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Despite the numerous projects and exhibitions dedicated to technology and Internet infrastructure, "Data Center Studies" has not yet fully grappled with art's role in the wider intervention critical scholarship is making via the data center—as object, cultural image, sociotechnical imaginary, site, metaphor, and concept. In this article, I weave in artworks and insights from artists to make a theoretical intervention about what constitutes environmental media "in the cloud," and how a critique of Internet infrastructure has spurred a critical data center art movement.

In four exploratory theoretical gestures (appraise, dispose, hoard and mediate), I propose the 'archive as dumpster' as a framework for returning to the physical conditions of memory, where "picking through the trash" subverts traditional archival methodologies by insisting on the very material consequences of a culture inculcated in networked digital communications. I make an argument that by posing the archive as a mediatic question (Parikka 2013), we can begin to account for the ways in which the perceived immateriality and weightlessness of our data is in fact with immense humanistic, environmental, political, and ethical repercussions. It is also a means by which we come to understand who we are, looking forward. In both cases, pitting the archive's orderly ambitions against the dumpster's stinking mess reveals a 'call of things' (Bennett 2011); the slow and often distanced process of disposal and waste to remind us who we are, in and over time, in and out of our bodies, increasingly under the impression of a dematerialised engagement with our stuff.

Abstract
Can private data "havens," localized servers, and offline infrastructure empower secure and private user control over data? Contrasting Sealand's counter-surveillance policies with the NSA's Utah Data Center mass surveillance apparatus, the authors analyze how control of the physical location of data centers shapes the possibilities of data agency and ownership. They note that to whom data belongs has become regulated asymmetrically through technological capacity rather than through socially articulated norms or deliberative legal processes. They offer a number of policy approaches to enhance the democratic potential of information stewardship, but question whether any are sufficient to subvert the power of agencies such as the NSA.

For this special issue of b2o, we explore Musk's SpaceX, the NSA's control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple's new "Spaceship" headquarters. In these projects and artifacts we find highly politicized deployments of Silicon Valley-style scitech, masked as concerned with escape from planet Earth while necessarily downplaying and denying their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged, obfuscated philosophical origins in accelerationism and technological nihilism, these endeavors and their proponents in government and tech sectors represent the ultimate expression of reality TV's much-discussed "preppers," ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else. In a final turn, this paper contrasts such endeavors with Trump-era protectionist values (e.g., increased military spending; the detention of migrant children; entrenched, ongoing structural racism; antagonism of longtime allies) seemingly in stark opposition to these manifest desires to leave, rather than defend, the nation. Yet, when read through the lens of accelerationism, such antagonism can be more accurately identified as directly aligned with the hastening of global confrontation, chaos and the deliverance of the chosen few to a fetishized future of their making.

For this special issue of b2o, we explore Musk's SpaceX, the NSA's control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple's new "Spaceship" headquarters. In these projects and artifacts we find highly politicized deployments of Silicon Valley-style scitech, masked as concerned with escape from planet Earth while necessarily downplaying and denying their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged, obfuscated philosophical origins in accelerationism and technological nihilism, these endeavors and their proponents in government and tech sectors represent the ultimate expression of reality TV's much-discussed "preppers," ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else. In a final turn, this paper contrasts such endeavors with Trump-era protectionist values (e.g., increased military spending; the detention of migrant children; entrenched, ongoing structural racism; antagonism of longtime allies) seemingly in stark opposition to these manifest desires to leave, rather than defend, the nation. Yet, when read through the lens of accelerationism, such antagonism can be more accurately identified as directly aligned with the hastening of global confrontation, chaos and the deliverance of the chosen few to a fetishized future of their making.

This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable 'deliverables.' Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they undertook as part of a broader research group of emerging Canadian scholars working in different international contexts between 2012 and 2015. The research conversation began in academic roundtables in 2013, and was furthered through a content analysis of articles collected from scholarly and general interest blog posts, newsletters, and magazines published online from July 2012 to April 2014. In this article, the authors explore emerging themes and document pressures to conform to neoliberal practices within the corporatized university, as well as suggest pathways for dissent and reinvention of academic labour.

This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable 'deliverables.' Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they undertook as part of a broader research group of emerging Canadian scholars working in different international contexts between 2012 and 2015. The research conversation began in academic roundtables in 2013, and was furthered through a content analysis of articles collected from scholarly and general interest blog posts, newsletters, and magazines published online from July 2012 to April 2014. In this article, the authors explore emerging themes and document pressures to conform to neoliberal practices within the corporatized university, as well as suggest pathways for dissent and reinvention of academic labour.

Research Justice (RJ) is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that seeks to transform structural inequities in research. Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change builds upon the methodological frameworks developed by the national non-profit organization, DataCenter Research for Justice and is the first book to take a radical approach to socially just, community centred research. Challenging traditional models for conducting social science research within marginalized populations, it examines the relationships and intersections between research, knowledge construction, and political power/legitimacy in society. Presenting a new and highly innovative concept of Collective Ceremonial Research Responsiveness, it envisions equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge including the cultural, spiritual and experiential. The book examines how the co-existence of these various forms of knowledge can lead to greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change. Offering a much-needed analysis of the intersections between Research Methods, Public Policy, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology, this unique book will be of wide interest to researchers and students in a variety of disciplines