Timo Arnall, of the BERG design consultancy in London and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, is soon recently a film titled Internet Machine, exploring the big data facilities that enable and host cloud computing technologies. Here’s a few images:
In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them.
There’s a write-up on the film here, as well as Arnall’s blog, here.
Deterritorial Investigations 
Yea, it’s crazed how much energy it takes to power these facilities in gigawatts per hour. The big datacenter their putting up outside Salt Lake for the NSA is mind boggling in power wattage. And since most of the power comes from the Colorado river complexes already in the West makes one wonder if that means less for other cities, or if that means a new nuclear facility in the offing. Either is bad news… and they’ve yet to run very many studies on the effects of dirty electricity. Other than Samuel Milham’s MD MPH, Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization I’m not sure who is even covering this topic and its impact.
http://newbooksintechnology.com/2014/05/29/vincent-mosco-to-the-cloud-big-data-in-a-turbulent-world-paradigm-publishers-2014/
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/features/2010/04/26/the-origins-of-the-modern-public/
james gleick on 2 worlds bits and atoms: