The infrastructure of money
published in Think Space 2013—2014 cycle / Money
Curated by Ethel Baraona Pohl, César Reyes Nájera
Organized by DAZ—Zagreb Society of Architects
Money can be seen spatializing through the Internet cables and server farms around the world. Stock exchanges invest in placing cables throughout the world that directly connect them, avoiding any time delays in the system. Drawing the map of the world based on the Internet would be a completely different map as we know it. What kind of spaces do these infrastructures create? And could money be somehow ruled out of the picture?
This paper looks at the historical development of data centers in relationship to trade and tries to investigate how the space of currency exchange transformed from banks to server farms.
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Internet technologies are continously changing the face of the planet. Money can be seen spatializing through the Internet infrastructure, cables and server farms around the world. Drawing the map of the world based on the Internet would show differentiations in density of infrastructure which is intrinsically related to the economy.
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To facilitate digital trade in any form, from alghoritmic trading on the stockmarkets to transfering data from credit card to bank, one always uses the Network as infrastructure. Today money is not anymore a physical object but a virtual set of data. Stock exchanges invest in placing cables around the world that directly connect them to each other, to avoid any time delays in the system. Cities and their networks encapsulate all kinds of protocols of urban planning and emergent morphologies and the future development of cities is largely based on these infrastructures. It can be said that money today spatializies through data centers and internet cabels. What kind of spaces do these infrastructures create?
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'The Internet is perhaps the greatest example ever of a human-made “emergent” system. There is no master plan. But the urban planning implications are difficult to consider. The Internet operates physically at multiple scales, which often collapse into each other: the machine, the building, the city, the region, and the globe. But it is also an incredibly complex thing in logical and algorithm terms. That makes it difficult to draw an analogy with urban planning. Cities are certainly multivalent—physical, economic, social—but in different ways." 1
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Throughout history, trade was the accelerant for human settlements and urban developments, closely related to the spaces used. Today, electronic trade has replaced most other forms of trading and has become an accelerant for the development of new types of urban and spatial infrastructures. Examples of virtual trade in the 2010's would be Amazon.com2 with its super-size warehouses or Silk Road3, the online black market, with its own encryptions, Tor's and bitcoins.
As the user interface decreases in physical size, the size of the network is rapidly growing and is in desperate need of more physical datums. The number of data centres in the world in 2011 reached over 500,000 with 26,4 million square meters of space or the size of around 6,000 football fields4. A closer look at network infrastructure reveals that energy consumption of data centres worldwide in 2009 was bigger than the amount of energy the whole of Sweden5 consumed with its 450,295 square kilometres of territory and a population of 9.5 million. Likewise, exchange of data in the virtual realm means producing energy in the physical space.
The server is at the moment the most precious object, just as once, different kinds of currencies were the most precious objects of exchange. Servers store all our emails, attachments, transactions and Internet knowledge in multiple physical locations, that we are mostly not aware of. Banks are no longer the most secured spaces, keeping money and gold safe. Data centres and their high levels of security became physically the safest places on the planet. If money is not physical anymore, then it is definitely encapsulated in the Network infrastructure, and to imagine a World without money might be imagining the world with even more data centers and endless miles of cables that connect them. In the world ruled by banks and petrocurrency, could the server become the currency of the 21st century?
ISBN: 098-953-7939-04-5
1 Blum, Andrew, "Mapping the Internet: Financial hubs" 16 Jul 2012, CnnMoney, Accessed: 15 Jan 2014. <http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/chartist-internet-financial-hubs/>
2 Cadwalldr, Carole, 'I Spent A Week Working At An Amazon Warehouse And It Is Hard, Physical Work', The Guardian, 01 Dec 2013. Accessed: 02 Feb 2014 < http://www.businessinsider.com/i-spent-a-week-working-at-an-amazon-warehouse-and-it-is-hard-physical-work-2013-12>
3 Silk Road(marketplace), Wikipedia Accessed: 11 Jan 2014 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)>
4 Miller, Rich, 'How Many Data Centers? Emerson Says 500,000' Data Center Knowledge Accessed: 11 Jan 2014 <http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/12/14/how-many-data-centers-emerson-says-500000/>
5 Vanderbildt, Tom, 'Data Center Overload', New York Times,8 June 2009 Accessed: 18 Mar 2013.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&>
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