The Cloud is a Factory: Cloud Capitalism

Owned and controlled by a handful of mega-corporations, clouds and mobile devices in our pockets have become the taken-for-granted foundations of contemporary society. What are the consequences of this far-reaching influence of ‘tech’? How did it become embedded in a broader capitalist logic? Devika Narayan, a leading scholar in the social study of cloud computing, gives a talk and engages in a debate.

In this session, we welcome a lecture from Devika Narayan (University of Bristol), a leading scholar in the social study of cloud computing, followed by a debate with Seda Gürses (TU Delft) and Miriyam Aouragh (University of Westminster, University of Oxford).

Narayan’s talk examines how the computer industry morphed into ‘tech’. Tech firms today do not operate within the strict confines of a ‘tech industry’ but hold enormous influence over a range of other industries. What was once a relatively contained computer industry has evolved into something far more expansive and pervasive. The machine and the machine-making industry have been unbounded. To understand how, why, and to what effect this has unfolded, Narayan combines a sociotechnical approach with ‘organisational political economy’, arguing that the computer over several decades has been decomposed, virtualised, and rendered extremely scalable. The talk ends with a reflection on the powerful consequences of such scalability and the broader capitalist logics within which it is embedded. 

The Cloud is a Factory series invites speakers from different disciplines to explore the nature of these computational infrastructures, how they came into being, and consider other possible futures. This talk is part of the AlgoSoc Speaker Series.

Speakers

Devika Narayan is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and Business School, University of Bristol. She is an interdisciplinary sociologist drawing from and contributing to economic geography, economic sociology, and platform studies. Her interests lie in the study of the digital economy and industrial change. Devika Narayan’s work has been published by New Media & Society, EPA Economy & Space, Journal of Economic Geography, Work Employment & Society, The Information Society, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Miriyam Aouragh is Professor of Digital Anthropology at the University of Westminster/ Associate Fellow Oxford University Department of Social Anthropology. Aouragh studies how digital media shape collective memory, activist networks, and political narratives. Her work engages with questions of infrastructures through the prism of (settler-)colonialism, as well as the (re)construction of transnational movements. She has examined the imperial legacies of technology and how online and offline practices influence public imagination and remembrance of Palestine in numerous books and articles. See also: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/aouragh-miriyam

Seda Gürses (moderator) is Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft. Her research focuses on privacy engineering, protective optimization technologies, software engineering and the political economy of computational infrastructures—examining how technical systems intersect with social justice and governance. She is a co-PI in the NWO Gravitation Project AlgoSoc (https://algosoc.org) and member of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (titipi https://titipi.org). 

This programme has been organised by Agustin Ferrari Braun (AlgoSoc/University of Amsterdam) and Donald Bertulfo (TU Delft).