![]() The cultural specificity of these representations testifies to the ways in which global cable systems develop in relation to local spatial politics. By examining the cultural conflicts over cables in California and O‘ahu, the article shows how telecommunications companies reorganize visual space to protect the cable, using diverse media such as nautical charts and warning signs. The author documents the cultural production of these traces, recording how infrastructural visibility must be negotiated at points where cables cross through public spaces, including beaches, highways, and state parks. This article highlights the visual traces of undersea cables, technologies that carry the majority of transoceanic telecommunications traffic, in order to make visible the material systems that support an ‘immaterial’ internet. This thesis argues that interdisciplinary research on submarine cables and their landing sites, bridging archival, ethnographic, and creative methodologies, brings to the forefront the concealed material and social entanglements embedded in the internet’s infrastructure and opens up new possibilities to relate to contemporary networking technologies. Bearing these connections in mind, the third chapter discusses the tensions between institutional narratives and local stories in Conil about submarine cables, exploring the role of speculative storytelling in the contested production of meaning around the internet’s materiality. ![]() Having established the theoretical and methodological backbone of this thesis, the second chapter traces the intricate relations between submarine cables, frontiers, bunkers, watchtowers, and maritime routes in the south of Spain, emphasizing the colonial and modern paradigm of connectivity through securitization in which the internet’s undersea cable system is deeply rooted. Starting with a theoretical discussion on the materiality of media technologies, the first chapter exposes the need for interdisciplinary, creative, and interpretive methodologies in order to approach the complexity of the internet as a technosocial infrastructure. Weaving together archival material, interviews, observations, autoethnographic considerations, and speculative storytelling, this thesis reflects on the internet’s contentious mediation of reality, proposing a mode of research on media technologies that operates from a relational networked proximity. ![]() This thesis centers on a critical interdisciplinary research on the Atlantis-2 submarine cable and its landing site in Conil, a small coastal town in the south of Spain, seeking to understand the material environments, geopolitical contexts, and social relations in which the internet’s material infrastructure is embedded. It analyzes di erent modes of data centre infrastructural (in)visibility and shows how imaginaries became in uential both for implementing the cloud in Luleå and for shaping the anticipated time and space of “post-extractive modernity.” More speci cally, the paper focuses on the socio-technical preconditions as well as the concrete prac- tices and styles-that is, technologies of imagination-that enable those imaginaries. is paper is based on an ethnographic study that followed the implementation of Facebook’s rst European data centre in Luleå. Since the actual name and operations of the IT company were kept entirely secret, the planning and implementation of “Project Gold”-as the data centre project was called locally-was as much driven by collective imaginaries as by hard facts or former experiences. Such anticipa- tions were supported and shaped by municipal planning and business management activities soon materializing in the form of building sites, regional development strategies, and new markets. ![]() When a world-leading IT company expressed the intention to locate its infrastructure in the Swedish city of Luleå in 2011, the announcement immediately triggered future scenarios and visions of a new industrial era, economic prosperity, and changing urban life. ![]()
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