Pulse (Dec 2021)
From Proving Ground to Bumblehive: Touring Utah’s Weird Information Landscape
Abstract
The American state of Utah has emerged as an important infrastructural and experimental hub for large-scale information science and communication technology endeavors: both Meta (formerly Facebook) and the US intelligence community maintain massive data centers just south of Salt Lake City, each of which require over a million gallons of water per day to cool servers housing billions of gigabytes of personal data. Utah-based research services such as FamilySearch and Ancestry.com, both with roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormons) play hugely important roles in the growing online genealogical and genetic research industry, which continues to re-shape how kinship relations are conceptualized and evaluated globally. Many of the state’s municipal agencies were recently forced to cancel contracts with the AI-based software company Banjo (since renamed SafeXai), which promised to consolidate diverse information streams into a “live-time” data surveillance service, following revelations the firm’s CEO was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. This article reads these unfolding projects through John Durham Peters’ concepts of Mormon “media theology” and “celestial bookkeeping,” as well as the fiction of Utah-rooted authors W. H. Pugmire and Orson Scott Card. It sketches a tour of Utah as a weird information landscape, wherein unfathomable quantities of data find material embodiment and the secular-rational promises and practices of Big Data reveal latent cosmic aspects.
