“The material lives of servers are normally hidden for the average Internet user. We have our own machines to use and care for, and we have a basic understanding that there are some other machines maintained by someone, housed in some place, doing something. As sociologist Susan Leigh Star remarked in her famous call for the closer ethnographic examination of ‘boring things’ like servers: “[Infrastructure] is by definition invisible, part of the background of other kinds of work” (1999, 380). With the rapid and nearly global explosion of Pokémon GO, I think we are seeing an emergence of very real, popular attempts to visualize and represent server infrastructure, to make vague grasps at one of the many strange, yet familiar black boxes in our everyday experiences of digital interconnectedness.”
“The personification of technology is nothing new, but it is a different thing altogether to personify something like a server, a mechanical piece of infrastructure locked away in a cold data center somewhere. We don’t personify other forms of infrastructure like roads or highways, sewers or electric plants. No, when those malfunction, we turn to other authoritative subjects: engineers, developers, politicians, “the government.” Perhaps, then, visible servers represent the face of a kind of power, a controlling authority that we have come to hold responsible for issues with access and interconnection. But are they really always to blame?”
“We don’t think about servers when they are doing what they are meant to do; they remain buried in our minds. However, as soon as they malfunction, they have to come to the surface, whether as human or potato. Nicole Starosielski (2015) has written of undersea fiber optic cables, core components of our global Internet infrastructure, “surfacing” from the ocean, in a very tangible, visible sense. Servers, as parts of that diverse infrastructure, surface in other ways.”
“In many virtual worlds, for instance, servers represent copies of the same virtual space, carrying their own names, populations, and identities. In my own dissertation work on virtual worlds and queer communities, I have found that servers surface as distinct places that in some cases have these kind of imagined boundaries, allowing queer players to find and build safe spaces. These examples suggest that servers are perceived not just as mechanical objects that perform distant, robotic tasks. They are also seen as idiosyncratic and variable, receiving quite a lot of blame for so many of our technological shortcomings.”
“Or perhaps it is that they have become a convenient scapegoat for other more hidden issues at hand, like labor, energy, and capital. Do servers have the potential to make these background forces more visible?”