of years for which high-level waste needs to be stored) – thus raising questions of what to do with this type of waste after this time.

References

Adam, B., & Groves, C. (2011). Futures Tended: Care and Future-Oriented Responsibility. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 31(1), 17–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610391237

Alexander, C., & O’Hare, P. (2023). Waste and Its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)Knowing. Ethnos, 88(3), 419–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734

Bayer, F., & Felt, U. (2019). Embracing the “Atomic Future” in Post–World War II Austria. Technology and Culture, 60(1), 165–191.

Boudia, S., Creager, A. N. H., Frickel, S., Henry, E., Jas, N., Reinhardt, C., & Roberts, J. A. (2021). Residues. Thinking Through Chemical Environments. Rutgers University Press. https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978818057

Felt, U. (2015). Keeping Technologies Out: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Formation of Austria’s Technopolitical Identity. In S. Jasanoff & S.-H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity. Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (pp. 103–125). Chicago University Press.

Hecht, G. (2023). Residual Governance. How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures. Duke University Press.

McGoey, L. (2019). The Unknowers. How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World. Zed Books.

Carsten Horn is a doctoral candidate in the ERC-funded research project “Innovation Residues. Modes and Infrastructures of Caring for our Longue-durée Environmental Futures” at  the STS Department. He investigates the residues of digital practices, digitalization and datafication at the interface of digital and environmental concerns. In his dissertation project “Datafication and its Discontents”, Carsten studies the emerging controversies around data centers in Austria, France and Ireland.