Habits, labour, data: from warehouses to data centres

Historically the warehouse functioned to contain habit. Be it routines of work associated with the packing of goods or the use of ledger books to keep track of inventory, the warehouse operated as a storage and processing technology making habit accountable. More recently, the architectural form of the warehouse has been repurposed within digital economies as data centres. Otherwise known as server farms, and often referred to as ‘the cloud’, these facilities extend the warehousing functions of storage and processing to include the transmission of data. These two primary typologies – of the warehouse as storage and processing facility, and the warehouse as digital infrastructure for the circulation of data – are respectively marked by habits of labour and habits of data. The operational systems in contemporary warehousing cannot be made actionable in the absence of technical topologies that decide how habit is known and governed according to strictly calibrated routines of nesting, stacking and distribution. These technical and computational operations increasingly take place within data centres, which offer software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and, more recently, AIas- a-service (AIaaS) to business, government and cultural sectors. While the technical destabilizes the sovereign authority of human actors, it nonetheless submits to the operational requirements specific to institutional agendas, geopolitical struggles and political economic interests.