32. Future Storage: From Mineral Extraction to Data Forestry

Marina Otero, head of the Social Design Masters Program at Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands, is the winner of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's 2022 Wheelwright Prize. Her study, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, will examine new architecture paradigms for storing data, and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today.

Intro:

Lithium, by Nirvana

Discussed:

The Stack, Benjamin Bratton

Ingrid Burrington

Tubes, Andrew Blum

Grow Your Own Cloud

DNA as a storage medium

Seed banks for data

A data garden in Eindhoven

Destinations:

- Singapore: Had a ban on data centers for a number of years; are seaborne and underwater data centers an option? Floating solar farms?

- Darwin, Australia: Data governance – the first indigenous-led data center. Who has access to the data? Who owns it?

- Nigeria: Woman-led crypto-tech communities. Positioning themselves against the corporations that are bringing the infrastructure, so they can set up their own.

- Chile: Lithium extraction, new Humboldt Cable to New Zealand and Australia.

- Iceland and Sweden: Questions connected to industry and energy. Use of new infrastructures. In Sweden, one data center is also a club.

- California: Where new storage media are being developed.

Outro:

A Forest, by The Cure