Project 02: Twenty Years of Google in The Dalles, Oregon

FAIN: DOI-299546-24

University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh (Oshkosh, WI 54901-3551)
Adam Diller (Project Director: October 2023 to present)

Research and writing of a scholarly monograph and associated public events on the history of Google’s first data center in The Dalles, Oregon.

Project 02: Twenty Years of Google in The Dalles, Oregon develops new models for changing the Internet through an environmental history of Google’s first hyperscale data center. Project 02 contributes new perspectives to existing studies of this Internet by analyzing Google’s oldest data center longitudinally, tracing its emergence over the past twenty years. The novel mode of computation implemented in The Dalles produces new practices of occupying land, organizing time, securing data, structuring information, and engineering flows of materials. This monograph traces shifts across Google’s discourse, computing technologies, relationships with local governments, entrenchment of settler colonial processes, and consumption of water and electricity. Project 02 highlights ways that the contingencies of these practices provide opportunities to contest Google’s expansive power, leveraging the more-than-human materialities and histories of this node in this Internet to produce change.