Data plantation: Northern Virginia and the territorialization of digital civilization in “the Internet Capital of the World”

Abstract

The development of the Northern VA and the Washington, DC metro area as a key node in the globalizing digital urban system is well established. This essay investigates the growth of that technological geography in the 1990s and 2000s as a part of the planetary epoch of human transformation that some have called the “Plantationocene” (vs. Anthropocene).

Keywords

• data center
• digital cities
• internet infrastructure
• northern virginia
• plantationocene
• right to the city